Enterprise application issues

Posted on Wednesday October 25, 2006 by Julian I. Kamil

Andrew McAfee wrote about his recent Office 2.0 presentation, and pointed out several issues with the typical enterprise applications, one of which is the impedance mismatch between the structured tendencies of these applications and the need for flexibility:

... As I wrote earlier, the best configuration for a given business process isn’t always clear in advance, yet the enterprise systems we have don’t typically lend themselves to quick-and-easy process tweaking. They’re great for embedding a process once it’s developed, but not so great at experimenting and iterating to come up with a good process. ...

I surmise that this tension between imposed structure and flexibility is characteristic of the large enterprise, where there are always—and rightly, I might say—heavy gravitational pulls toward maximizing efficiency, resulting in the culture of ‘best practices’, ‘distilled methods’, ‘lessons learned’, and the view of the human workforce as interchangeable parts in a solution factory. What else would be the reason for prescribing a rigid tool that is known to work only most of the time but to simplify problem solving and eliminate all but the minimal amount of costly, creative thinking? Inside the enterprise, the solution factory, this optimum leveraging of best practices and methods has been the profitable approach for problem solving.

Until recently, that is…

The primary beneficiary of Enterprise 2.0 approaches is going to be large enterprises with employees and internal networks approximating the population and the size of the Internet. For one, an enterprise can leverage the wisdom of its employees if, and only if, there is enough diversity and population from which to draw the right crowds. With web services, as another example, a giant corporation no longer has to be a slow moving elephant when responding to changing business requirements, because it can now make better and rapid use of its distant parts to create highly efficient and effective enterprise mashups—and cheaply, too. These are benefits that can only be significant in large enough enterprises. For smaller corporations, they need to look outward, with Web 2.0 approaches, to derive similar benefits.

Read the rest of Andrew McAfee’s posting here...

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