In my experience, organizations looking to invest in enterprise technology focus too much of their attention on the functionality at the expense of the underlying architecture.
This is a mistake.
Anyone can make a flashy demo, but if your new app does not have the right architecture, you’ll experience disappointing returns and have more problems in the long run than you anticipated.
Better to do your due diligence now, I think, and get it right the first time.
Technologies that were in their infancy just a decade ago have matured and advanced to the point that they can no longer be ignored.
I advise you to “look under the hood” before making your next technology investment to ensure your 2015 Porsche 911 isn’t really a 1985 Pontiac Fiero!
With that said, there are three key underlying architectural features that your next SCM investment should have.
Using The Cloud as a Key Enabler of Three Underlying Architectural Features
Very few enterprise applications are designed as network apps, and that’s a huge problem because today’s enterprise trading relationships are really best understood as networks.
Think about it: most industries contain thousands of trading partners that share and withhold information from each other depending on the specific business relationship.
Furthermore, within industries there is a huge amount of overlap: retailers share the same logistics providers and suppliers, suppliers share the same raw material suppliers, and logistics providers often serve two competing companies, sometimes carrying their products on the same truck.
A good analogy is Facebook or LinkedIn. There are certain pictures or information about yourself that you may not want your co-worker to see, but that you’re perfectly fine sharing with your mother. And there’s also a lot of overlap; your friends have the same friends, and so on.
Is your enterprise software architected to reflect this underlying network? Network tenancy does just this, providing all trading partners with a “single version of the truth” safely and securely.
The next generation of enterprise apps allow every trading partner in a particular business process - say a manufacturer, retailer, or logistics provider - to view the same information at the same time in the same instance of software.
They will be network apps that better reflect the underlying relationships between trading partners - complex environments filled with public and private information that is constantly changing.
What’s in it for you? A single version of the truth for all parties.
Related: The Power of Platform-as-a-Service: Building Innovative Cloud Apps for the US Marine Corps