Instead the better approach would have been to ascertain which ERP vendor would have been more suitable for the task of managing the Overstock.com distributed order management system implementation without forcing major reporting errors (Kanaracus, 2008) in addition to having professional staff on hand to manage the integration and professional services implementation plan. Second, the distractions Oracle faces during the BEA acquisition (Financial Times, 2008) were also reflected in their acquisition of Sun Microsystems recently (Ricadela, 2009) (Tait, 2010). The front-line experience of the CIO could have been avoided if an analysis of ERP vendors had been completed that took into account the potential distractions and lack of focus from working with a vendor known for their merger and acquisitions (Financial Times, 2008).
In prioritizing this experience, the first is the initial success of installing the ERP system followed by the lack of follow-through of the Oracle professional services teams. This is the most critical issue of the entire change management process, as the oracle change management teams were responsible for Business Process Management (BPM) and Business process Reengineering (BPR) tasks and programs. Without accuracy and clarity of BPM and BPR tasks the ERP systems was essentially useless expect for limited financial reporting. The next prioritized experience is the lack of system definition globally for financial reporting audits...
The Overstock.com CIO did have the ethical choice of reporting the financial results as being inaccurate and the fact that the problems were quite large or not, and he chose to be overtly honest (Kanaracus, 2008). This nearly cost him his job but it did save the company from making exceptionally large and costly errors over time.
Conclusion
From a front-line change standpoint, this process of choosing and ERP system and the resulting inaccuracy of reports showed that the most critical aspects of new system implementation, the process redefinition aspects, need to be planned out and executed well. Second, the fact that Oracle was so diffused in focused is an excellent lesson for any CIO in terms of choosing an enterprise software company as well. The front lien change experience was made more effective due to the CIO being as honest and forthright as he was about reporting inaccuracies, which saved errors from being generated with bad data.
References
Financial Times, 2008, Oracle acquires BEA for Dollars 8.5bn: [ASIA EDITION]. 2008. Financial Times, January 17,
Kanaracus, C. 2008. Overstock's ERP Woes Force It to Restate Results. Computerworld, November 3, 7.
Aaron Ricadela. 2009. Oracle's Sun Deal: Oracle May Need to Loosen Its Grip. Business Week (Online), November 9, 14 -- 16.
Nikki Tait. 2010. Brussels approves $7.4bn Oracle-Sun deal. FT.com,…
