Resumen
The article focuses on managing risks in enterprise systems. The experience of two companies after installing an enterprise system has been discussed. The first company survived while the other failed after installing an enterprise system. At the time of its P13 implementation, beginning in 1995, Dow Corning Corp. Incorporated was a $2.5 billion producer of silicone products. The company was facing competitive pressures as well as lawsuits worth $2 billion due to well-publicized problems with silicone breast implants. The company decided that its survival depended on reengineering its business processes to become a truly global company, an objective it believed could be met only with appropriate information systems. It created Business Processes and Information Technology to support reengineering by incorporating responsibility for business processes and IT within the same organizational unit. This scenario can be compared with FoxMeyer Drug Co.'s P13 implementation. FoxMeyer's business was wholesale drug distribution, an industry rendered very competitive and relatively unstable by health-care reforms of the early 1990s. Hoping to gain a competitive advantage, FoxMeyer initiated its $65 million P13 project in 1993. However Fox Meyer's plans did not work out. INSETS: Characteristics of ES and ES Projects; Lessons Learned.

Resumen
This article discusses the many different approaches that can be followed when solving a problem. Systems development is, fundamentally, a problem-solving activity. A problem in an application domain is transformed by the systems development process into a solution in the computer's implementation domain. The problem-solving literature distinguishes between "strong" and "weak" problem-solving approaches. Strong methods are those designed to address a specific type of problem, designed to fit and do an optimal job on one kind of problem. While weak methods are general approaches that may be applied to many types of problems, designed to adjust to a multiplicity of problems, they solve none of them optimally. It is the purpose of this article to pursue this notion of "strong" and "weak" problem-solving approaches more thoroughly from a systems development point of view. The dilemma with any of these approaches lies in establishing a criteria for choosing among and interfacing schemes for meshing, the various constituent methods. To overcome this dilemma, problem-solving approaches are weak, and that solving the dilemma is the price to be paid for moving toward strong approaches.