This month we celebrate Youth Day in South Africa. Youth Day, while not a uniquely South African observance, has a particularly powerful connotation for our nation. It is a day that reminds us of the importance of education and the pressing need to adequately equip and empower the youth as our future leaders.

Over the years, I have heard many customers and prospective customers suggest that customization is a bad word. People of change, ERP vendors, sometimes customize the software to the nth degree and then struggle to deploy the latest and greatest of their existing platform.

ERP is often described as the backbone of a company, but in my opinion the spinal association is less than exact. Using an anatomical metaphor is great, but let’s go beyond quick assumptions and get it right. Perhaps it would be better to say that ERP is like the Central Nervous System (CNS), the all-important connections that run from your brain down the spinal cord. Like ERP, the CNS integrates all the body’s information, triggering, adjusting and coordinating everything our bodies do. This change of metaphor frees up the backbone, which I think is better used to describe the role and function of Human Capital – the most important driver for making an ERP solution useful.

It’s not what you bought but what you do with IT

Applying IT is like the application of any tool - if you don’t know what to do with it, you’ll break something. But this time it could be your business.