Enterprise Overview
Enterprise Small Systems
Enterprise Small Systems are what the business users develop while IT is working to its strategic plan.
The problem and opportunity
Most long-term, strategic implementations of major systems clash with the urgent requirements of key business managers. ERP, CRM and other major systems are notorious for sucking all of the budget, resource and management attention from the organisation, requiring that high-impact smaller-systems be put on the back burner.
This causes:
- Frustrated Users to go and “knock-up” a solution to their immediate needs using a tool like Microsoft Access, diverting time from their normal roles to become buried in the generation and support of a unique business application.
- Individual systems to proliferate. Each one of them brings an island of data. The validity and currency of that data is directly proportional to the amount of time each individual system owner devotes to its maintenance, and generally degrades over time.
There is always some incredibly valuable Intellectual Property hidden away in some percentage of the numerous individual systems in an Enterprise. For example it is not unusual to have more than a thousand individual systems throughout a medium to large Australasian Enterprise. The issues become:
- How many individual systems are out there?
- Which of these systems have vital business data or processes that could be used throughout the rest of the organisation?
- What is the cost of converting them to web applications that may be deployed globally and supported centrally?
Real money is being wasted by organisations requiring, or letting, business people become IT managers.
When one of these individual applications is recognised as containing data or processes worthy of global roll-out, more hundreds of thousands of dollars may then be spent re-developing the application for the corporate platform.
This view of the value of Enterprise IT systems can be gained by categorising systems using the following two criteria:
- Their urgency to the business user, that is do they have a high or low propensity to assist the user to:
- Generate revenue for the organisation;
- Control costs for the organisation;
- Generate new products for the organisation; etc.
- The complexity of the system, that is:
- The number of internal users;
- The scope of usage across the organisation;
- Does it require specialised IT resources to develop;
- Does it require access to corporate data; etc.
By segmenting Enterprise applications on these two axes it can be seen that there are three critical areas where organisation-wide strategies are desirable: Enterprise process-support systems, Information-oriented systems, and User-driven small business systems or Enterprise Small Systems.