"Everything flows, nothing stands still." - Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC).
The IT literature contains myriad uses of the word “enterprise.” Mostly it is used as a modifying adjective that qualifies a specific phrase or term, such as “enterprise service bus, enterprise system, or enterprise architect.” This practice seems to have its origins in Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.
ERP grew out of Manufacturing Resource Planning II in the early 90’s when software vendors such as Baan, Oracle, JD Edwards and SAP expanded MRP II solutions to include other functional areas of the enterprise such as engineering, finance, human resources, and project management.
By the end of the 90’s, ERP was being adopted with great enthusiasm as the right solution for Y2K problems. (See ERP and More for a nice summary).
Today we are inundated by enterprise “things.” We have enterprise application integration, enterprise architecture, enterprise information integration, enterprise meta-data, enterprise content management, etc. Why?
The first reason why enterprise has become such a familiar term is - economics. When it comes to IT, the private and public sectors have behaved like prospective brides at Filene’s basement sale. This increased reliance networks, computers, mobile devices and databases comes with a price tag, a very big price tag. In each of the last three fiscal years the Federal Government IT budget has topped $60,000,000,000, per year. (1)
Redundant, unconnected and incompatible information systems grew up like weeds in an untended garden. Remember “islands of automation?” This phenomenon was clearly understood in 1984 when the Department of Defense recognized that the military services each had logistics information systems that were not interoperable and could not exchange data, mostly because they were never designed to do so in the first place. Why not? Because they were bought by different people, with different funding, for different purposes, but with similar objectives. The notion that information might need to be moved to other organizations for valid reasons never found its way into the requirements because to do so might jeopardize programs and funding streams. There was no overarching enterprise perspective, and no clear need for enterprise-level efficiencies. Today we have a different perspective. Organizations such as US Central Command are working hard to reduce, eliminate, combine and consolidate systems. CENTCOM has has gone from over 2,000 distinct applications down to less than two hundred, and is not stopping there.
The second reason is that over the last couple of decades we have slowly come to recognize that information is an asset that has as much strategic value as investment in modern production facility or a long range, stealthy precision-strike platform. The problem is that we have stored it away in beautiful cylinders of excellence that can’t communicate across the enterprise, and we need that in order to be more agile and resilient in these fast-moving times.
(1) Fiscal Year 2008 Information Technology Budget, Updated May 24, 2007
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