Charles E. Belford

What did you spend on Y2K, and what have you got to show for it? One of the things youve got is sitting on your shelf under that stack of brochures for 15 different conferences on e-commerce. Its the inventory of every old, new and middle-aged system in your organization. Question is, what are you going to do with it? And how do you engage senior management support for the long-overdue clean up?Management believes that you install systems and they last forever, or at least a lot longer than your company cars. You know that you cant get them to sit down and go through the inventory with you; thats not going to happen. However, what you have here is, believe it or not, an opportunity. The easy route of remedy, and by far the most popular, is to pitch management on the installation of one or a cluster of ERP modules. Lots of organizations have already taken that route and are now working away on an intense, two-year, multi-million dollar install. Unfortunately, your senior managem