| Functional
incrementalism is the concept of being able to add application
functionality in manageable increments. This concept is counter
to the ERP systems of the last decade where huge chunks of functionality
were tied together in a tightly coupled fashion. This tight-coupling
was promoted as a ‘feature’ by the ERP vendors. Unfortunately,
a significant number of large ERP installations were a disaster
due to the significant amount of time and energy required to install,
configure and integrate.
Functional Incrementalism suggests that an initial
investment must be made to lay down a base infrastructure (the
Service Network). After the foundation is laid, new business
applications may be incrementally deployed. Although an initial
investment is required, the application investments become incremental,
enabling an organization to more effectively manage new systems
deployment.
|
It is believed that
ERP vendors will be refitting their applications to work on a
services network (due to customer demand). This will enable a
customer to selectively choose best-of-breed business modules
from a variety of package application vendors. Thus, package applications
will conform to business dialects,
expose predefined interfaces
and be process orchestration
aware.
|
