ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Better Change Management Maturity and Testing Maturity than Most.

As a continuation our recent focus on the business impact of testing maturity by application and operating system, we continue with a deep dive on the state of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

This review of ERP systems is our first look at one of the prudent planner categories that emerged from our recent IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II Applications and Operating Systems.

ERP Application Environments, More Mature Than Most

Companies supporting ERP applications seem more mature than most, including the following characteristics:

• Changes made by companies with ERP applications are least likely to cause problems in production and are below average in the number of downtime events.
• Most likely to use automated change management and test the entire stack before releasing changes to production.
• Have a higher propensity for using high-end hardware and leading edge technologies. For example, they are more likely to use server virtualization and clustering than the average company.
• Concerns about complexity are more dominant in managing multi-tier applications than others.

ERP – A special relationship between the rate of change and downtime incidents

Companies supporting ERP applications exhibit a stronger relationship between the number of changes they perform and downtime including:

• While the average company supporting ERP experiences 12.9 incidences of downtime, this varies significantly by the number of changes pushed through the organization. While this is true of most multi-tier applications, it is particularly dramatic with ERP.
• On the low end, those with fewer than 15 changes annually experience an average of 5 downtime incidents.
• Companies with 50 or more changes per year have over 4 times as many downtime incidents (averaging 21.5).

StackSafe Analysis

At the end of the day, it should be no surprise that companies supporting ERP show improved change management and testing maturity compared to most. ERP systems are the backbone of organizations and have been for quite some time – bringing improved maturity to organizations that invested early.

There is clearly room for improvement. As business look for opportunities to become more dynamic, the desire for greater change rates will increase. IT operations team will need to find ways to improve the rate of change, while decreasing the proportional increase in downtime incidents.

Download the Report

A full copy of the IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II – Applications and Operating Systems can be downloaded here.

You may also find interesting the recent deep dives on the need for improved testing maturity in E-Commerce as well as the advantages that automated change management provides to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.

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Filed Under: Business Continuity, Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations Research, Testing