Despite some high-profile ERP implementation failures in local and state governments in recent years, Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind., are implementing a three-year, $16 million project to replace back-office systems based on mainframes with ERP technology from Oracle, reports Jaikumar Vijayan at ComputerWorld.

Indianapolis hopes to get the deployment right by keeping the project's technical complexity to a minimum while focusing on transforming business processes. The project will consolidate the separate administrative systems used by the city and the county, creating one ERP system for managing payroll, procurement, accounting and human resources, Vijayan reports.

ERP integration has long been a thorny challenge, and the technical and business impediments don't seem to have diminished much, according to a new report from Forrester Research, titled "It's Time to Tame the ERP Integration Beast." Thomas Wailgum, in a post at CIO, summarizes some of the common obstacles discussed in the report:

• ERP apps interoperate with other apps from the same provider but not other providers;
• Vendors choose middleware that limits customers choices;
• There are too many choices when it comes to integration strategies; and
• Dynamic business apps increase the integration complexity.

For more:
- see Jaikumar Vijayan's article at ComputerWorld
- here's Thomas Wailgum's post at CIO

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