It’s rare that I post on topics other than enterprise or e-commerce software, but at the end of the “Year of the Protester” (according to Time magazine), I could not help but to see parallels in the world at large and the world of enterprise software. (I suspect this is a sign of a truly diseased mind.)
At the beginning of the year, much was made–and rightly so–of the power of the social web to help facilitate the uprisings comprising the Arab Spring. This technological basis to uprisings continued all the way through to the demonstrations in Russia in December. Twitter, Facebook, and the whole SOLOMO (Social, Local, Mobile) trend allowed masses of people to communicate, organize, and protest much more easily. And allowed protesters to change their plans instantly in the face of authoritarian opposition.
At the risk of egregious trivialization of the lives of millions of people, however, societal change is less like consumer software adoption and a lot more like trying to rip out a legacy ERP system and replace it with a new version, or even a new SaaS solution. It’s painful, takes years, causes huge change management issues, obsoletes some skills and creates demands for new ones. It threatens an existing order and moves power to the users from “IT”–or to the people from the central government.
I’m not an expert on Egypt, but it seems like the protesters there, for example, wanted a new ERP and what they got initially was just a few new heads in charge of “IT” but no new ERP/system of government! With the recent elections, Egypt is beginning the messy “RFQ process” to replace the existing system, but Egyptians have not yet even defined all the requirements for the new government. It will be a long and harrowing process to put a new system in–filled with intrigue, optimism, disappointment, winners, and very sore losers who try to destroy whatever choices are made. Just like an ERP sales and deployment cycle.
The point is that in these countries which are trying to fundamentally change the way they govern themselves, even if they get to the point Egypt has reached, which many have not, it’s just the beginning of a long and difficult process that will require far more patience than we are used to providing to any government. Our expectations for 2012 need to be optimistic, yet realistic for when a new functioning system will be in place. Our best private organizations, take years and millions of $$ to change an ERP–and they sometimes fail, so change on the scale of an entire society is going to be a lot more rough than that. (BTW, our federal government usually fails completely to change out its ERPs!)
But enough about politics.
The same point goes for the “revolution” taking place in enterprise software. Many see 2011 as the “tipping point” of SaaS/cloud solutions starting to overthrow the existing SAP/Oracle/MSFT paradigm in the Enterprise. After all, Oracle “gave in” with their Right Now acquisition and SAP “caved” with SuccessFactors. Certainly, 2011 was a big year in threatening these “regimes” as well, but the “fight” will be a long, drawn-out one that will last well through 2012 and beyond. Change in the Enterprise don’t come easy, but it is accelerating and it is fun to be a part of it.
Excellent thought-provoking post, as usual.
The Venn diagram is an interesting one that shows the readers for whom a comparison between regime change in Egypt and ERP upgrades will make sense. So don’t go trying this on Fox or CNN!
But it is a correct one. At its core, the point here is that the change sought centers around people, not technology. And people are notoriously bad at changing quickly. Of course, the shiny stuff gets all the attention and excites social media gurus, “occupiers”/protesters/change advocates, the media – and investment bankers behyind those rich IPOs – alike.
Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. Change is still very hard where people are involved. 75% of us apparently won’t make our earnest new year’s resolutions past the end of this week. The SOLOMO trend helps get noise out more efficiently, with the added benefit that it lets more people from outside watch (and has the patina of ‘different’ and ‘transformative’, which helps drive those crazy IPO’s).
That being said, my own theory on what’s driving a lot of the Arab Spring change goes back 20 years, when the advent of the Web itself provided surfers around the world pictures and video on what in life in other places was like. Forget Facebook and Twitter – good ‘ole Netscape and Mozilla, largely unprotected from state censors, probably did more to create a hunger for a better life than any other emanation from the Valley. It’s the awareness of how things can be better that drives the force behind the uprisings in the Arab Spring – could it be that all Facebook and Twitter did was to grease the skids of what was already likely coming down the pike?
In other words, that ERP upgrade was probably an easy sell at the right time with a desirous customer – if it nonetheless remains a hard thing to deploy.
Excellent thought-provoking reply as usual as well. You never fail to add insight–at least so far in 2012! 😉