Sunday, January 17, 2010

What Happened to systems for the Enterprise?

I've been away from this blog for a long time. I have had a lot of change in my life but after watching developments in computer systems I have come back to this and feel the need to share some thoughts.

As we see the globalization of the modern enterprise the need for well designed enterprise systems becomes increasingly importnat as a critical success factor.

We see a great deal of activity in terms of technological innovation, but what about the systems themselves? Today as I have said before management has lost faith in their own IT staff. In all too many cases from the CIO to the computer operator they are viewed as geeks and not as part of the business community. Quite often if asked, the CEO Will tell you that the IT people know nothing about the business and just provide technical services that they need.

The solution? Buy 3rd party ERP systems and squeeze the corporation into the system with a shoe horn.

In the following series of articles, I'm going to start breaking business systems down into manageable components and discuss how an enterprise can and more importantly SHOULD move away from off the shelf ERP systems and develop in-house to meet today's needs.

I will start at a high level and drill into sub topics from time to time that while never getting into detailed technology may argue the merits of many commonly accepted approaches to systems development and I will challenge many well accepted industry pundits in their views.

What you will not see in this blog is any discussion of hardware. In today's world I think that hardware has become a commodity separated from developers and users by many layers of software. The machine, the operating system, and many things that in the past were critical are simply irrelevant today. Price and capacity are all that really matter in terms of computing hardware today.

While we are still a long way away from "Cloud computing" or computing as utility I do believe it is the probable direction of the future.

A key thread of this series of discussions will be security and protecting an enterprises key data oriented assets while leveraging a distributed world of technology.