the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
"We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"
It's probably not worth the money...
I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers.
If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time.
I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
In this particular case they were sold a product that serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across international boundaries where no single telco can connect all of the data centre locations.
Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-connected by multiple telcos because... they're a state government, not a multi-national corporation. They're blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state, let alone internationally. That would be a literal act of war.
That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the Chinese market?".
I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.
It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.
There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.
If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.
The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.
Needless to say, it was a disaster.
This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one.
End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control.
Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is.
They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.