Essay About Software Industry And Enterprise Systems

Agility: The Key to Survival of The Fittest in The Software MarketAgility: The Key to Survival of The Fittest in The Software MarketAgility: The Key to Survival of the Fittest in the Software MarketIntroductionThe software industry and IT departments are facing extreme pressures to provide new applications that add value in todays competitive environment. Whereas in the 1990s companies concentrated on implementing systems that re-automated functions to provide specific benefits (the ability to process transactions on January 1, 2000), todays market demands new applications, and better integration within and between organizations. This has sparked the formation of many software companies to solve new problems, and well-established application providers are looking for new features and business models to improve their revenue streams.

Concurrently, there has been a significant increase in the number of small, interconnected organizations who are working to provide emerging services and products to todays customers. These firms have different information needs than large firms. They often provide a limited number of products or services so their information needs may be simpler. However, they often work in concert with many other firms to complete projects, so they need the ability to communicate seamlessly within this web of firms to share information about each project. In response to traditional and emerging markets, software vendors are realizing they must satisfy the needs of a wide range of companies and to develop applications tailored to each niche.

Facing these changes, those needing to evaluate applications are often faced with a daunting task of understanding key differences among software packages and attempting to identify the major players within each market segment. To facilitate such analysis, we have developed a framework that organizes software applications similarly to the evolutionary categorization of animals. In this framework, analogous to the vertebrate/invertebrate classifications, enterprise systems can be distinguished as those that have been created without an organizing principle while others are either inwardly organized or outwardly organized. Figures 1 and 2 show the comparative evolutionary trees for animals and enterprise systems.

Each category of enterprise system can be sub-divided, and each species of system can be studied to identify (1) the characteristics that can lead to its continued existence and (2) the niches in which it can flourish. This structure can provide several benefits. First, those interested in purchasing software can use this categorization to identify the key differences among systems currently available. Second, software vendors and customers may use this framework to highlight todays software market trends with an eye toward guiding organizations toward tomorrows software choices. Finally, we have successfully used this framework to design a graduate course to introduce students to a wide range of software applications and prepare them to enter the market in which agility is the key to survival.

Developing the Framework: The Evolution AnalogyThe ideas of Darwinian evolution can be used to describe the tumultuous IT environment in which enterprises compete. As illustrated in Figure 1 for animals, a first pass at natural classification produces the three categories of (a) invertebrates, (b) vertebrates, and (c) a speculative category of how animals interact as communities. In Figure 2 a similar first pass categorizes enterprise systems into (a) systems with no overall organizing rationale (i.e., with no backbone), (b) systems with inward organization (i.e., can be likened to vertebrates), and (c) systems with outward organization (i.e., able to communicate and interact as communities). Each of three information system categories is explained below and can be further subdivided, as shown in Figure 2.

Insert Figures 1 and 2 hereSystems with no organizing rationale: Invertebrate animals such as insects are not as advanced biologically as their vertebrate counterparts, but they survive well in a multitude of environments. Similarly, single entry enterprise systems can be successful in guiding a multitude of small organizations. However, these systems are not able to provide robust classification principles to guide the recognition of transactions. QUICKEN ™ is an excellent example of such a system that has found a niche and is flourishing within that narrow segment— individual users and very small businesses in which the owner is the key participant and decision maker. These systems work well when the owner or manager participates in all of the key business events. However, they face survival problems if the organization has significant transaction volumes, reporting requirements, or outside information users. For example,

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For example, when the person is a large business organization, it is important for the organization to meet transactional needs (even if many of those are the business needs of the entity). However, it is unlikely that an organization can achieve the same feat in an environment with large entities, large customers and large business units. For example, it will likely be costly to maintain operational data retention requirements, to maintain data backup capacity, to maintain business data security, and to maintain administrative data, or large amounts of sensitive information in a private network. Many organizations also have to maintain organizational documents, but they are likely to be extremely difficult to maintain. Other problems will occur as a result of these and other problems. This may include data protection and authorization problems, or for security reasons, large file system issues. The data stored on a computer will often or always be accessible to a large amount of users, especially to large companies.\R

Efforts to improve this will usually take years to do. This is because the organization does not realize how the data is stored or what has become of it. The organization will also fail to identify and treat the data as an asset—the only thing that has value depends on the number of transactions involved or in which transaction is involved. This will lead to an accumulation of unnecessary data, especially in situations other than a single transaction or a single transaction involving a large database of transactions. In short, a failure to maintain organizational data backup capacity and business data retention requirements may lead to significant costs and delays for organization administrators and those working within the organization, and thus is a potentially costly cause of financial problems.\R

The following systems could assist in maintaining data retention and processing: \R

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