The Intelligent Enterprise in the Era of Big Data

PREFACE

Two centuries ago, Adam Smith laid down architectural principles that govern how enterprises organize themselves and function. In this book, we present an entirely new way to think about how enterprises should organize and function in the digital age. We present the enterprise architecture for the future: an architecture that recognizes the power of the emerging technology environment, enables enterprises to respond rapidly to market needs and innovation, and anticipates such needs by sensing important developments in internal and external environments in real time.

Enterprises continually strive toward becoming efficient and competitive through various means. Prompted by the TQM and radical re-engineering movements of the 1980s and 1990s, many enterprises have attempted to embrace process orientation as the key to efficiency and competitive differentiation. However, most have had only limited success in becoming process efficient. This may be largely because in today's dynamic business environment, the static and unresponsive nature of most technology paradigms has stifled any significant progress. In recent years the flood of digital information, called big data, has compounded this challenge and opened yet another front for businesses to factor into their strategies.

Most enterprises are severely constrained by their inability to change their processes in response to market needs. Despite all the attention toward business process management and process orientation, ...