Information Technology Stakeholders

Returning to the discussion of the Project Team’s IT Members, we expand here to discuss other IT stakeholders that are within the business and their roles in the ERP implementation and management. In that previous post, we already gave overviews of the roles for DBAs, developers, system administrators, etc. Let’s touch on a few more roles which also vary by your organization as to which person(s) fills these roles.

The CIO or VP of Technology has an obvious ownership role as that person will largely be held accountable for the operation of the ERP applications and the implementation projects from the hardware and software perspective. This person liaises with the rest of the business top management as well as top management of external professional services groups.

Other stakeholders include the help desk support personnel and escalation points within IT that are first responders when users experience issues with the ERP. Whether they have forgotten their passwords or can’t connect to Oracle because the network is down, it is likely that a user will call the IT help desk and then the support person routes it appropriately. Naturally they need to be trained to handle such eventualities.

We already mentioned the stake that infrastructure personnel have in the ERP but it bears repeating. When a user cannot connect to the database, usually it will appear as a symptom in their browser as ‘page not found.’ This could indeed be a problem with a database outage, but it also could be a disconnect of the operating system, or a SAN outage, or a down router or switch, or some other hardware failure, or even an ISP fault. Any one of these root causes could have a different person in IT accountable to getting the problem resolved.

If your organization is large enough to have in house IT skills training, naturally the ERP could consume a big portion of this person’s responsibilities, likewise for Quality Assurance as it relates to testing. Security roles should also perform key duties both to secure external perimeter from outside parties but also securing the database from internal users to insure only authorized people are accessing authorized areas. Any internal or external auditing function would be highly interested in that.

The ERP Director’s or Project Manager’s challenge is to make sure that each of the stakeholders are appropriately included and properly trained to be able to support the ERP operations and growth.

LJA