business
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TALKING
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OLD SYSTEMS
GET YOU STUCK,
WHILE MODERN
SYSTEMS GROW,
SHRINK AND
CHANGE AS YOU
NEED THEM TO.
customer profiles across all your business
channels? It’s because these concepts
actually require a high level of co-operation
across various business silos and their
systems. Traditional business systems don’t
work like that. They are inward facing and
orbit around a central pillar, usually finance.
Modern systems are outward facing,
because digital systems no longer stop at a
company’s door. You can really get closer to
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INTELLIGENTCIO
customers and they can get closer to you.
This includes internal users. Employees are
also customers to the system.”
expectations people develop from modern
workplaces.”
More agility to the small guys
Modern workforces want
modern systems
Upgrading to a modern business system
is not the same as the usual technology
improvement. If you get a new laptop, it’s
often still the same as what was replaced,
only more powerful. Those are incremental,
evolutionary changes. But modern systems
such as cloud-native ERPs are called
revolutionary for a reason, enough to generate
expectations among modern workers.
“People today are a lot more hands-on with
technology. They expect the technology to
work as they need it. We’re still in the infancy
of this movement, yet not far from actually
just talking to business applications. The way
people interact with systems is changing,
driven by many factors like low-code and AI.
Most of those advantages stem from
the multi-cloud world. Old systems can’t
integrate with that world, so that wipes 90%
of the advantages. They can’t match the
It is a misconception that the modernisation
message is directed only at big enterprises.
Though costs kept new business systems out
of reach to smaller companies, today paints
an entirely different picture. Systems can
be introduced at a small scale and funded
on monthly or per-user operating costs. For
example, a post-modern and cloud-native
ERP can easily be deployed in an SME, as
long as it has PCs, smartphones and an
Internet connection.
This gets me more excited than anything
else. A large part of my career has been
around core business systems and they have
always been big, expensive and difficult to
manage. This has been flipped. The cost
model has been flipped.
Old systems get you stuck, while modern
systems grow, shrink and change as you
need them to. Smaller companies can now
punch above their weight without spending
heavily on IT systems or skills. n
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