Of Systems

In today's work environment, disaggregated systems are a reality. As much as ERP vendors would like to push for one, centralized system, this doesnt seem to be becoming a reality. Quite of a few of the systems seem to have been integrated in a large number of organizations, but this is something which is an ongoing process, though i am not sure how far this is going. Which is something Rachel Happe has written about in her post about The Future of the Social Web. Interesting reading ...


The way i like to look at it, systems within the organization can be classified as personal (ok, so you might put productivity tools as part of this classification), and enterprise apps. Personal systems, like IM, blogs, wikis, communities are tools you use to enhance your way of working. Enterprise apps, on the other hand (i reckon ERP to be probably the largest piece here), are those which you are told to use by the organization (ok, even here, there seem to be islands of information). The point here is, there doesnt seem to be any amount of talking happening between these two disparate systems. As i had written earlier, SAP was working on incorporating components of web 2.0 into their apps (though we havent heard much about this after this, or maybe i missed it ... please do let me know!), but one doesnt see them bringing out comprehensive social computing functionality in their apps. As such, the gap between the enterprise and personal tools seems as though it would remain.

And this is one of the sources of information which organizations seem to be missing out on. Between the different terms like Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence (personally, i havent been able to make out the difference, but then, thats not surprising ... i have been a Supply Chain consultant for quite some time), and a number of others, there seems to be quite a bit of information that seems to be slipping through. And maybe, this gap is one of the reasons that organizations are not able to make the mostof knowledge which is essentially personal in nature, and gets expressed and shared on the personal platforms, and enterprise apps have no way of accessing this.