Best Practices Make Perfect: Managing Information in the BfE^™

The Boundary-free Enterprise^™ (BfE) enables delivery and use of information within business processes on demand, anyplace, anytime – but not without significant challenges to managing information for use in business decisions. Each of these seven important BfE trends (see Figure 1) presents a significant challenge with a requirement for managing information at its core.

What is Happening?  As many of our readers know, for the past seven (plus) years, Saugatuck has been researching ISV and Master Brand transitions into the Cloud with SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings. Our earliest research was based on dozens of interviews with pure-plays and on-premises providers, and we have continued to reach out over the years to identify the most significant challenges that transitioning vendors face and the best practices they use to ensure success in the markets they are pursuing.

With Cloud adoption poised to accelerate even faster this year, Saugatuck has initiated a focused research program in 2013 to refresh and expand this research, reflecting the evolved set of issues and challenges brought about by the shift to the Boundary-free Enterprise™. This applies equally to pure-play Cloud ISVs entering the market as well as traditional ISVs evolving their offering portfolios with new Cloud solutions. However, our research also will focus on two additional groups – business and services providers developing repeatable cloud-based solutions, as well as name-brand (non-IT) businesses that are bringing new products / services to market that leverage the Cloud (and associated mobile, social and analytic technologies). One of many great examples in this regard is a case study of Rossignol, as they rethink customer engagement and value.

Saugatuck has gone on record that the phenomenon of Cloud IT is forcing vast changes in the responsibilities and roles of the traditional enterprise IT organization. In published research for our CRS clients this week, we took a look at how these changes affect enterprise IT from an applications development point of view. Figure 1 summarizes the key characteristics of Cloud IT that impact enterprise AppDev, as follows:

Figure 1: Summary Changes – Cloud IT and Enterprise Application Development

Source: Saugatuck Technology Inc.

What is Happening? As we ramp into the New Year, it is clear that 2013 will be a watershed transition year from a business growth perspective. Many experts believe that the global economy is poised for a rebound – led by continued strong growth in the developing economies, and bolstered by a healing US economy (especially in the second half of 2013). What this means for the IT economy is an environment of growing capital investment spending – which will fuel continued investment to both lower costs and to innovate for the future.

Why is it Happening? On the surface, the economy still seems stuck in a rut. A recent survey by the Business Roundtable (BRT) – an association of leading US CEOs (whose companies represent more than $7.3 Trillion in revenue and 16 million employees) – indicates continuing weak sales and capital spending in the US over the next six months, with only a slight rise in new employment. As Figure 1 highlights, the continued softness in the BRT’s quarterly CEO Economic Outlook Index “reflects deep uncertainty about the future overall climate, realities of a slow-growth economy and frustration over Washington’s inability to revolve looming ‘fiscal cliff’ issues,” according to Jim McNerney, Chairman of the Business Roundtable, and Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company. An index reading above 50 suggests a growing economy.

Successful business decision-making has always been about having the right information available at the right time. Saugatuck’s model of the emergent, new master architecture for IT and business –The Boundary-free Enterprise™, or BfE– shows how the rapid evolution, adoption, and innovative use of several key technology types changes the way that game can be played, by introducing new options and requires new responsibilities, to deliver information on demand, anyplace anytime.

We’ve just published a Strategic Perspective that examines seven critical trends and challenges in realizing business value from this new “master architecture,” and discusses the related implications for data management. Figure 1 presents each trend with its matching challenge to enterprise business success.