Australian businesses will be held back substantially by GST, according to Brian Clampett, general manager of Rational Software.
While businesses in the rest of the world are winding up their Y2K projects and moving on to developing e-commerce strategies and sites, "Australia will fall behind while companies work on implementing GST compliance into their IT systems," he said.
With limited resources it is likely that e-commerce projects will be put on the back burner until GST projects are finalised, Clampett believes. This leaves Australia at least 12 months behind other countries in e-commerce development.
"E-commerce gives companies such a competitive advantage," he said, once these businesses are operating on the Internet, they will have a strong advantage over Australian businesses.
The solution, according to Clampett," comes down to tools and processes." Businesses will need to be able to make changes and implementations faster to catch up. "Change management is essential," he said and this comes down to having appropriate system architecture.
The fear is that many companies are not doing this, they are "changing their systems on-the-fly," according to Clampett. With the impact of Y2K, GST and the speed of the industry in general, people have been using stop-gap measures to patch-up their IT systems. This may cause "the same or bigger problems down the track," he said.
"What companies need to do is step back and take a long-term view," Clampett said. They need to look at requirement management, change management and functional and load testing. "It's not just coding any more."
"Organisations need to put in place correct practices, processes and change management systems to cater for ongoing planned and forced change to their business information systems," according to Clampett.
That way "big changes won't have such a big impact." Future changes we can expect such as amendments to the GST legislation or the introduction of the Ralph report recommendations can be handled more easily and changes to business processes due to e-commerce will be much faster.
