The Day After Digital Transformation
Last week I wrote a post here talking about the death of ERP. It had a great response – for my surprise - raising a passionate debate around the subject. Now I try to clarify a little bit, or confuse, the idea of “rethinking ERP”.
ETá* – A Digital Utopia
The first text, R.I.P. E.R.P., is a fragment of a personal project where I attempt to rethink not only IT systems, business structures/processes and concepts but enterprises and society. “ETá: A Digital Utopia” is divided in three parts: The Death of E.R.P. (published), The Digitised Enterprise and The Birth of Ethereal Enterprise (forthcoming).
Digital Transformation will kill ERP. The text is a chronicle of birth and death of ERP as we know. It is controversial but sets a historical ground for the decease of an Era.
The Digitised Enterprise
Gartner calls Postmodern ERP but there are other names, such as Hybrid or Digitised, for what is coming soon or has arrived already. At this point Digital Transformation takes on and enterprise systems use the four pillars of Digital Economy - cloud, network, data and mobile - as basic foundation. SAP with S/4 Hana and Hana Cloud Platform is the “has arrived already” bit and it will be the focus of this section in a future post.
The Birth of ERP - Ethereal Resource Planning
It is the most complex and abstract part. Assuming that systems and enterprises are alive, pulsing by Digital Transformation, the biggest challenges are: “what will happen next” and “where sharing economy is taking us”. It will be a moment when technological evolution will not exhaust possibilities but won’t be the mainspring of developments. Creating a vision for this stage requires a new and daring approach and the idea is for “Society as a Platform” – no pun with SaaP intended here! For this risky movement the suggestion is a “blockchained” system - remember Bitcoin? - and Ethereal Resource Planning - ERP again – is a tribute to Vitalik Buterin and his decentralised application platform called Ethereum. Then Social Contract as in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, will be rewritten and enterprises will be intangible, ethereal.
What is Blockchain by IBM here.
ETá
I know; it is deep. ETá - Digital Utopia - is a personal project but one day I would like to share it with a community – need suggestions for a platform (not “SaaP” for while) - and I call for collaboration and friendship. I have a big help from Dan Barton who let me free, after my deliverables, to think. If this is good thing. Be patient with me as I conclude, abstractly, with a poem by Manuel Bandeira:
They will demolish my house.
But my room will remain
Not as an imperfect form
In this world of appearances:
It will stay in eternity ,
With books, paintings,
Intact, suspended in the air!
* ETá means “a lot” or “many” in Tupi Guarani, indigenous language from Brazilian Amazon.
Africa's Digital Infrastructure Expert | Datacenters | Connectivity | Fiber Networks | Energy Solutions for the Mining, Heavy construction and Oil&Gas sectors.
8 年Hungarian keyboarder* has it coming: The next level of automation will deal with keyboard jobs: clerical work, sales, customer service, and support functions. *The Hungarian keyboarder is a shorthand I use for guys who 'pilot' a PC using ERP. It was a real guy or girl who took three months and never refunded my airline TKT during a gig I did ar Nokia in the UAE. (Nokia finance clearing house was in Hungary). He kept asking for the IBAN number, I kept replying my account was in Singapore and IBAN was only for the EU. He or she kept losing the documents. Until my agent decided to refund as I started getting a bit angry...
"Be As You Are !"
8 年1. I like your writing style Gilson Teixeira, thanks for sharing 2. I like that you take your time to think, congrats to Dan for supporting you. Regarding freedom, I think that "The Truth will set you Free!" and that you are always free to choose how to "spend" your time ; it's the only thing you have in fact... 3. I like the poem, I wish your room to be full of love and I wish you to consciously connect to the wisdom of indigenous people All the best
SAP Technical Architect at Self-Employed
8 年Another insightful post Gilson. The lead data scientist at Data61 CSIRO here in Australia gave a keynote at the Innovation Awards in Brisbane on Tuesday. Our national government has charged them with researching blockchains and the role they will play in the digital transformation process. In general I think we all need to "take the blinkers off" so to speak and re-imagine how business will be done not just in 10 years time but also in as little as 2 years time.
Future SAP & AI Advisory | SAP Separation M&A Architect | Finance Domain Business Transformation Expert | SAP Programme Director & Trouble Shooter | Data Alchemist | TOGAF Ent Arch - CTO | SAP Investor Analyst | XTed
8 年One of the best digital blogs I have ever read (not including my own)