Ben Worthen offered a post on WSJ’s Business Technology blog challenging the conventional wisdom that investing in a wall-to-wall ERP system improves corporate agility. He cites an article published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. A few interesting points:

• 75% of ERP projects are rated as “failures” by the organizations that undertook them
• The average company spends $15 million or more on the overall project
• IT departments then spend 70-80% of their yearly budget maintaining their existing systems

If those facts and figures don’t scare the hell out of any CEO or CFO considering undertaking a new system I’m not sure what will. It’s yet another data point suggesting simple point solutions, often offered on-demand, are a much lower risk and lower cost approach to streamlining business operations.