Mr. Who? Becoming Mr. ERP: Part I

Posted in: Blog- Jan 09, 2013 No Comments
I’ve been doing ERP for 30 years, and people often ask me if I planned a career in IT.  Like most people, I backed into my career through chance and good luck. 
 
In college, I was initially pre-med, but most of my classmates thought it was strange that I spent my time reading novels instead of biology.  When they recommended I turn instead to an English Lit major, I thought it made good sense.
 
Needing a way to finance my education, I took a job at Columbia University, which had tuition benefits, and applied for a transfer there.  Both of these activities were successful and during this time working at the university they had, serendipitously, just begun putting in a new ERP system, hiring Peat Marwick, one of the then ‘big eight’ accounting firms, to implement the system for them. 
 
During the initial phase of implementation, the Peat Marwick team visited each of the university’s departments, explaining how the process would work, what they could expect, and most importantly, soliciting their interest and support of the university’s new ERP system.  This process taught me a valuable lesson right from the beginning, which was, “If you don’t have the client involved in the implementation then it’s not going to be a successful implementation.”
 
I was immediately fascinated by the new ERP system, recognizing how it could help my job in the Business School by giving me the ability to access better information and manage operations.  But I also wondered at the things the Marwick team did not explain about ERP, and I kept thinking — “Wait a minute. If it can do this, then it should also be able to do this-and-that, too!”
 
Asking the right questions led to my receiving a call from the controller’s office asking me to be part of the implementation!  I’m probably the only pre-med student to chuck it all for literature and then participate in  a university-wide ERP implementation. 
               
Once the implementation was complete, I was hired as a manager of the new system for the university, working with the computer center to handle the technical side.  I also worked closely with the accounting staff as well as the different schools and departments, which was an incredible experience. 
 
By the way – I did end up getting my English degree at Columbia; but it was my experience with the ERP implementation that moved me to continue on for an MBA at Columbia.
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