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Future Enterprise- Enterprise Transformation
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
A variety of factors are driving frenetic change in the 21st century, including major shifts in the geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological landscape. Two major trends are Globalisation and the volume and complexity of information processing, driven in large part by the service economy.
At the same time the reduced cost of information and communication technologies as well as improved availability of education worldwide has enabled developing economies to leapfrog obsolete legacy infrastructure and business processes, catching up to the developed world more rapidly. For example China and India now graduate over 300,000 engineers per year, including a large number of software and IT specialists, compared with 65,000 in the US. In turn the fundamental acceleration and realignment in global knowledge growth is driving enterprises to improve the productivity of process outcomes in order to survive in this new world order.
However current business process improvement and re-engineering will not be sufficient to turn the tide. Emerging organisational theory postulates that enterprise transformation is driven by perceived value gaps in the quality, pricing and functionality of services delivered, relative to the anticipated potential of the organisation- that is its capacity to exploit market and technological opportunities as they arise.
In all industries there is now an understanding that only radical change and innovation beyond traditional workflow and process management can effect the desired remediation. A point in the evolution of the enterprise is eventually reached where the differential between actual and anticipated performance becomes so divergent that only a radically different strategic direction can provide an adequate solution.
The organisational environment itself may however be a serious impediment to this goal- often rife with territorial conflict and a self-serving culture that undermines essential strategic decision-making. The current terminal failures within the motor vehicle and banking industries are salient examples. Ford, GM, Fanny Mae and Citicorp all failed to adapt to new market environments and opportunities, opting instead to base their product mix and service processes on an obsolete social and economic model.
Their subsequent catastrophic failure demonstrates that beyond the skills and the abilities of managers, understanding the nature of the social networks governing the organisation’s complex decision-making environment, including the requisite feedback channels, signals and indicators, both internal and external, will have an enormous future impact on the capacity of the enterprise to survive over the longer term.
A number of dynamic modelling and simulation approaches to socio-technical systems analysis and redesign have been developed, including agent-based modeling, that facilitates process change in complex adaptive systems. Also new networked architectures with the capacity to dynamically route information and intelligence resources to critical decision nodes in the enterprise. The key to the future enterprise transformation therefore, will not only involve the ability to deploy information resources to these key decision nodes, but ensure the directed targeting of intelligence and problem solving capability, so that critical decisions can be implemented in optimal time frames.
Future Trends
Although the more far-sighted enterprises are becoming aware of such critical networked linkages and feedback loops, the support provided by today’s service oriented architectures have lagged well behind. Tomorrow’s enterprise must be far more pro-active and sentient in relation to environmental change, avoiding being caught passively flat-footed.
Future research in enterprise transformation as mentioned is beginning to provide both a clearer understanding of the drivers and enablers of complex organisational ecology and the tools needed to make such change a reality. Progress is now emerging from new insights into a combination of complexity, decision, and social network theory. These will be examined in greater detail in future commentaries.
The days of dependence on traditional hierarchical management techniques in an ultra-volatile competitive as well as cooperative world are over.
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