Enterprise software addresses company-wide business issues, while a software application often solves problems for a functional department. The software can be designed to deal with accounting, sales, inventory, or just about any other aspect of business management. Some of it might be budgeting software dealing with financial areas of the business, and some might be forecasting software that provides sales and demographic information to facilitate decision making. The inherent complexity of enterprise software is the one of major sources for failures.
The phases for putting an enterprise software system into place consists of 1) defining project scope, 2) identifying functionality of the system, 3) functional design, 4) vendor selection for software and hardware, 4) customization, 5) deployment and 6) system testing and user acceptance. Risk management for enterprise software addresses possible risks in each single phase of enterprise software development.
The failures of many large IT projects are often the failures of project scope. In the definition phase, the scope of the projects should not be defined either too broad or too narrow.
The critical risk period in the use of enterprise software is the implementation period. The normal systems and procedures of the organization are either going to adapt to the new software or change completely. As the implementation process takes place, changes must be made in the software in order to accommodate the particular nuances of the company. Since no two companies are identical, no enterprise software package will be totally compatible with every company. The implementation process can take several weeks for a small company, or it can run for a year or more for a large organization.
It is advisable to work closely with consultants from the software vendors at the early phases of the system development. Software vendors bring knowledge of the software and the experience of implementation in other organizations. Your own technical staff and will understand how the existing systems work better. As the implementation is proceeding, training must be done on a department by department basis to insure that employees are aware of the policy changes and format changes that impact them and their work. The training sessions also serve as feedback forums for troubleshooting and debugging.
Testing is the last phase of a system development cycle. There're many types of testing (unit testing, system testing, user acceptance testing etc.) and each type of testing serves a unique purpose to ensure the quality of enterprise software system. It costs much less to fix software bugs at the development phase. It is estimated that it costs ten times more to fix bugs after the deployment.
Enterprise software is a necessity in information age and knowledge economy to create competitive advantages for organizations of any size. Risk management is one of the critical success fators for the success of enterprise software.
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