Escaping the Proprietary System Vise With ONE Agile Enterprise Doctrine

Large enterprises are caught in an ever-tightening vise driven by users that are demanding highly specialized functionality to effectively perform their jobs in markets that are rapidly shifting.

IT responds by building or acquiring systems that rapidly become legacy and become a progressively larger burden for IT support.

Eventually, IT becomes so burdened by the support that taking on anything new becomes increasingly difficult.

This leads to a dramatic decline in agility and dissatisfied users.

Cloud and SaaS applications have provided a huge boost in capability to companies with one major caveat.

They work well for relatively standardized processes.

They can be configured to deal with process variation, but there are limits to what can be achieved solely through configuration.

For small and medium-size businesses, configurable SaaS apps are probably sufficient.

However, larger enterprises often have a significant degree of business process specialization as well as a huge array of processes.

Historically this has been approached by building custom applications from scratch or taking "platforms" such as ERP and customizing them.

Both of these strategies have resulted in huge support costs as well as a significant decrease in enterprise agility.