preview

Cisco Case Study Essay

Better Essays

1. Cisco suffered from inertia when an attempt was made to engage business management in selecting software for their individual areas, and/or agreeing to participate in the ERP implementation project. List and explain reasons why management would hesitate to become engaged in the IT process/project.
Below are reasons Cisco hesitated to take on an ERP project:
a) Fear of decentralization
b) Fear of “mega-projects” that ERP implementation often becomes
c) Disruption to the business
d) Need for strong internal team and strong partners
e) Balancing standardization versus proprietary functionality
f) Cost
Fear of decentralization
Cisco’s CEO believed that Silicon Valley firms had a tendency to decentralize too rapidly while not …show more content…

Support and continued enhancements
The vendor provides the support and continued enhancements for the product based on the current industry standards and any requirements from agencies if the software interacts/used for contacting any regulatory agency. They also provide the enhancements and bug fixes based on the other customer’s experiences. When building custom software sometimes small changes to functionality might require redesign and reengineering would end up being expensive.
Reliability
The “software off the shelf” is more reliable as it is developed with broader audience and scalability in mind. It will under go several rounds of testing with different customers perspective. In custom built even though some features might work when used alone, but when interacting with other components might fail.
Business Involvement
For custom software development it requires major participation from the business team to define and train the development team about the process and workflow design. Even after all the great efforts getting all the required functionality would be challenging. With “Software off the shelf” business users spends some time initially to understand and define the new business process based on the current process. Once it is defined and system has been configured it would be easy to maintain.
Cisco’s Approach Cisco’s approach was to do this quickly

Get Access