Enteprise Systems

A software product designed to integrate computer systems that run all phases of an enterprise's operations to facilitate cooperation and coordination of work across the enterprise. The intent is to integrate core business processes (such as sales, accounting, finance, human resources, inventory and manufacturing). The ideal enterprise system could control all major business processes in real time via a single software architecture. Enterprise software is expanding its scope to link the enterprise with suppliers, business partners and customer

The sort of major impact that I mean here is generally measured in dollars. It's the sort of major impact that has to be discussed at a board meeting and the sort of major impact that causes notes to appear in the company's annual accounts.

By fail I don't mean a system that goes down for a few hours, although that sort of downtime could of course cause a wider business failure. By fail what I really mean is a systematic failure of the system to manage to perform the task that it needs to do. This in term causes the business to suffer an operational failure which often means the business itself fails.The big news, which really is no news, is that enterprise systems, as much as any other kinds of system are about the users and the business context. They aren't about clever technology, clever programmers or clever anything else.

They are all about a ruthless focus on the business goals and helping the users of the system achieve those goals. The moment that a project team loses sight of that the game is over.