Admittedly, Lean Tech’s product Thrive is not for everyone.  However, I have often encountered the sentiment that the business system or ERP is.  This thought was echoed in an article I read by Michael Vizard this morning in Baseline magazine.  He was talking about the disconnect that occurs at some companies in seeing the “relationship between I.T. and business processes” and what the costs are when a new business process is conceived at a company.

“The standard default response is to frantically find some sort of reference model in the suite of SAP or Oracle applications that approximates what the business wants to do, and then try as hard as possible to make the business process bend to meet the capabilities of the software when what the business needs is for the software to bend to the requirements of the business.”

Of course, being a purveyor of a smaller product that is quickly evolving (as opposed to a behemoth with fairly rigid business rules) for customer needs, I am biased.  Vizard’s point is that companies need to spend time making sure they understand how their new business processes will impact IT investment and infrastructure and vice versa (will my business system end up determining how my business operates).  I was just interested how his one sentence highlighted my experience that companies will look to the ERP as the holy grail for I.T. support for their business process, when that often is not the case.