To increase the ROI (return on investment) and reduce TCO (total cost of ownership), we need to recast the legacy IT assets as context-based reconfigurable IT assets, says Sudeep Mallick in one of the essays included by Sanjay Kumar, Jose Esteves, and Elliot Bendoly in ‘Handbook of Research in Enterprise Systems’ (www.sagepublications.com). These special assets – in the form of software systems, services, hardware, and so on – can then be adapted by reconfiguration to suit new business use cases and contexts, he explains, in the essay titled, ‘Service-oriented composite applications.’
For starters, ‘composite applications’ are IT applications built out of combining or compositing together multiple pre-existing IT applications, the author defines. “Each IT application would have a piece of the enterprise business architecture embedded in it, in terms of business processes, policies, rules, data, and events. Due to an evolutionary reason, different parts of the enterprise – geographical unit, business units, product lines, etc. – could have slightly varying business architecture.”
Performance nirvana
Another essay in the book is on how ‘renovation cycles’ can be upgraded to ‘innovation waves’ using knowledge management and enterprise system capabilities. “If organisations can empower their innovation engine by continuously fuelling it with organisation’s knowledge flow, they can really accomplish the state of ‘optimisation’ and experience the ‘performance nirvana,’” begins the abstract.
The author, Rakesh Kumar Mishra, rues that many organisations focus only on the ‘asset’ part of knowledge management, viz. the direct knowledge source. It is very essential that organisations equally manage the knowledge that resides in people’s mind, he argues. Also emphasised in the essay is the need for real-time cross-functional integration of the enterprise information.
Collaborative solution
One other essay in the book is on ES (enterprise solutions) as infrastructure for analytics and knowledge management, where the author Gita A. Kumta notes that the line between transactional systems and analytics is blurring. She finds that the technology backbone and the people environment have set the stage for a truly collaborative enterprise solution.
Painting ERP implementation as a people project, the author calls for redefining workflows so as to ensure that the assigned tasks are completed, or escalated if necessary. “This requires alert management technology to identify potential problems in the value chain so as to take proactive action and improve the quality of service.” And managers will need technology that enables them to define and modify their workflow by reconfiguring the system.
Underlining that the competitive strategy in today’s business environment is to create a virtual company resulting in organisation redesign, to integrate processes giving a single experience to the customer, and to build learning and agile organisations, Kumta avers that the only facilitator for the purpose – in addition to good leadership – is a robust and flexible technology.
Worthy addition to the techies’ shelf.
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Tailpiece
“The storerooms have been protected against rodents and rains, but they didn’t anticipate…”
“Rogue fields?”
“Yes, with a ferocious magnetic power to wipe out all poll data!”
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