I've had lots of conversations with both consultants and PeopleSoft clients about recommended approaches for meeting business needs. The primary question at hand is: should customers invest in modifying the delivered product to meet business needs or wait for something else.

There are two things that drive this decision:

1. The impact of modifying the software to future product releases. In other words, will the change make taking future maintenance or upgrades too expensive?
2. How long customers will stay on their existing PeopleSoft system. In other words, does it make sense to invest in the PeopleSoft system when they will be moving to something else eventually?

Rick Beers of Corning provided insight into this when he presented to the PeopleTools development team 3 years ago. According to Rick, project sponsors have already had to justify the ROI of implementing PeopleSoft and upgrading PeopleSoft based on improvements in productivity and controls. This means that even performing an upgrade will have limited support because of the cost and the fact that executives feel that they have already solved their ERP problems. This means that the bar is set extremely high for replacing a PeopleSoft system with another system (whether it be SAP or Oracle).

Therefore, a much more effective strategy is to look at the features that are needed in the PeopleSoft application and focus on addressing them. The current environment makes this approach much more feasable than in the past.

1. There is little risk that modifying the PeopleSoft application will create future upgrade risks. Products will not change dramatically with future maintenance, and Oracle will most likely want to protect its maintenance revenue stream from PeopleSoft customers and not force upgrades.
2. The impact to making specific changes to the applications are much smaller than taking a full upgrade or switching to a completely new infrastructure (which is what moving to Fusion will likely be, or what moving to SAP will likely be).
3. PeopleSoft delivers the source code for its products, unlike other ERP applications. This means that customers can make incremental changes to product behavior without writing a lot of code.

In essence, I believe that PeopleSoft customers should plan their investment in software like many people plan their investment in a house. If you need to add a home network to your house, you don't buy a new house, you hire a contractor to do the wiring (or do it yourself). Until it gets too expensive to meet your needs with your current home, you fix the problems one at a time because a house is a very expensive asset.

Labels: PeopleCode, PeopleSoft