Monday, June 16, 2008

Rise of new ERP

Came across this interesting article titled 'The Next Revolution in Productivity' in Harvard Business Review few days ago. The article advocates that - To harvest the maximum benefits out of an SOA initiative, it is required for the companies to revisit the fundamental design of their operations & their organizational structure. If they dont do that, all they will achieve is just IT efficiency, while SOA's true potential can achieve lot more than that.
This perspective generates a lot of thought process. I always tried to understand the value proposition behind the SOA strategy of bigger ERP vendors. The ERP vendors' SOA stack primarily unwraps its huge monolithic bundle in the form of prolific services and encourages the ecosystem to innovate and compose new business processes. However, I would see this model as 'innovation' happening on the 'Edge'. The true innovation in this space would be the one that could be applied at the 'roots' of the business processes.
As mentioned in the above article, using ERP vendors' SOA stack, is it possible to fundamentally redesign a specific business process?. Is it possible hot swap, sell or buy the inner most activities of a business process that is composed around ERP?. If the HBR hypothesis cannot be delivered out of today's ERP ecosystems, then as the article states, one may not leverage the fullest potential of SOA. And the one that supports the complete enterprise transformation with innovative business processes would be the new ERP...

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