How To Think About Enterprise Solutions

Armed with a credit card and access to cloud-based solutions, departments can quickly solve their pain point independent of what other departments are doing or really need. While this may work in the short-term, will it be scalable in the long-term? Have you considered what your need will be in a year or 2 or are you just looking to put out the immediate fire?

Imagine a company needs an ERP system. While it makes sense to buy a complete, comprehensive ERP solution from one vendor because of the seamless integration of functionality, security, information sharing, etc., I’ve never seen a company buy different ERP modules from multiple vendors and then attempt to do the integration of these modules on their own. You can’t practically and cost-effectively get there from here. And, this can apply to cloud-based point solutions as well.

Let’s look at the problem of creating and reusing intellectual property—an area I refer to as “knowledge management and collaboration.” Often, intellectual property is created in one department for reuse in other areas of the company. For example, Marketing and Product Management may create content that can reused by Sales, Inside Sales, Channel Partners, etc.

While Marketing and Product Management could independently deploy stand-alone, non-integrated applications, might it be better to have a single system to leverage for content storage, sharing and reuse by those involved in selling functions? The answer is “yes.”

A company needs to consider its corporate data model—what dots need to be connected to holistically solve the end-to-end business challenges? This will get you on the right course.

Thought for the week:

“No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it.” – Peter Drucker