SAP has more than 100,000 customers, and when you start to combine their knowledge and experience, you can come up with some hefty insight. SAP is sharing that insight among its customers in a program called Value Engineering.

Other vendors have touted initiatives along the same lines, but as InformationWeek's Bob Evans writes, "most of those promises turn out to be primarily marketing fluff with fancy-sounding names that don't amount to much more than a handful of three-year-old lightweight case studies tucked away in the corner of a hard-to-find website."

Enterprises have a greater need than ever before to find ways to put their technology to maximum use, and learning from the experiences of others can help. The Value Engineering program includes more than 30 kinds of surveys on benchmarking and best practices. More than 8,500 customers from 25 industries have completed the surveys.

In studying its customers' implementations, SAP found that the vast majority of companies are quite good at making a business case for the technology. However, only 15 percent are good at maintaining a focus on the business value during the implementation. Worse yet, only eight to 10 percent of companies manage to sustain that focus in the final stage of a project.

When a project is ready to go live, companies "have no budget left, and the project doesn't live up to expectations, and it creates a culture where top executives become very leery of investing in further projects because the big payoff just isn't there," according to SAP. Taking an end-to-end value-management approach to deploying technology can improve the odds. 

For more:
- see Bob Evans' article at InformationWeek

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