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  • Before signing you have the leverage. Afterwards you do not.

    Whoever moves systems to the new provider before signing has given away their only leverage. Voluntarily, and usually without noticing. I once witnessed exactly that. We were still waiting for formal approvals, but the running program could not wait. A…

  • 250,000 expense claims a year.

    Travel expenses are trivial, until there are 250,000 a year. Then 30 percent savings are no longer an office matter, but a line the board reads. At an industrial group it was about 80,000 users in 16 countries and around…

  • An ERP end-of-maintenance is not an IT deadline

    An end-of-maintenance sounds like a deadline for IT to administer. A date in the calendar by which something has to be done. It is exactly this reading that misleads. SAP has, for understandable reasons, no interest in maintaining two product…

  • 99.9 percent while you switch providers.

    25 percent cheaper is easy if you accept outages. The art is to save 25 percent and hold the 99.9 percent while you swap the provider under running operations. First the honest arithmetic behind the number. 99.9 percent availability refers…

  • Build, Buy or Greenfield

    Every system decision is at its core a make-or-buy question. Do we build, do we buy, or do we start fresh? Build, buy or greenfield are just three names for the same underlying decision — and it is almost never…

  • You do not buy delivery. You buy the ability to judge your supplier.

    When a bridge is 70 percent finished, you can see it. With an ERP system you see nothing at all. Unless you have stood inside it yourself. A bridge is honest. Its progress hangs visibly in the landscape, every pillar…

  • Technology is not an IT decision

    Almost every large technology initiative first lands on a desk in IT or in a business unit. Usually it stays there. That is the first mistake — and rarely the cheapest. The reflex is understandable. A new system, a new…

  • Organizational debt grows like technical debt.

    Whoever staffs an area completely with externals buys delivery and loses control. Organizational debt grows like technical debt: quietly, until the next negotiation makes it due. In the 2000s and early 2010s a huge relocation wave was running. For leaders…

  • Should we build AI ourselves? The wrong question.

    „Should we build AI ourselves?“ is not a technology question. It is the same build-buy-partner decision as ever, only that this time everyone pretends no one has ever calculated it. In most cases the answer is buy, but a buy…

  • I know how your provider calculates.

    Before I negotiated for clients against providers, I calculated for the provider. You see the same numbers differently depending on which side of the table you sit. For fifteen months I was the provider. A premium supplier for IT operations,…