ABSTRACT

It is mind boggling to think how organizations like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, LinkedIn, and many others are reinventing the landscape and models of business. In the new economy, technology is enabling the warp-speed transformation of organizations into global, multilevel networks of transactional enterprises. Unlike manufacturing improvement, transactional improvement is transparent and comprised of key business processes, information ²ows, knowledge, and decisions. Further, there are literally hundreds of people managing thousands of dynamic process touch points, a continuous churn in changing requirements, speci¥c country needs, time constraints, communications issues, and exponentially greater opportunities for waste, variation, and bad decisions. This chapter is about two fronts of strategic improvement:

1. Getting the most out of existing technology and integrated enterprise architectures, and

2. Assimilating emerging technologies such as mobility, real-time enterprises, cloud computing, and other capabilities as a strategic weapon of global competitiveness.