Today’s enterprises are a legacy of the thinking and the structures that were put in place based on successful companies during the industrial revolution. These enterprise were driven by inventions and manufacturing as their core competence. These corporations were created before the advent of the information age, large scale globalization and at time when a company made money off a light bulb for decades after patenting the invention. It is easy to argue that things have changed in the last 100 years, but have organizations changed to cope up with the same macro level changes? It is well known that successful enterprises of tomorrow will learn to deal with shortening product life cycles, will be responsive to their markets and will do this by looking beyond their traditional enterprise for ideas to design, manufacture, sell and support these products. The teams responsible for these products will be globally distributed and will span open and fuzzy enterprise boundaries. To support this value chain, companies will have to adopt information architectures and workflows that are characterized by speed, collaboration, flexibility, and transparency of both structured and unstructured bits of data.
Traditional enterprise systems such as ERP, SCM, PLM, ,… systems are inherently designed and architected on a closed paradigm that restricts highly structured data to flow in a hierarchical way within the enterprise. These technologies were suited very well for the organizations created in the industrial age.
The new enterprise and the products they bring to market will be based on a major paradigm shift that will require open, flat and extended organizations (beyond your organization). They will be supported by bottoms-up, lateral and cross functional information flows. These companies will use technologies to not only gather critical customer feedback and rapidly respond to the feedback – with new product offerings, new packaging, and pricing…. Also, businesses are increasingly relying on strategic partnerships in order to deliver best value to customers. All of this will require closer collaboration at a scale and speed not seen before. To support this fundamentally different enterprise, the technologies that will be used to collaborated will be very different than their predecessors and might be described using words such as social tools, serious game, games based learning, social media tools, …
These technologies allow organizations to facilitate greater interaction between their employees (across organization boundaries) and get better results through collaboration and team work. Businesses that manage this successfully stand to gain a distinct competitive edge in the market.
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