Enterprise Landscape & Technologies
Internal process integration, near real-time transactional data availability, and back-end processing were probably some of the most exciting and promising technology endeavors the business world was excited for, about two decades ago! Almost a decade and a half were spent perfecting that and still going on. This was in a way an internal focus on technology innovations to manage and integrate a company's financials, supply chain, operations, reporting, manufacturing, and human resource activities. Typical benefits considered are of course accurate and timely access to operations data, information sharing between all components of the organization, and redundancy elimination. Organizations strived to achieve operations efficiency and near real-time data intelligence providing visibility into business holistically. Many ERP applications such as SAP have become the backbone for most medium and large size organizations.
Digital Transformation
The world already has a plethora of business intelligence, data mining, and analysis technologies. And on top of that emerging and maturing new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Machine Learning, and others present an opportunity like never before, for any business.
Many of these offer critical business information input consuming not only available market data and other information but predictive scenarios. With the risk of oversimplifying here, the primary idea of course is to be able to turn data into an asset and use technology to forecast/extrapolate and seamless system learning for continuous algorithm improvement as in Machine learning.
And then with the importance of accurate data availability in mind, systems like blockchain are gaining importance to create and keep the digital records safe, practically very difficult to hack, change or cheat. Technologies like Blockchain not only just do this but also unleash an entirely new set of possibilities and business opportunities. The emergence of Bitcoin is a great example, which utilizes Blockchain technology.
I read an article a few months ago analyzing if Enterprise technologies slow down the digital transformation. I wanted to make a case here contrary to that and say that Enterprise and Digital technologies are complementary to each other! Let me elaborate...
Complementary Technologies
If I can dare to take an analogy to get my point across, it would be of sitting on mobile data transmission and touch screen technologies being used separately or may be of limited usage together. iPhone innovation changed mobile communication, mobile software, and even underlying hardware technologies forever. This innovation basically used these two technology areas namely mobile voice and data communication and touch screen together and showcased how this turned out to be amazing and revolutionized general mobile communication forever.
More than ever businesses have a need and case of integrating digital technologies at the end of any end-to-end process and in between. For example, demand sensing on one end will need market data analysis, forecasting technologies to quickly adapt to changing market needs. On the other end, we will need intelligent business data mining, analysis, and executive reporting to assess performance in various categories, market response, and predict trends to ultimately take intelligent data-driven decisions. And then there is a case to at the least automate this feedback loop to gain efficiency. This will not only be able to predict market changes and demand much in advance but almost automatically react to them and make required changes to the operation and supply chain and internal operations.
Technology Integration
Not only these new technologies present opportunities in themselves as we see with the rise of Bitcoin or similar currencies, healthcare, retail, and many other applications but also by integrating existing enterprise applications with these. The technology landscape already has a large set of possibilities, but the issue here is if the industry and consulting world have recognized this opportunity and put in resources for this much-needed integration. I have no doubt in my mind that this will unleash a world of possibilities much beyond what we can even imagine ordinarily.
Most if not all businesses are either driven by technology or impacted by it. It's getting easier and easier to implement any given application or technology for your organization with a cloud-based approach and Software as Service (SaaS) offerings. So, it's clear that mere adoption of newer technologies will not be a differentiator!
Organizations will need to carefully evaluate if their existing enterprise systems are still viable or if they need to be upgraded or replaced etc. But along with that, the technology landscape must include digital technologies which can be integrated and provide leverage. The landscape must be capable of quickly adapting to changing market needs to provide better value to your customers. Winners will be the ones who have been able to lay an intelligent and flexible technology footprint. SaaS does make it easy to implement new applications quickly but that should be preceded by careful assessment for integration and existing landscape enhancement.
This will require high-end teams who understand both enterprise and digital technologies and are guided with a customer-centric technology-driven vision. To enable this, technology leaders may need to restructure their organization and finally have teams who can create a holistic integrated approach to leverage technology for business growth.
It’s not that we use technology, we live technology– Godfrey Reggio
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