Article first published as Applications2Apps and Enterprise Ecosystems on Technorati.
Twenty years ago I remember standing in long queues at 5:30AM in the morning, with an application form in hand at the railway station waiting for the mainframe to churn out ticket availability. The Indian Railways is the fourth largest in the world and transports 30 million passengers every day. The system changed the way ticketing was done from manual registers to centralized ticketing. So I could choose the train service across different lines and not be restricted to services offered by one booking station. There were two major breakthroughs the ticketing system achieved; it aggregated localized service and automated enterprise processes.
Internet Self Service Channels
As the internet delivery channels matured, automation moved from enterprise processes to client processes and I no longer had to fill paper forms or stand in queues, I could login to a self service portal and get the job done. So CRIS (Center for Railway Information Systems) maintained a powerful ticketing backbone capable of processing millions of transactions and started building out services which was directly exposed to end customers.
Agile Platforms
This is a journey most enterprises have had to go through. In the last few years enterprises have started investing heavily into analytics to understand consumer behavior. The data gathered is used to structure products and services alike and this in turn resulted in the need for agile technology platforms as consumer behavior did not operate in a set path. A dynamic business environment where life runs on quarterly cycles cannot afford anyone the luxury of working on a set annual plan. Therefore IT is forced to transform their platforms to become nimble, responsive to change and support a quarterly release cycles.
Enterprise Ecosystems
With the introduction of tablets, smart phones and cloud computing Google and Apple have stopped building packaged applications and instead provide a massive ecosystem. They provide an ecosystem that empowers the world to build their own apps and in doing so they have changed the game. Rapid strides made in the world of telecommunication and technology has made consumer appetite and possibilities endless. So why bind the consumers to the boundaries of one enterprise’s vision? We have unwittingly stepped into the age of Enterprise Ecosystems.
The second transformation is applications are decomposed into small light weight apps enabling Micro Services and Multichannel Services offering. So in the dark ages of the mainframe computers you had monolithic applications running on massive servers the size of an average cafeteria. In the 90s you had to install a large desktop application from a CD-ROM. Today you download and install apps the size of a floppy disk. If the only banking service you use is the ATM, just download the ATM locator app versus logging into a website and navigating 10 different menus. Further I want to be looking for a coffee shop and then find an ATM via the same maps application. So the services are focused, multi-channel and mapped to a specific need that needs instant gratification.
Virtusa an IT services company recently organized an event called the Hackathon, where developers were encouraged to build their most innovative mobile applications in 8hrs. Some of the apps that the developers came out in a day were mind blowing. Such was the resounding success, they further extended the concept to come up with their own internal innovation ecosystem, where developers in their free time can come up with their own apps. The expectation is that as the beta apps mature they will build micro service offerings for their clients based on employee innovation. In doing so they have recognized the power of mass innovation and empowered their employees with what might be the beginnings of a larger Enterprise Ecosystem.
Today’s employees are forced to live two lives on the one hand they use a powerful set of tools to communicate, share and solve complex problems in their personal lives, they walk into work only to be locked into ageing systems and inflexible processes. In my recent article Crowd in the Cloud, I wrote about how the consumers are taking control and collaborating amongst themselves to solve their problems, while enterprises are playing catch up. Innovation has always been random and decentralized and very difficult to tap into in a large enterprises. With the power of technology, enterprises need to create the necessary Ecosystems, empower their employees to create their own Micro Services, and keep pace with the frantic pace of technology change.
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