Downton Abbey is one of the most famous TV series around the world. It depicts life in England at the turn of the twentieth century, the separation and commonalities between the family and their staff, and how social, economic and technological changes were transforming them.
Lady Grantham, played by the great Maggie Smith, is the wittiest character. In an extraordinary dialogue, someone is talking about the different activities that happen on weekdays and weekends and, with her unique style, she turns her head and asks: “Weekends? What do you mean by weekends?”
For her, weekends do not exist.
For most of us, weekdays and weekends are required to differentiate between the time we focus on doing our job and the time we need to enjoy our lives. Like this, there are many constructs that we humans have built to organise and simplify our lives; however, there are some that make our lives much more complicated.
In the latter, you can find software modules. The cost of storage and processing when corporations began using computers to cope with their growing complexity made it logical to develop and interconnect modules. The problem is that many people haven’t challenged this belief.
Many ERP implementations interconnect 20, 40, 60, and more modules trying to bring the so-called best-of-breed solutions for each isolated function. This modular approach creates more problems than the ones they try to solve.
To begin with, data is not consistent simultaneously in all modules, creating differences and discrepancies between most of them and making it impossible to obtain real-time information that reflects reality.
Transaction queues, or micro-services, make coordination between organisational functions a nightmare; most people suffer the Excel-ence disease, abusing spreadsheets to keep a reasonably decent version of the information required to do their jobs.
Hundreds of thousands of lines of code written to “make the software fulfil the organisations’ [current] needs” create inadequate static moulds that lead to slow and expensive development and inhibit innovation.
As Tonie Var Der Horst, Leadership Partner Enterprise Applications EMEA at Gartner, writes in his blog article “ERP is Dead”, “Enterprise Software components need to be as big as necessary, as small as possible”.
So, let’s think systems and change the point of view, or in Peter Checkland’s words, the “weltanschauung”.
Organisational life is constructed over business processes, and Enterprise Software should support them from beginning to end. Organisations need a best-of-breed beginning-to-end business process system that allows companies to run their operations while building integral and reliable information in real time.
To help medium and large companies to run their business, not the software, we have created LOVIS EOS, the first zero-code Enterprise Operating System Platform on the Cloud that fully adapts to each company’s needs, runs integrated beginning-to-end business processes, builds transactional information that reflects reality in real-time, closes every day, month, and year with zero downtime, automatically derives accounting records, provides Financial Statements in any standard every morning, and is implemented in six months or less with no-disruption at go-live.
The next time you are struggling with convoluted processes that make no sense, see your team suffering the pain of the Excel-ence disease or have to decide on data you cannot trust, ask yourself and your team the key question: modules? What do you mean by modules?
Rafael Funes