All Roads Lead to Data: Charting Your ERP Journey

A famous historical phrase is, "All Roads Lead to Rome." The title of our article paraphrases this quote to emphasize the central role that data plays in realizing the benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation.

If you have searched the web for why ERP projects fail (AI-enabled, of course—it's 2025, after all), the search results will likely include a host of common culprits including ineffective change management, insufficient project leadership, poor communication, and conversion and integration failures. If you dig beyond the headlines, you will likely uncover a recurring topic relevant to most of the results: D-A-T-A.

Institutions and organizations across many industries have moved toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP solutions, trading in the responsibilities of hosting, securing, and patching infrastructure for modern cloud architecture. While many parts of the ERP ecosystem have been simplified, implementations remain costly and fraught with risks. Simply selecting a vendor and implementation partner is not enough. Institutions that prioritize data in their overall ERP transformation strategy and readiness activities—rather than treating it as an afterthought—will be better positioned to get to their intended destination.

Despite the buzz around ERP transformation platforms on college and university campuses, 2023 EDUCAUSE research indicates that only 19 percent of higher education institutions had completed an ERP implementation in the past ten years. A majority of institutions (53 percent) said they were in the process of implementing a new ERP, were committed to ERP change in the next five years or were interested in replacing their current ERP. Meanwhile, another 28 percent had no plans to modernize their ERP in the near future.^Footnote1

The following five pathways can better position your institution for ERP success. Each pathway below includes an explanation, actions to be taken, and the benefits to expect if institutions take a data-first approach. Now, let's follow the data!

Pathway 1: Secure Data

What does this mean?

Secure data begins with a robust strategy for managing it during and after the implementation and leveraging the expertise of established vendors to secure your environment.

What to do now?

• ✓ Refine your data classification policy. Dust off the data classification policy at your institution and be ready to use the implementation to gather metadata—including classifications—against all datasets that will be moving into the ERP.
• ✓ Update cloud security. Update application security policies to include the requirements of the cloud applications being brought into your institution's application landscape. The Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) is a great starting point!

Benefits

• Clear data exposure visibility. With proper classification tagging and inbuilt modern ERP reporting tools, institutions will have a clear view of what data exists and who has access to it, as well as audit traceability across its life cycle.
• Stronger defense. The ability to leverage the investment of billion-dollar firms in securing data centers and applications instantly decreases the risk profile of your institution.

Pathway 2: Access Data

What does this mean?

Data access has transformed from legacy implementation standards of individual users with unique access rights to role-based access that feeds the enterprise identity and access management platform at your institution.

What to do now?

• ✓ Define an identity strategy. Understand the current state and define the future identity management approach across all systems. Implementing a new ERP platform without a future identity strategy in mind is a costly mistake.
• ✓ Rationalize exceptions. Align business processes across departments so that future access design minimizes exception cases.

Benefits

• Intentional identity landscape. The ERP serves as the primary conduit for newly hired staff and faculty. The planning process provides an opportunity to address current onboarding issues and provide a more seamless user experience to address typical data issues.
• Shared language and simplified maintenance. By standardizing access models, stakeholders can leverage common datasets and reports rather than fight about whose spreadsheet is "right." Standardization in turn simplifies maintenance headaches and further removes onboarding friction.

Pathway 3: Trust Data

What does this mean?

Stakeholders—from end-users to executives—depend on data to make critical business decisions. A multimillion-dollar ERP investment should result in data that stakeholders can trust!

What to do now?

• ✓ Redesign business processes. Data quality, whether good or bad, is a direct result of business processes. Disparate processes will result in data consistency issues across departments. Now is the time to map out current processes and evaluate where they can be aligned.
• ✓ Define data quality processes. Data quality plays a critical role during ERP implementations, often impacting the success of data conversion and impeding testing. Get started now with a process to capture, manage, track, and address data quality. This process provides just as much value in the current state as it does during implementation. Do not wait for the first issue to occur to define data quality processes.

Benefits

• Fresh start. Begin the ERP journey at your institution with clean data. First impressions are critical!
• Reduced risk. Reduce the risk of data quality issues impacting your implementation by having a tested and proven process already in place.

Pathway 4: Use Data

What does this mean?

Data itself is not the end goal. The objective is to put the right data in the right hands, with the right context, at the right time for decision-making. However, self-service reporting without intentional design and training will result in continued lower adoption.

What to do now?

• ✓ Focus on business outcomes instead of reports. Define future-state reporting based on business questions and outcomes rather than the legacy question, "What reports would you like?"
• ✓ Implement change management and training. Identify the implementation approach not only to train functional users on business processes but also to have a robust training process on the data capabilities of the new platform.
• ✓ Avoid the "kitchen sink" approach. Do not plan to replicate all existing reports on your new platform. Now is the time to rationalize, ensure reports address a business need, and establish common reports across departments—all of which reinforce trust.

Benefits

• Data-informed. Move away from gut-feeling decisions and toward a culture where stakeholders are equipped with the right data to make decisions confidently.
• Future-focused. Rather than focusing on operational reporting ("What happened?"), elevate the analytics maturity at your institution to address tougher questions, such as, "Why did this happen?" or "What will happen?"
• Higher adoption. With trusted data and the right training coupled with the advanced self-service of modern SaaS ERP platforms, more stakeholders will be able to leverage data.

Pathway 5: Institutionalize Data

What does this mean?

The culture of an organization and its future state data governance will far outlive the implementation plan. Begin thinking about the future service model that can address current silos and keep the ERP momentum well beyond its go-live date.

What to do now?

• ✓ Embed data governance. Whether your institution has had a difficult time establishing data governance or is already a well-oiled data governance machine, determine how to embed data governance in the implementation early on. Some strategies include documenting standards, creating shared definitions, and aligning on naming conventions.
• ✓ Identify existing data pain points. The legacy processes will soon be gone, so identify what is and is not working in the current data life cycle from request through fulfillment. Use this as a starting point for the future state model.

Benefits

• Breakdown data silos. Establishing a structure that promotes governance and cross-functional discussions can enhance collaboration and reduce silos.

Charting a Data-First ERP Journey

"All roads lead to data" means understanding that data is connected to more than just reporting or conversion in an ERP implementation. Data is a critical lens to apply to all the angles of an ERP project. In summary, then, here is a guiding principle for each of the five data pathways for you to consider:

1. Secure data. Harden the foundation of the institution's financial, student, and human resources data.
2. Access data. Design role-based, identity-driven access that fits within a broader institutional identity strategy.
3. Trust data. Establish quality at every stage of the implementation to fuel stakeholder trust in the data.
4. Use data. Deliver all the tools and training to allow stakeholders to connect data with business outcomes.
5. Institutionalize data. Build a governance structure and a culture that sustains the first four pathways during implementation and persists well after the go-live date.

The data road will be bumpy and has many potential roadblocks, but if you follow these pathways, your institution will be better positioned to navigate the change that is likely to occur on a multimillion-dollar, multiyear, and multi-challenge ERP journey.

Happy travels!

Note

1. Sean Burns and Mark McCormack, More than "Going Live": Achieving Institutional Transformation Through ERP Implementation, (EDUCAUSE, June 2023). Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩