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Comment by pilsetnieks | Hacker News Reader

> The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying

I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain that things don't work or if they do, it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort?

Surely there must be some other explanation for the proliferation of these systems other than "execs dumb and bad"?

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It’s not “execs dumb and bad,” it’s that execs have different priorities than you think they do, which I think is partially dandare’s point.

Executives at a large company are divorced from your reality at your level of the job.

Incidentally, that’s part of the fun of working at smaller companies, though the variance is higher there’s also the potential to work more closely with good earnest executives who also want the company to succeed.

ERP guy here

>people complain that things don't work

that's a problem and we're going to have to fix it

>it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort

that's not a problem

the fact that Jane the accounting drone has to do twice the amount of work, or has to hire an intern to help her out, or even wants to quit because the job is so awful now is not a problem

it's a rounding error in the overall cost of implementing an ERP system

a new screen with some new data to show for the exec is worth 20 Jane's and her opinions on the new system

you can't even call the new system unethical or fraudulent because 10 people other then Jane can now stop using broken excel sheets to organize their work

basically Jane is collateral damage

IT guy for ERP customer here.

This sounds about right to me. In particular, it tends to partiton the organization into (A) the people whose job it is to plug away at the ERP system (orders, invoices, tickets, etc), and (B) the people who actually do whatever it is that the company does.

Then you hope (and work to ensure) that the benefit achieved for B, by having consistent org-wide information systems to work from, is enough to cover the overheads of A and C.

The simplest explanation is a mis-alignment in incentives.

Executives want to have successful projects to show to their value to an organization. But usually the board members are unable to comprehend the details of a project. So the herd mentality kicks in. The CTO will seek approval for SAP and provide Gartner magic quadrant BS to give the board a level of comfort.

Now whether SAP is the right tool, or if it inconveniences users doesn't matter a whit to the CTO. All that matters is budget and timeline. The CTO wants to be able to speak to the board and say that the project timeline was met and under budget. All else is a complete non-factor.

This.

> Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them?

In many cases, no. In part because the people that do the operational work aren't the same people who work for the decision maker.

The third point is plain old corruption, so there's no reason for anybody to be surprised that the second point is incompetence.

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