Hands up all those who have used Facebook or LinkedIn? Have an iPad? Dabbled in Google Docs? There is transformational change afoot in the way consumers use IT, and companies should be taking advantage of these trends, according to enterprise strategist and disruptive technologies expert Ray Wang.
The enterprise software you’re currently using was probably best practice when it was designed in the 1980s and implemented throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but in the meantime a huge shift in how and where we work has occurred, according to Constellation Research Group CEO and principal analyst Ray Wang, who spoke at the SAUG Summit 2011.
“Enterprises face massive and unprecedented levels of change,” he said. “You are now dealing with five generations of workers who all have different perspectives on how they expect information to get to them, and what interfaces they use. Don’t forget that, because it changes how we adopt technology and how we put it to use.”
Business models are also being shaken up – just as selling laptops is not about the machines themselves, but getting the service contract to support and maintain them, the same thing is now happening to enterprise software in a “freemium” world. For businesses, with such rapid change in technology adoption, planning is also nigh on impossible, and long-term business planning should be scrapped in favour or iterative strategy development, according to Wang.
“Three years ago, you wouldn’t have envisaged two Harvard kids would be in a dorm room going to create Facebook and taking over the world in social media. You just can’t plan for these things,” he said.
Against this backdrop, consumers are becoming used to a phenomenal IT experience in their personal lives, and a much less satisfactory one when they get to work. “IT that I can procure as an individual is much better than what can be provided by the business,” Wang said. In many cases, people from the business side are now bypassing IT altogether and taking matters into their own hands. While technology spending is up 22 per cent across the organisation, often it is not IT who is making these purchases. The rise in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has made it easy for others to BYO solutions.
So what is the answer? Wang said there are five consumer trends dominating IT in the enterprise at the moment: mobile enterprise, social business, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and video and unifi ed communications.
“It’s about taking these great disruptive technologies, these great consumerisation of IT elements and fi nding the business value, and then work out how you can pay for it,” Wang said.
With so many consumer IT developments catching the attention of individuals, organisations also need to take what they can from the buzz and adapt it to the enterprise environment. “There is a freemium component out there and we need to fi nd out how to get that goodness into the enterprise,” he said. Organisations should now be asking how they can use new technologies from SAP, such as HANA, Business ByDesign and Gateway, to get the information they have in their system out and to use it in new ways.
“This is the stuff that shifts things from just being departmental IT and takes the business where it wants to go.” The future will see the rise of engagement apps – or in SAP parlance, “people-centric applications”. They will be role-based, offer a rich user interface, be context-aware, have a business process focus, and connected to enable collaboration. While this might be five or 10 years away, how do organisations move to this exciting new environment from where they are today, bogged down with old, complex, inflexible systems? And perhaps more importantly, should they start down this path at all?
“It’s our job to figure out what makes sense for our organisation with a sense of business value. But you have to dream a bit and share with the business side of the house so they know you are thinking about this and can plan accordingly, so we can map these things out,” Wang said. “Business has to get work done, and IT has to create efficiencies and standardisation. You can’t have one without the other, but you have to do it in a way that if you go so far ahead on the business side, people don’t collapse under the weight of all these applications and all this disparateness, but it is not so standardised that the business reaches a point of frustration and goes out and make their own decisions. That’s the lesson learned here from the consumerisation of IT.”
With four paths to optimising an SAP landscape – staying with the status quo, upgrading to new SAP, freezing the old SAP and augment it with ‘best of breed’ products, or modernise SAP and add best of breed – Wang challenged organisations to think about which option will best suit the pace of change in the business. “Think about the partnership back to the business. It’s more important than ever, not only for funding, but also in terms of business strategy.”
Ray Wang was a keynote presenter at the SAUG Summit 2011 in Sydney. Visit www.saug.com.au for information on upcoming events.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Winter 2011.
