When will the Disruption in ERP and Financial Software appear?
The global IT market is now in the middle of a disruptive period, where mobile technology and social media are taking over. A sure sign is the market valuation of Apple and Facebook.I will take a look at the state of an Enterprise Resource Planning and Financial software, I call it ERP from now, and will try to imagine the way at head. I will also tell about my company's attempt to meet some of these challenges.
It is s a quite special market segment:
- local and region software provider dominate geographic markets
- it's accepted that extensive professional training is needed
- sectorized
- business critical
These may be some of the reasons that the software
- uses obsolete soft technology (COBOL, DOS)
- if they use internet they may be dependent on IE6
Which again makes ERP to be
- extremely expensive
- normally not very user friendly
Normally enterprises don't encourage the utilization of new technology, so many workers find their access to social media is blocked, and that they are not free to use the mobile they want.
- use old hardware (On premise servers, dumb terminals, needle printers)
They also don't expect their workers to participate in crowdsource development and analysis through open sharing and participation.
But the disruptive technology does trickle into the enterprises and the following scenario will be quite common:
Are you a graduated person start working on the ERP? Instead of his way of doing some work on his mobile, some on his iPad, something on the PC he has access to he must now do everything on a terminal. He must for instance:
- instead of being always connected - start the PC and log in
- instead of touching the app - remember and go through endless menus
- instead of touching an icon on a well organized screen - do a serie of tasks with menus and shortcuts
- instead of being able to search and ask for help from 1 billion people - must contact help desk
- instead of just doing the task - take extensive training courses
A trainee has to live with this, but a new manager may start to yell. And when manyh are yelling at the same time, some day the ERP industry will come to term with the new mobile touch paradigm and start implementing it.
I will give you some examples from my company's product. It uses mobile touch phones and stores the transactions in the datacenter. It's not prepared for enterprises but for independent professionals, but making it available for enterprise is only a question of resources. I will show you how to make an invoice for billable hours for work by the client, that are better documented than all other ERP systems:
Then you can do other work with your mobile, rewake when finished, stop the clock. Take a photo to show the state after your work, for instance a screenshot. Select and touch convert to invoice, and then send it as email or let us print it in our printcenter.
The work to create an invoice took less than a minute. You didn't have to use a PC or terminal nor a printer.
The result is an invoice where your start and end are registered. Also your longitude and lattitude are registered at that time. And the photos even further document your work. In fact you've just created an irrestible invoice in less than a minute.
In the next post I will tell you how the automatic bookkeeping are done in the cloud, and how you’re current ERP can connect to it. Keep tuned...
