Part I of a special two-part series.

By Thomas Woll and Linda Garfinkel

Legacy systems, whether home-grown or purchased, tend to become ungovernable for a variety of reasons: training may no longer be formally structured; original documentation may be lost or no longer applicable due to internal modifications to the software; duplicate or conflicting accounts are customary (such as 38 iterations of a single chain-store account); inventory records may be incorrect due to comp copies that haven’t been deducted; and the list goes on.

To benchmark your organization’s metrics, define a perfect system with perfect processes, and measure what you actually have against it. Then you will know if your system is working to your satisfaction or is in need of a major overhaul. The sooner you start the evaluation process, the better.

Part two of this series (in the next issue) will help you with the:
• analysis phase—showing you how to evaluate your business need against the existing environment,
• selection phase—helping you identify those software solutions that are best-suited to address the problems you’ve identified, and
• the final phase—defining what ultimately constitutes success for your company’s needs.

Thomas Woll is president of Cross River Publishing Consultants Inc. (www.PubConsultants.com). Linda Garfinkel is president of Media Consulting Services.