Way past Systems of Record and Engagement

InformationWeek has kindly run a column on the new book The Digital Enterprise. My basic premise is IT has become fun and profitable for most of the companies we interviewed for the book. The reason is they have moved past systems of record and even systems of engagement and are focused on systems of advantage.

Read the full column here.

During the edit, they dropped for reasons of length some other examples I had included in the column. They included:

• Celso Guitoko, Global CIO at Nissan Motor, described the “steering-by-wire” and electric vehicle innovations their technology investments are enabling.
• Echo Entertainment described how its casinos in Australia are exploring digital technologies such as RFID and facial recognition to provide better customer service.
• Magne Frantsen described the Statoil Management System the company uses to manage safety and promote operational excellence across its massive exploration assets in the oil and gas industry. Optimized for its North Sea operations, the system is evolving to support the fact that 70% of its production is expected in 2020 to come from vastly different sources such as shale fields in North America and CO2 injected gas fields in Algeria.
• Several executives talked about how customers increasingly expect personalization, so they'll have to embrace new marketing and production techniques around mass customization and agile shop floors to support it.

Of course, this is just a small sample of what the 350+ pages in the book describe. Other customers talk about complex event processing, agile robotics,  semantic product memories, wearable computers, 3D visualization and many other technologies they are leveraging in their industries.

Download a Kindle version for only US $ 3.99 or EU 3.99 and read about the systems of advantage these companies are creating .  And feel good doing so - Software AG is donating net proceeds to charity. Enjoy!