The company’s clients face some difficult challenges in their efforts to expand their business capabilities, including those enabled by information technology. As they completed multiyear, cross divisional initiatives such as ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) implementations, both technology and business management professionals realized that it had become increasingly difficult to envision a rational systems- and process-integration approach. While each of the leading vendors in these spaces touts the ease of integration their solutions affords, integration has actually grown more vexing as the sheer number of “enterprise” systems has increased. Today, one of the largest obstacles to enterprise technology initiatives is that they are inconsistently defined, not only by the technology providers, but also by the enterprises themselves. Clients face a number of challenges in this increasingly critical and increasingly complex IT environment.
Among other things, they need: