Can EA save the world?

Week2: Software for IM

This week we look at enterprises and what makes them robust. How do businesses plan for IT? Search news articles online and look for IT failures in the industry. You will find many such cases. What were the issues that caused loses in IT investment. Could EA have helped? Any interesting videos on the business and IT links?

Can EA save the world?

EA can help us find out how good the company runs.

EA can help us find out the clear image of future blueprint.

EA can point out which part of the company is really in trouble, and problem of which part is linked with another.

EA can point out what we should do in necessity, and what we need to cut.

There are so many expect on EA. However, can EA save the world?

A failure case in China
(http://www.e800.com.cn/articles/2011/0505/485269.shtml)

Shuanghui (http://www.shuanghui.net/), which was founded in 1958, is now the biggest famous meat-processing corporations in China. It has more than 200 subcompanies and over 2000 chain stores all over the country (http://www.shuanghui.net/html/category/about/qyjs). As it becoming larger and larger, the difficulties in managing production, sales and inventory is becoming sharper. Before, the branches and chain stores make phone calls and sent faxes to cooperate. When the head office needed to make a plan, it would be a tough time for all the clerks. Because even if work 7-24, they should spend even a whole month to gather the information. To make bad to worse, the information was serious lacking time-effectiveness and accuracy. All these lead to a mess in distribution channels.

The head office pinned their hope on informatization. They signed the contract with an ERP company in China in 1999. The company helped Shuanghui building up a C/S structure system and designed to set up servers in each subcompanies and chain stores.

It seems that this system can work well, right? However, it failed finally.

Let us find out the reason.

1, Shuanghui has too many subcompanies and chain stores. The fixed cost in setting up servers in all of them is not a piece of cake. After setting up, the servers need technicians to maintain and upgrade. Those processes are not cheap. When there is something wrong with that system, it is not so easy to fix on time.

2, That customized system can only run on specific computers. The company should buy many appropriate computers. Even so, due to some bugs inside the system, the data cannot be synchronized on time between stores and the database in head office. Thus, the managers cannot master marketing condition timely.

Realizing these problems, the ERP company want to fix. But they noticed the nature of Shuanghui made the problems complex. First, Shuanghui operates collectivize but do the accounting separately. Second, the organization system of Shuanghui is complex because of its hundreds of subcompanies and chain stores. It is extremely hard for them to build the system with modules. Last but the most important, most employees have little knowledge in computers; they need a software system easy to use and manage. That ERP company do not know how to solve all these problems and finally leave Shuanghui with a legacy system.

In addition, in China, there are some other local reasons that lead to IT failure.

First, the introduced foreign software systems may not suited local business process. Maybe a system runs perfectly abroad, but it may not that efficient when the condition changes.

Second, in China, most of the companies want to make their business informationize. But how to make the change? Some small companies define informationize simply as making a website and maybe an inside IM system. That is totally wrong. Informationize is to introduce a system engineering interaction system into the whole business process, rather than spend small amount of money to build a webpage. It should integrate all the resources inside the company and the cooperative partners outside the company.

In my first job, the CEO asked one of our website developers to mend her computer. The misunderstanding of IT systems lead to the result that the head office of companies cannot judge what systems they should introduce, what structure should the software systems use, what are the prerequisites, etc. In addition, many companies just think highly of IT orally, but not even have IT department inside. The CEOs do not understand what IT can do and how IT can help. They ask the software companies to do many things unpractical thus making the system not suited their real business processes.

Can EA help?

Absolutely can, there are many successful examples in EA. EA itself is an analytical method, it is summarized from the real business world is suitable for almost all the companies nowadays. Every company can find out a way out of mire by using EA. Understanding EA properly can help the company realize what they are and what they really need to do.

Maybe because I am a Virgo man and have the character of critical. I always want to find disadvantages. Although the disadvantages cannot be solved nowadays, we still need to consider them.

The EA is just an ideal model offering a direction, and cannot avoid human factors. The IT teams and business teams still need to communicate with each other to know what the others are doing. CIOs should lead the IT teams to understand more about the business; and CEOs should be more proactive themselves and educate themselves more about technology.

In addition, EA is not so easy to adopt. It need special skills and a large group of people working together to build. The risk of EA implementing may cause hesitation in introducing it. This process can cost a lot of money and time.

The most important, as the well-known saying, a man can be saved only when he want to be saved. EA can help a company to go out of mire only when the company can understand the importance of EA.

PS: The most delicious sausage----Shuanghui maize sausage,yummy~