The role of technology vis-a-vis business is to enable business.
What does enabling imply? Let's look at how Nature enables life on the planet. Trees for example provide food for the planet, homes for birds and clean up the atmosphere so life can be sustained and so on. Trees enable life on the planet. The eyes, the heart and the immune and nervous systems enable life. One never hears or has any inkling what some of these enablers do unless there is a problem. Enabling a system implies the following:
What does enabling imply? Let's look at how Nature enables life on the planet. Trees for example provide food for the planet, homes for birds and clean up the atmosphere so life can be sustained and so on. Trees enable life on the planet. The eyes, the heart and the immune and nervous systems enable life. One never hears or has any inkling what some of these enablers do unless there is a problem. Enabling a system implies the following:
- Critical support of system goals and objectives over the life of the system.
- Enablers are rarely seen or heard from.
IT has always been considered an enabler of business so let's take a look at how well IT has enabled business using the criteria we just defined.
Most businesses have two types of operations - an internally focused set of activities (HR, accounting, G&A) and a market-focused set of activities (product development, marketing, manufacturing, sales, customer service). Clearly, the former is a stable, well-defined set of activities and is well supported by IT while the latter are more subject to change, less well defined and are simply more complex. This latter area is where accurate information is needed for decisions and comprehensive business automation is needed to stay competitive and grow. Traditional software and ERP vendors do an excellent job with financial book-keeping and internal facing processes and most ERP vendors have extended their functionality to support some of the market-focused business needs. However, all of these functional extensions have not been able to keep up evolving requirements, are excessively complex, expensive to customize and maintain and do not effectively enable (as defined above) these critical customer facing processes.
Today's customer facing business processes need to be built on a foundation of flexibility, collaboration, mobility, process automation and information-enabled decision making. IT managers have to face up to dealing with point solutions, multiple products and vendors, integration challenges, customization, cost and excessive complexity. This is where today's IT is no longer delivering on the promise as a business enabler. A Gartner CIO study conducted a few years ago listed IT as one of the biggest stumbling blocks to change.
Cloud computing is a technology that will enable business by lowering costs and complexity of IT. However, there is a dire need for business applications that complement and extend the traditional ERP-type application to genuinely enable business - transparently and effectively.
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