Organizing and explaining the essentials of Enterprise Transformation in a nutshell, clearly and practical, appeared to be a challenge beyond our imagination. “The desire to write grows with writing” (Erasmus) and to avoid us from wondering off the path, we first structured all of our thoughts on Enterprise Transformation in the ArchitectedERP overview book. It has a special focus though. A leading theme in the book is the integral application of the Services Thinking concept in the Business and IT domain, specifically ERP-centric ones. This book will give you a means to purposefully deal with the dynamics that characterize this era of continuous transformation we are living in, pragmatically linked to IT environments where ERP solutions play a role.
To partition Enterprise Transformation into more digestible portions, we have boiled everything down into three stages. Each stage knows its own set of well-defined and well-delineated pieces of work, or template workpackages, which we dubbed engagement types. These are the main stages in ArchitectedERP:
Enterprise Transformation Planning and Portfolio Management
Solution Crafting
Solution Delivery and Transition
We use the expression Enterprise Transformation to reflect the wall-to-wall change process involving the whole of people, business structures, processes and relationships, including their information aspects, the information systems and applications that support these, including data and analytical aspects, the generic information technology components that make possible the designing, building, integration and deployment of these information systems and applications, all IT infrastructural facilities, plus all of the governance mechanisms and controls related to the aforementioned areas.
This may strike you as a quite knotty way of putting it but when you get more familiar to ArchitectedERP you will see that all of these topics indeed have their place. ArchitectedERP thus basically is an wall-to-wall multi-disciplinary approach to Enterprise Transformation, helping you to navigate from strategic intent to delivered change in daily operations. It has a special eye out for the application of the services thinking concept in the business and IT domain, specifically SAP-centric ones.
Mendel Koerts and Lucas Osse, Utrecht, January 2009
