What’s next? What’s new? What’s in the pipeline? These are questions customers often ask their software partners, and rightly so. What this means is that while execution matters, innovation is becoming an equally important topic for businesses of all sizes and the future of ERP.
Yet, business innovation is still largely decoupled from day-to-day operations, which tend to focus on existing services or execution of core products. This limits growth opportunities to deliver new value because managers tend to forgo innovation to focus on sure bets or the latest quarter sales cycle.
If growth is a core objective for modern business leaders, then finding new ways to tap into data should become a priority. This data must be interoperable and lead to more innovation, which needs to take place while businesses maintain day-to-day operational excellence. Fragmented data impedes data-driven innovation across applications, which is needed to become future-ready and self-diagnostic.
At the same time, drastically reducing manual entry by leveraging AI can fuel existing strategies with greater focus on innovation.
However, to engrain business innovation much more completely, the future ERP must not only be more autonomous for specific business processes. It must also be ambidextrous to focus on what comes next and to help humans focus on more strategic topics rather than mundane or even tedious ones.
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Organizational ambidexterity puts people at the center of work through the ability of a company to manage and innovate its business in parallel.
An ambidextrous person can use both the left and right hand equally well. Imagine how amazing it would be for an organization to be equally skillful – able to explore new business areas while honing the current ones.
Why would a business need this ambidexterity? Well, for starters, today’s customers are hyper-informed and their needs increasingly sophisticated. So, technology must do more to keep up with ever-changing consumer needs and wants.
Moreover, globalization has increased competition – despite current geo-political challenges – and technology cycles are getting shorter. Companies need to find new ways to run their business operations across many different applications, including those of partners, cloud providers, and a fragmented IT architecture.
A dual focus on operational execution and innovation is how we can help transform into intelligent, networked, and sustainable enterprises.
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Unfortunately, while advances have been seen in the marketplace, there is typically a separation of church and state – business execution and innovation – that impedes long-term strategy.
Also, most of the existing software tools available in the market within the category of innovation management cover extremely specific and often disconnected processes; typically, idea management. Furthermore, none of those software tools covers innovation management holistically by integrating all the different dimensions required to enable innovation.
This includes strategic and participative innovation along the business architecture, innovation processes and methodologies, employee engagement, and distributed open innovation networks, orchestration, and governance.
Another dimension is transformative change management for things like business shifts, customer preference changes, or supply chain disruptions, COVID-19, or natural disasters suddenly impacting businesses and the communities they operate in.
As a result, being nimble is no longer an option. For a modern business, this means preparing for what’s next just as much as keeping the lights on.
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To this end, we envision ambidextrous systems that support the ability to create new business value by simultaneously conducting exploit and explore activities – driving efficiencies while investigating growth opportunities.
We see these systems as establishing synergies between these activities to cover business applications of the future.
Imagine idea management, scenario planning and AI-assisted visioning coming to life in new ways, then served to users contextually and hyper-personalized through a system that knows the user and can deliver what they need, whenever they need it.
This system could unlock human potential by providing autonomous, operational-level decision making, continuous adjustments of strategic criteria for different business functions (think procurement strategy, manufacturing strategy, marketing strategy, etc.), and reflect strategic decisions autonomously into operations.
It includes capabilities like business model management, scenario planning, and opportunity management. We also envision that based on strategic criteria, the system detects myriad events across business networks, constantly illuminating risks and opportunities, and selectively raising alerts in hyper-personalized information flows.
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This ambidexterity can lead to not just high-level decision-making, but more complete decision-making. Therefore, autonomous and more ambidextrous ERP should also be seen as a possible competitive advantage for companies trying to become more future-ready.
So rather than think about ambidexterity as using your hands or feet equally or simultaneously, imagine using multiple business functionalities tools simultaneously.
Being ambidextrous can help businesses perform more effectively, respond faster to sudden changes, and be more resilient. We need this ambidexterity to help businesses be more relevant and agile while ensuring humans remain at the center of work.
