Napoli, August 23 AD 79

Dear mum,

I am so excited. I have just signed the tablet with the local estate agent to purchase that villa I told you about in Pompeii. My estate agent says it’s a fantastic property with great views of the mountain and you can also see the sea. He says that I cannot go wrong with the location because the villa is right in the heart of the town, not far from the market. I thought we could move in today but my estate agent says he cannot give me the keys because he’s been told that there’s a big barbecue going on today on the mountain and he doesn’t want to miss out. There’s certainly a lot of smoke coming from Vesuvius – they’ve clearly started cooking the meat - so perhaps it would have been fun to be there as well. But me and Fulvia have rather decided to spend the weekend relaxing on the Amalfi coast and we’ll move in on Monday.

Yours, Marcus.

Amalfi, August 25 AD 79

Part 1: Building a house on a solid foundation

You can hardly miss it these days: questions about why Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects hit problems, or worse, fail, appear on so many websites. I have seen many ERP implementations and thought I had some answers, but it was only after I had been involved in building a house that I could see the similarities between building projects and ERP implementations, and why we don’t see buildings collapsing in the same ways some ERP projects fail.