Best Practices Make Perfect: Managing Information in the BfE^™

The Boundary-free Enterprise^™ (BfE) enables delivery and use of information within business processes on demand, anyplace, anytime – but not without significant challenges to managing information for use in business decisions. Each of these seven important BfE trends (see Figure 1) presents a significant challenge with a requirement for managing information at its core.

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

An emerging and disruptive master architecture – combining Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics plus Integration to on-premises Data Assets – is now forming to enable the Boundary-free Enterprise™ that Saugatuck foresaw in 2008. The Boundary-free Enterprise will not be constrained by organizational boundaries and firewalls, but can enable a new model of work and facilitate new business relationships that are not bound by time or place. Nevertheless, there are new risks and challenges that must be managed for its rewards to be fully realized.

Table 1 - Convergence in the Cloud: 21st Century Organizations, Boundary Free and Global

What is Happening?  Asian-based IT provider Proview recently won an injunction against Apple in a Chinese court over ownership of the iPad trademark. This resulted in some retailers pulling iPads from the shelves, as litigation goes into high gear. As of 23Feb2012, another Chinese court has overturned that injunction; appeals are being filed as this is written.

The case is convoluted, and involves an appeal from Apple, an Apple win in Hong Kong, a countersuit for defamation, and involvement of Proview subsidiaries in the PRC, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan. The details are not important here.