Kuglin / Thielmann The Practical Real-Time Enterprise

Facts and Perspectives
2005
ISBN: 978-3-540-27367-7
Verlag: Springer
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 560 Seiten, eBook

Speed as a factor for success Our modern industrial society lives life in the fast lane. The catchwords “faster”, “shorter”, “more powerful” reflect what we experience in almost all aspects of our lives. Whether at home or at work, we are constantly on the move and in a rush. In our private lives we find rapid exchange of inf- mation most entertaining and we are fascinated by the wide range of inf- mation that pours in on us from all around the world, mainly via the new media. It gives us the feeling of being a part of the action everywhere and all the time. Seldom are we aware that the only reason this flood of inf- mation, often referred to as “overstimulation”, does not lead to overkill is that we manage to organize our time effectively. There are many parallels to this in the business world. Here too, a great deal of time pressure is exerted from outside; goals are set ever higher and deadlines become tighter. In other words, demands on our time demand faster reaction. Crucial information travels around the globe – across all time zones – in a matter of seconds. In fact, instead of CET or CEST, it would make sense to have a single time zone for the worldwide network called GST for Global Simultaneous Time. In business more so than in p- vate life, we are almost constantly online.

Zielgruppe

Professional/practitioner

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kuglin, Bernd

Thielmann, Heinz

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Business processes in modern companies.- Inter-company business processes and e-collaboration.- Business process management in real-time companies.- Real value in real time.- Competitive response: a new lens for evaluating company performance.- The Real-Time Enterprise Facts, practices and prospects.- Typical examples from industries.- Building the Real-Time Enterprise at DaimlerChrysler.- Real-time-oriented service architectures in the airline sector.- The Extended Enterprise — Economic integration in real-time.- Strategic perspectives for the hotel industry.- Technological networking.- Technical networking.- Designing more productive business processes with convergent networks.- QoS Architectures and Resource Management in the Intranet.- Technical process support.- Business process evolution in real-time.- I&C Technologies for a Real-Time Enterprise (RTE).- Enterprise security.- Secure mobile business solutions for real-time enterprises.- Identity & Access Management Faster ROI and improved security through efficient assignment of rights and access control.- Real-time business requires security, trust and availability.- Outsourcing.- Intelligent IT sourcing in the financial industry: background, preconditions and requirements of future IT organization design.- Outsourcing as a strategic management decision.- Less costs, more functionality.- Challenges facing qualification and management.- Visual management.- From CIO to Chief Process Officer.- How to be switched on — without being switched off.- The steps in evolving into an “E-Enterprise”.- The RTE: it starts with early warnings.- Towards the E-Enterprise: standards, networks and co-operation strategies.- The evolution to real-time architecture.- Distributed mini-factory networks as a form of real-time enterprise: concept, flexibility potential and case studies.- Organic IT: cut IT costs, speed up business.- Living and working in a global network.- Delivering the promise. Making it pervasive.- The visions.- Knowledge-based companies — objectives and requirements.- Living and working in a networked world: ten trends.- Swarm organization — a new paradigm for the E-enterprise of the future.- Young professionals look to the communication of tomorrow.- Information and communication in 20XX.

Leseproben

Shai Agassi (p. 193-194)

Business process evolution in real-time

New technology has always been both a driver of change and a primary tool for coping with change. In the current market place, every company is awash in computing power, network connectivity, and functionality provided by richly complex applications.

To win companies must create a recipe – a secret sauce – that combines their understanding of customer needs and ability to meet them with all the power that technology offers. The central problem facing most companies is that these days even when they find it, the sauce doesn’t stay secret for long. Technological product innovation, giving half a decade advantage to companies 20 year ago, now spread through the eco-system in less than 3 months. The only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to adapt to change.

The concept of the real-time enterprise has emerged as the general shape of the solution. Yet the real-time enterprise requires continuous changes and ultimate flexibility in reconfiguring business processes to fit ever changing market conditions. As such, the Evolving Enterprise is a vision of the corporation as an organism that constantly assimilates new processes and adapts to them. In doing so, the organism changes itself to better respond to current conditions or to create a advantage changing the eco-system for other organism fighting for success.

To become an Evolving Enterprise companies must organize themselves, their technology foundation and their process landscape in a new way. They need to match a shortened change management cycle required by a rapidly evolving strategy with flexibility at the IT landscape that allows them to recompose their processes almost on the fly. All this needs to be done while at the same time reducing costs. At SAP®, we feel the key to this transformation is to put business processes front and center, and to build an entire infrastructure focused on lower the costs and increasing the speed of evolution in response to market forces.

Switching to the future

Consider the crossroads at which AT&,T arrived 60 years ago regarding its handling of long-distance telephone calls. At the time, most such calls were completed manually, by banks and banks of operators working in front of large plug boards. As AT&,T’s managers and technologists looked into the future, they saw that the volume of calls the company handled was about to explode. By increasing the capacity of trunk lines, technology had helped make long-distance calls much less expensive, more useful, and more attractive, which meant that usage of long-distance calling was bound to grow exponentially. But AT&,T quickly realized that to handle this growth using its old methods, it would eventually need to hire the entire population of the United States to work as telephone operators. To avoid that, the telephone company came up with a new breed of automated switch and a dialing scheme based on 3-digit area codes that together enabled subscribers themselves to dial and complete their own calls. Today, every CEO and CIO can see that something similar is happening in their own companies, but at a much more dramatic pace and involving much greater risk.