InformationWeek

RP. ERP. SCM. SFA. CRM. EAI. God bless them and keep them safe and warm, but pretty soon I think they're all going to RIP. It's all just TMD (too much data) and NEI (not enough information) and CNEK (certainly not enough knowledge).

In this business, we sometimes have an astounding propensity to delude ourselves into believing that history doesn't apply to us. For many companies that suffered through ERP projects, the completion of that effort was marked by a celebration for having 1) survived and 2) reached the UEOBT (ultimate end-state of business technology). But then some wisenheimer suggested that these highly refined ERP systems should connect with suppliers and, voila, there came supply-chain management and SCM. And some people reasoned that surely this supply-chain stuff would be The Last Project Ever. And it was. For a few months. Until somebody thought it would be smart to automate the sales force and up popped SFA; many of us thought, well, surely that is the endgame because it ties your back office to the front and what the heck else is there in the world other than suppliers and our company? End of story, so let's wind down and start to dissolve the IT organization 'cause it's all been done and there's nothing left to do except keep the juices flowing.

It turns out, though, that SFA was nothing more than the end of either a very long sentence or a very brief chapter, but it certainly wasn't the end of the larger story because a new character called CRM exploded onto the scene. And again, as has been our wont, we all reckoned that the puzzle was solved. Oh, sure, toss in some E-commerce and some enterprise application integration and a SAN or two, sprinkle liberally with enterprise information portals, and garnish with E-business before drizzling with a reduction of XSP and the dish is done. Case closed. End of story. But not so fast.

It's rather like the estimable saying that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know: With business technology, the farther we progress, the farther we are from "completion" because, rather than sealing things off or winding things down, these series of progressions open up new possibilities, new opportunities, new customer options, new businesses, and new, more valuable streams of knowledge. Properly focused, properly led, and properly leveraged, each of these projects drives our companies away from "completion" and toward novel and uncharted fields that give us the chance to be what our customers want and need us to be rather than simply replicating what we have been. And that approach, that business philosophy, is unfolding today as collaborative business (no acronyms, please!).

I'm not proposing some mumbo-jumbo, artsy-fartsy fairy tale that has no beginning and no end and that relies on magic for anything to happen. To be sure, most of us will spend a lot of time this year hunkering down and striving to integrate and optimize all the stuff we bought over the past few years, and to make IT a strategic tool for hammering through this soft economy. But, in a vacuum, business technology cannot and will not achieve that, simply because the economics and business practices of the early 21st century won't tolerate isolationists: Those would be companies that live within their own four walls; that hoard information as a weapon with which to pound on suppliers, partners, and customers; that refuse to collaborate with partners and suppliers to understand more fully what customers want and need, and then deliver that to them; and that put internal insecurities and risk-aversion ahead of customer-centric innovation and risk-taking.

This is not a three-week fling for InformationWeek; not by a long shot. Collaborative business will be the dominant theme behind our editorial content for the next 12 months, in print, online, research, and events. Very shortly, we'll be doing a major cover story on what it is and what it means, its risks and rewards; we'll be rolling out exclusive primary research that reveals how companies are collaborating and what they like and loathe about it; and the theme of our Fall Conference, Sept. 9-12 in Tucson, Ariz., will be, simply, collaborative business. Help us shape this coverage and content so that it's most helpful and valuable to you by sending us your thoughts on the topic to the address below. And TYVM (thank you very much).

Bob Evans
Editor-in-Chief
bevans@cmp.com