Despite the relatively smooth and rapid implementation, with hindsight there are areas Chambers says where he would have been more cautious. One of those is workflow. The automation of workflow within PeopleSoft is a great advantage, he says: it can both reduce the amount of work to be done and transport it to wherever you desire. However, he says, CIOs must be mindful that if you change your organisational structure, and your business rules around that structure, then the workflow must also change.

"In other words, as our business rules have been changing, the workflow has similarly had to change along with it. This is probably not necessarily an issue that a more established company might face."

There was also a bit of a hurdle regarding training. As one of the earliest adopters, COMindico did not have access to version 8 training prior to implementation. To ensure that staff would be up and running as fast as possible, users trained on the previous non-Web enabled version, then moved on to PeopleSoft 8.

"What we did was create internally a few [product] champions who had a train-the-trainer and support role to bring people up to that skill set. So again it's a question of being on the leading edge. We took on the software, we went for it, we implemented it, and we did train people and took them through the training process, but it was hard to get the latest training available for that release."

None of which will stop COMindico continuing to be an early adopter in the future. Chandler says there are plans to add a number of emerging technologies in the areas of voice services, unified communication services, corporate network services within peerless networks? that provide quality of service, prioritisation of packet traffic across the network and multicasting capability.