Underestimating the Role of I.T.
The situation:
More than half of eCommerce implementations will be on hosted platforms such as Magento, Shopify+ or Insite. The business can get excited about having independence from the I.T. department. However any business sponsor operating within a large enterprise with a well-defined capital expense approvals process needs to consider the following facts:
- There will be development – at the very least, programmers will have to work to connect your ERP and other legacy systems.
- If there is development, there will be CapEx.
- If there is CapEx, there will be a Project Manager, and in most companies they will be within the I.T. team.
In other words: I.T. will be part of your project, whether you like it or not.
If you bring in I.T. after you have already performed a vendor selection and if you rely upon the vendor’s estimate for costs, then you will almost certainly be facing double or triple the costs you first planned for. The vendor will not take into account back-end integration costs, or project overhead like Project Management and change management.
How to recognize it:
Your financial analyst confirms that you need treasury approval for CapEx.
How to fix this:
Build a good relationship with the I.T. management and let them know in advance.
About the Enterprise Fail Series:
Our senior project management experts share lessons that others have had to learn the hard way about how, when and where enterprise-level digital transformations and software implementations have ground to a halt. The result is high-level guide to avoid being among the 7 out of 10 enterprise implementations that don’t achieve their objectives or are discarded.
We’ve helped several B2B and D2C clients work through these issues to successfully bridge the digital gap.
