As pictured here, the IT-software landscape is organized around two major axes which are of vital importance for enterprises:
- their resources: human resources, production, logistics and so on
- their market: customers, channels, sales, segmentation, pricing, etc.
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On that landscape you find countless IT-software products of relative importance (represented by numerous spheres of various sizes), which can be grouped along two broad categories:
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- the ERP-type software dealing with enterprises’ resources axes and
- the BI/CRM/SRM-type software dealing with their market axis;
these are the Business Intelligence (BI) software, the Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship
Management (SRM) software.
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These IT-software typically improves business performance along two major axes:
- the enterprise effectiveness axes: doing the right things in terms of
resources and market management.
- the enterprise efficiency axes: doing things right (i.e. speed, cost,
error rate, etc.) in terms of resources and market management
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The first axis is also referred to as the ‘strategic effectiveness axes’ because it is about the ‘what the enterprise should do’ which is, essentially, a strategic dimension; the second axis is referred to as the ‘operational efficiency axes’ because it is about the ‘how the enterprise should do’ which is, essentially, an operational dimension.
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Some of the software products found in the landscape are designed to improve operational efficiency (e.g. production-related software) while other are designed to improve strategic effectiveness (e.g. market segmentation software). Overall, enterprises strive to be ‘efficiently effective’ and they adopt a mix of these software products to excel both at operational efficiency and strategic effectiveness: they strive to do efficiently the right things.
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But there are two serious limitations with these enterprise software products:
- they are specialized software products which are most often used in isolation or in silo-mode, and
- they are necessary but definitively not sufficient software products
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