Business Mantras for Success in Future....

Question

The recent focus on Service Oriented Architecture is not just something that SAP has been promoting to enhance the Enterprise Software business, but the acceptance that it's been finding shows that it indeed is a well thought of and researched initiatives. As businesses are growing, organically or inorganically, what keep the efficiencies on is the seamless flow of information. This information as of now, due to the mere size of enterprise software, makes its flow rigid and more focused on what can be achieved through them, rather than what the businesses really would like to have.
Size does really still matter, but so does agility and flexibility, coupled with adaptability. ESA does allow companies and business process owners to think of innovative way to reach the end customer and identify as well as deliver exactly what they may want. This enable the concept of "core competency" to be implemented uniquely to each business as they wish to, rather than just being a "me too" of a benchmark firm. After all, each business, like people, has some uniqueness to it, which it would like to leverage. This could be in terms of the Branding, Go to market strategy, Low cost or service provider image.
These changes of course make change management more important. Not just in terms of the competency required by the Business Process Experts involved in further implementation, also the right education to the clientele in terms of the possibilities existing and the business impact of the same.

Answer 1

Sridhar,
what you say is true , what ESA offers is the flexibility to change your IT to suit your business rather than the other way round. Any aquisition or growth also comes with the baggage of integrating / scaling existing systems and/or integrating a multitude of IT systems to function together , this is exactly what ESA tries to hit at.
Some examples of web based architectures / on demand slutions could be found at salesforce.coms web enabled platform for CRM ( Sorry SAP for the reference to a competitior!!!) or the transaction based pricing models adoptted by many..
But then it is not a quick fix for all that today-I-am-in a-traditional-discrete-systems-spread-across-the-world-managing with-excel-sheets to totally-web-enabled / ESA enabled bleeding edge platform tomorrow. It would need a lot of vision and tenacity to go through the change and the capacity to push it through the organization.
I think it would be initially competitor / business leader  driven .. Company X has done this , can we do the same ?.. and unless this vision *** tenacity is available or appropriate leaders found , it would still be piecemeal and result in certain functions being ESA compliant and other business still falling back on the old excel sheets ..
My 0.02
Arun
P.S The above may be a pessimistic way of looking at change management and ESA and BPX but then in many old economy companies , they still choose to build their own applications internally or outsourced rather than implement a package and try and align themselves to industry standards...