Agility by Design – an Oracle E-Business Suite Blog and Technical Tips 

The implementation of enterprise systems brings with it great promise of better information, consistent systems, and reduced operational costs. Achieving that promise, however, is an immense challenge. Building a cohesive enterprise software environment is extremely complex. Most large companies have hundreds of applications to run their business. Many of the systems automate similar business processes and utilize the same data. One of my customers is selling one of their product lines. They have approximately 1700 systems in place. Even if they had an up-to-date inventory of those systems, it is almost impossible to separate the data that is used for the product line that they are selling. They don’t know where the information is, and even if they did, all of that data is in different formats. For all practical purposes, that data housed in 1700 systems is lost to the organization and the value is unrecoverable because of the expense and effort involved in trying to retrieve it. Organizations continuously need to adapt their enterprise systems to keep pace with business change. However, enterprise systems, once deployed, become very rigid, and even small changes are slow and costly to implement. Designing systems to allow for continuous business process improvement, the flexibility to change, and yet provide complete, correct, and consistent information is very challenging and has become the ideal in many organizations. In order to achieve the promise of better systems, agility must be built into the original design. This is the first in a series of articles that discusses how to design, build, implement, and deploy systems that are agile when built and remain so over time.  >>MORE