The economy, the technology spectrum and business have gone through dramatic change. Your enterprise and the applications running in your company should change also. Here are five applications you should be planning, prototyping and ready to roll out by year's end.
Enterprise
applications used to be a code word for one big yawn.
You
had an ERP app that was first developed in about 1963 and incrementally updated
ever since. You put a Web front end on your inventory control system, called it
2.0 and off you went to happy hour. You sank so much money into CRM
that eventually you too agreed with Marc Benioff that software was dead and you
went and signed up for
Salesforce.com.
But
in 2009, the economy, the technology spectrum and business have gone through
dramatic change. Your enterprise and the applications running in your company
should change also. Here are five applications you should now be planning,
prototyping and ready to roll out by year's end.
xTuple CEO Ned Lilly explains how the economy is leading to more open-source enterprise applications; click here for the podcast.
1. True business intelligence. How did
all those Wall Street firms invest all that money in all those financial
control systems and still get blindsided by the big financial meltdown? The
problem, as I see it, started at the very top with two business agendas. Agenda
one was to build financial systems that met minimum compliance requirements and
were the playground of the quants and math geeks who thought they could model
the world. Agenda two-and the one that mattered-was about the unwritten salary
and bonus rules that said put as much business as you can on the books whether
risky or not, get your money and get out before the Feds come knocking. The new
BI systems have to start right at the top and be designed to fully reflect a
company's business: the good, the bad and the ugly.
2. The business backbone. How many
green, eco-friendly commercials can you watch from companies that have no idea
what energy their utilities, HVAC and electrical systems consume? The
enterprise application that ties in your traditional analog,
not-under-control-of-IT energy systems to your digital dashboard is not
something still impossible to produce. The federal government is-in my opinion-going
to come up with a carrot and stick regulatory and tax program that will require
regular energy use reporting. You can get ahead of all these new energy compliance
(just like financial compliance) laws now by instrumenting your company and
getting it all tied into the digital nervous system.
3. The social net monitor. Look,
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and myriad other social networks are not going to
go away. These will all be tools that will be in use by your marketing, product
development and customer service groups. The enterprise application that is
missing is an app that ties these tools together and presents views based on
department needs and measuring requirements.
4. The cloud monitor. Ah, yes, cloud
computing. Maybe you should build a little cloud in a couple departments, maybe
a corporatewide cloud, maybe just one big cloud. It all sounds so easy. Until
you get into issues like server virtualization, compliance monitoring, security
and application access. I'm a fan of cloud computing, but I wouldn't go and
deploy any mission-critical apps until I had a way to measure, monitor and
administer those applications.
5. The mobile enterprise. Mobility was
once a bolt-on to existing business applications. Now mobility is the central
focus of senior-level executives. Don't believe me? Try and take that iPhone or
BlackBerry away from the CEO. Consumer
applications tend to lead business applications. The rapid development of the
iPhone App Store has shown how quickly mobile applications can be developed.
The next generation of enterprise applications will be designed with mobility
in mind from the start.
There
they are, the five enterprise apps you should be working on now.
Follow me on Twitter @ESLundquist
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