Migrating ERP systems has got to be the single most difficult project that any company is likely to undertake. An ERP system is the nervous system of a company and as such can't stop for any length of time. This means that migration has to happen in small parts, a department and/or location at a time, and that testing is extremely difficult.

During the migration, many employees have to at least briefly maintain both the old and new ERP systems which can, depending on the employee's role, result in a significantly enhanced workload, and stress and frustration at the IT department.

Failed ERP migrations are legendary, and it's not hard to see why.

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I continue to read Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent", which by the way is available online in HTML format courtesy of the gutenberg project. Joseph Conrad's observations of the motivations of both terrorists and those that pursue them seem very prescient to me. He describes one terrorist mastermind's motivation as follows:

His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect—a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness. In the son, individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor’s indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind—the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.

Doesn't this sound very much like the way that a modern Islamic terrorist might think? Perhaps Bin Laden, like the professor, frustrated in his desire at making his mark in the business world and steeped in religious ritual turned to moral absolutism instead...

Conrad describes the Professor's nemisis, Chief Inspector Heat as follows:

But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. His promotion had been very rapid.

Doesn't the Chief Inspector seem like any of a number of officials in the Bush Administration? And could it be any other way?

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I had a need recently to determine, based on start and end dates for processes that can span several days, what the total and average hourly activity is. I was able to do this in SQL but the process of thinking it through got me to thinking about something else, which is acceleration and deceleration.

If you have activity that occurs periodically, say purchases at a store, and you sum that activity by some time duration (hour, for example) then you can easily measure acceleration or deceleration of activity by looking for counts that increase or decrease over time.

One useful element of measuring rate of change is that rate of change is independent of volume. An application could look for times when there is a rapid increase of activity rather than looking at the quantity of activity alone.