Many information technology ideas start out small and end up big. In just the last two decades or so, the concept of material requirements planning grew into ERP and then the notion of extended ERP as so-called integrated software suites combining supply chain, customer management, and other functions made its way into the market.
What one might call scope creep has also visited the realm of product design and development technology. Born in the land of CAD and product data management, the idea of PLM has come to encompass a broad view of a product's lifecycle, including its role in the concept of a demand-driven value chain.
In more recent years, the idea of business intelligence technology has similarly stretched itself into what some are now calling business performance management -- the notion that BI and associated technologies like report writers have a much broader role to play within a company as a whole. As Jim Davis, SAS Institute's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, described it at SAS's fourth annual manufacturing conference in April, BI should now be thought of as an Enterprise Technology Platform encompassing data integration, intelligent storage, and, of course, analytics.
Cynics may argue that the term "platform" is just an industry code word that suggests an attempt to sell more technology through clever packaging techniques. There may be some truth here, but the packaging also may reflect certain realities about IT and even offer users some benefits. In the case of BI, scope creep has clearly reared its head, but given the growing need of organizations to convert their exploding stores of data into actionable information, this may not be such a bad thing.
The reason that so many IT ideas start modestly but end up so expansive in their application is that the technologies can neither be confined nor fully leveraged unless certain things happen. By their nature, ideas such as ERP, PLM, and BI are pervasive. They cut across functional areas and silos and they affect many aspects of an organization's performance. And, of course, organizations always want to do more with them. The technology grows because it can. If this growth is unnaturally restrained, the technology, in a sense, withers, its use declines, and it ends up as shelfware.
But success or failure in capitalizing on this nature, as Dick Hunter, Dell's VP of customer experience, emphasized at the SAS conference, depends more on an organization's culture than anything else. Process change alone won't ensure the optimization of pervasive technologies.
What a company needs to do to truly take advantage of expansive technology ideas like enterprise performance management, PLM, or demand-driven supply networks is to develop a culture of business value creation through IT. This starts at the top, of course, with the leadership, but it takes all employees, in all functional areas, to bring it to life. The cultural imperative is the key to unleashing pervasive technologies. If your company can develop such a culture, the scope creep which has already visited so many technology ideas and which will surely influence more to come will be looked at as an opportunity rather than an attempt by vendors to sell more technologies in pretty packages.
What's your view of pervasive technologies? Write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.