InformationWeek

In today’s business environment, getting optimum performance from the supply chain while delivering maximum value to the customer will remain a critical task, and one that well-integrated enterprises can manage. But being able to respond to rapid changes in the environment – whether upstream or downstream – is emerging as an even more fundamental survival trait. Such business agility requires not only a smoothly integrated enterprise, but also the development of true collaboration with a multidimensional array of partners. The available building blocks of technological support for true collaboration are many. Businesses seeking to enhance their agility must select solutions that match their goals, which are readily interoperable with existing enterprise systems and partners’ systems. This InformationWeek Half-Day Forum will examine the critical issues IT executives need to consider when tasked to make their enterprises more responsive to change by engaging in true collaborative commerce.

Discussion topics include:

		See the forest and the trees: Developing a holistic view of applications across the enterprise and their inter-relationships.
		Have we done enough?: Identifying untapped or unformatted stores of information, knowledge or processes – including materials not normally included in databases – that can add value to collaborative efforts.
		Portals and dashboards are only the beginning: The importance of establishing a structure that gets the right information in the right format to the right user at the right time – inside or outside the enterprise.
		New rules or old?: Looking at the interoperability of business processes internally and with partners.
		Whom do you trust and why?: Assessing non-technological barriers to true collaboration and how technology can help to overcome them.