The sound of movement?

Slowly, something moves. An almost imperceptable groan. A shift in the shadows.

The Computer industry has been dead these past 18 months. Hundreds of thousands of IT professionals have been laid-off. The industry has been moribund this whole time. Over the last few months the primary Job search web sites (Monster, Hotjobs, et al) have shrunk their job counts from the ½ million mark back to a few tens of thousands of jobs, and most of these are fake, being 3rd party recruiters regurgatating multiple copies of the same client requests.

A Sea Change?

2 'things' have caught my eye. Firstly, several companies have decided to can their ERP systems and write-off millions of dollars in useless expenditure. Then secondly, the jobs pages in the New York Times and NJ Star Ledger have shown a slight but measurable increase in column inches of computer industry job ads.

The second point is pretty obviously good, here is why I think the first is also good!

Companies persisting with ERP projects going nowhere are effectively not doing anything. All their time and effort are being drained, and their monetary resources are being squandered on a few vendors. Those companies that have quit the useless battle with ERP are now free to spend money in new directions. It may not be as much money, but I think it safe to say that few companies have been as inefficient consumers of capital as our ERP vendors and the big 5 (accenture, PWC, KPMG, EDS, CGE&Y) consulting companies that have taken the lions share of the former corporate wealth.

Corporations need new software, they always will. The world is also changing (China and Taiwan are in the WTO, new WTO trading agreements are being made) and with it so will the markets and the dynamics that drive them. The changes will be evidenced by companies finding new market places, or dying if they don't, as their competitors eat their lunches.

Those companies that are dug into the trenches continuing to do battle with ERP systems that were planned 5 and 6 years ago, had better get their game in order NOW or face the prospect of being beaten by competitors that have new tools to do the work that needs doing, todays work, not that of 6 years ago.

Change is a wonderful thing. It leads to Chaos. And as we all know this is just an anagram for...