I am undertaking a big I.T project in the coming year. It is based on Finance (budgeting and forecasting) with OLAP (Essbase) technology as the back end.
I need to give a presentation to the CFO and I.T Steering committee on how I will approach this project. Personally, I feel the resources, time and budget allocated for this project are not realistic. I need to understand the backend of all ERP systems worldwide and bring them together under one umbrella so that Corporate office can get reliable data for the coming budget cycles. There are a lot of challenges including language barriers, different/new technologies and understanding business requirements.
How do you think I should approach my presentation without sounding too pessimistic and making the CFO feel as if he is smoking weed. I can make promises that I won’t be able to keep…it will buy me time…is that a good approach? Are there any websites I can refer to regarding global I.T projects, approach, planning, design and deployment? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
WOw! sounds pretty challenging… I had the most awful time trying to consolidate data operations for just Canada and the U.S. and later for Canada and Europe… you’re the dot – legal and cultural barriers are tantamount with unanticipated delays.
Your presentation will be definitely a challenge, but I’d try to provide an Opportunity based view to entice enthusiasm first… followed by a “Gap Analysis” where you would bring in those issues you are concerned about. Make sure you rank the key issues so that a phased approach can be justified. In a situation like this where you have so many concerns but do not want to be antagonistic at the same time, it helps to use tools such as Sensitivity Analysis or at the very least have an Optimistic and a Conservative Implementation Timeline and a Contingency Plan.
God, I just gave you a lecture in Technical Case Analysis – sorry!
For specific resource on managing global technology, have you tried looking up articles in CIO’s globalization section? – http://www.cio.com/research/global/
Also if you can get your hands on this academic/practitioner paper, it may be a worthwhile read:
“Global information technology: a meta analysis of key issues” by Pavlia et al.
Couldn't you just make an Operational Data Store to connect to the various data sources. then use ETL's to mvoe the data to a centralized location while simultaneously cleaning it. I don;t know man...seems hard.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If your CFO can't understand that or you can't tell him that - whatever you do, the project will fail. But first make sure you're not sandbagging or over-estimating. Your CFO is not a fool to think it can be done
BoSS, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) was born in early 90's to adderess the various problems of rendering ERP data. Basically, ERP systems themselves do not (or at least did not) provide data consistency and are/were not dynamic accross geographical and logica bounderies (departments, branches, regions etc). It sounds like what you need is a common platform (integration layer) working as the middleware which will further interface with various ERP datasources on one end and the presentation/business logic layer for your forcasting application on the other end.
In most simplistic terms possible, it would be something similiar to :
ie, your middleware will sit in between business app and ERP data and collaborate.
Now, there are many many choices and decisions involve in choosing and implementing the middleware. The next generation integration technology is web services. You might want to take a look at that (do a search at java.sun.com).
You can either built your solution from scratch or purchase packaged solution, or do a mix of both. Some of the big players in the field are Webmethods and Tibco. I'd recommend thinking along the lines of web services.
Boss, it surely sounds really cool and i am sure u'll be able to do it alright :)
here is the approach i would take to present for the solution...
1) study in depth the existing ERP systems...that include the analysis at both functional as well as data level.
2) come up with a strategy to gather data from these sources...generally ERP systems do not allow you to directly talk to their data layer, so you need to have some kind of reporting/staging instance.
3) and now that you have data that you need from all the systems, you have to transport that to your local repository...use any EAI tool for that.
4) boom! you are good to go!
and once you have presented your strategy then do a gap analysis in terms of your budget, tme constraints and lack of your hands on with the technology.