My Story
The education that money can't buy, but clients keep paying for.
There is a certain kind of wisdom that can only be acquired by spending 35 years sitting in every chair in the room — including some of the chairs I later wish I hadn't!
It starts, as many things do, with accounting. I am Debbie Altham, a Chartered Accountant by training, and I entered the technology world through the unglamorous but clarifying lens of cost accounting, project accounting, shop floor operations, and supply chain — the part of a business where the numbers either work or they very visibly don't.
What followed was a 35-year tour of the ERP ecosystem that covered nearly every vantage point available. I was the in-house owner of the ERP system at Eli Lilly New Zealand. I moved into Big Four selection consulting at Ernst & Young, where I learned to evaluate software with rigor and recommend it with confidence. I spent 19 years as CEO and co-president of a two-country ERP practice, from sales and strategy to sleeves rolled up design, implementation and project management. Then I sold that practice to Sikich, one of the largest Dynamics partners in North America, and stayed on for almost ten years as a senior director in industry sales, Microsoft partnership and, finally, helping to build its Data & AI sales team.
Somewhere along the way, a milestone that was either a great honor or a warning sign: the world's first Microsoft MVP for Dynamics AX, the product that became Finance & Supply Chain. It is a distinction held with genuine pride and cited with complete transparency, because in this practice, the history of where the expertise came from is part of what makes the independence meaningful.
Here is what three and a half decades of that education produces: a precise and detailed map of who earns what, when, and why — and a clear-eyed understanding of whose interests are aligned with yours at any given moment in a technology project. The answer, with uncomfortable frequency, is: not many people's. The vendor is protecting the subscription. The implementation partner is managing a delivery under commercial pressure. The internal team is navigating the politics of a project that was someone's idea and everyone's problem. None of these are character flaws — they are the natural consequences of the incentive structures each party operates within. The person signing the checks, however, sits outside all of those structures — and frequently discovers that this particular perspective is underrepresented in the room.
That structural observation is what Solven Advisory was built to address. Not because the vendors and partners are villains — most of them are not — but because no one can be fully honest when their revenue depends on a particular answer. It is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic.
My answer is equally simple: fixed fees, no fee from anyone where it could bend the advice, everything else disclosed, and a written commitment, in the engagement letter before work begins, to say what is true rather than what is convenient.
I don't promise miracles. ERP implementations are genuinely hard. But they go much better when someone in the room is paid to notice the things everyone else has a financial incentive not to see.
That is the story. That is the practice.
Why It Matters
Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business goals. These aren't freak outcomes. They're predictable, which means they're preventable.
Most mid-market companies implement ERP once or twice in a generation. The vendor and the partner do it every week. That imbalance is where the trouble starts.
This is not a software problem. The software, in most cases, is perfectly capable of doing what it was purchased to do. This is a decision problem — a long series of them, made under pressure, often without the experience to know which decisions are the dangerous ones.
After 35 years working in and around ERP implementations — as a controller, end-user, ERP buyer, Big Four selection consultant, implementation practitioner, presales consultant, a CEO of a two-country ERP practice for 19 years, and also a seller — the pattern is well established. Projects don't fail in one dramatic moment. They fail in accumulated increments: a scope that was never properly defined, a business case built on optimistic assumptions, a go-live date chosen for political rather than practical reasons, a steering committee receiving progress reports that have been tidied up before they arrived.
And frequently — more often than most executives want to hear — the client organization is part of the problem. Not through any fault of character, but through the entirely human tendency to underestimate how much the business needs to change to make the technology work. ERP rarely fails because the software is wrong. It fails because the organization wasn't ready, wasn't honest with itself about its own complexity, or made a series of small compromises that individually seemed reasonable and collectively became fatal.
Recognizing that dynamic — and saying so, plainly, while there is still time to do something about it — is one of the most valuable things an experienced independent advisor can do. It is also one of the rarest. Most people in the room have reasons to keep the conversation comfortable.
What I do is work through the specifics. Is the original business case still intact, or has scope creep quietly dismantled it? Are the reported timelines credible, or is the project running on optimism? Is the go-live date a genuine target or a number that has become politically impossible to move — right up until it becomes impossible not to? Are the change management and training plans actually going to land with the people who will use this system every day? And critically: is this ERP implementation building toward the AI-enabled future the business needs — or inadvertently locking it out?
These are not comfortable questions. They are, however, the right ones. Asked early enough, they create options. Asked too late, they become the debrief.
This practice is built on fixed fees, complete independence, and a contractual commitment to tell clients what is true rather than what is convenient. The credentials, the world's first Microsoft MVP for Dynamics AX, a Chartered Accountant, and 35 years across every seat at the table, exist to make sure that when the hard questions get asked, the answers are grounded in genuine experience rather than educated guesswork.
The goal in every engagement is simple. Don't let my client become a statistic
Let's Talk
Solven Advisory
This website uses cookies.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.