From a posting in response to Discussing the future of IT, if it has one: I think Enterprise software will eventually be off-the-shelf. The reason we don't have it now is because companies will not change their processes to match how the software thinks they should run things. It's naive to expect that companies would change. On the other hand, have you ever helped an intelligent entrepreneur with Quickbook From a posting in response to Discussing the future of IT, if it has one:I think Enterprise software will eventually be off-the-shelf. The reason we don’t have it now is because companies will not change their processes to match how the software thinks they should run things.It’s naive to expect that companies would change. On the other hand, have you ever helped an intelligent entrepreneur with Quickbooks? Often they have no idea where to start when it comes to finance part of their small business, and they just do whatever the software tells them to do. As soon as somebody starts marketing small business software with add-on modules and an upgrade path to ERP, they will be the operations standard for companies of the future. When the businesses realize they are not just buying software, but also best practices as they grow, they will have a competitive advantage over today’s businesses.Bob’s last word:SMBs (Small and Medium Size Businesses, not Server Message Block protocols) aren’t simply Fortune 1000 companies that were accidentally washed in hot water. Nearly everything about running a small, entrepreneurial company is different from running a large, publicly held one. To take your example: A small company can be happy with QuickBooks because the accounting system is only used for bookkeeping. QuickBooks won’t satisfy a large enterprise for reasons that go well beyond scalability. Large enterprises rely on their accounting systems to help executives understand how the company is performing. Rightly or wrongly, most entrepreneurs understand how their businesses are doing through first-hand experience and the bank balance, coupled, perhaps, with a cash-flow analysis. Inspection of key ratios, Return on Assets and so on just aren’t part of the picture we need.Nor is there such thing as a best practice, even among large enterprises. Take what might seem to be a pure commodity process – accounts payable – and compare two corporate giants, EDS and Wal-Mart. EDS has a much lower volume, nor does it (for the most part) buy items for re-sale. Wal-Mart has a colossal transaction volume, most of which goes to vendors of products it places in its stores.Does anyone seriously think EDS could adopt Wal-Mart’s accounts payable process, which by anyone’s standards must constitute industry best practice? Which is to say, there is no such thing as a best practice, only (as has been said many times in this space) practices that best fit each situation. That means the likelihood that anyone will build shrink-wrapped ERP with built-in best-practice business processes everyone should adapt to … well, I think it’s pretty unlikely.What is possible … just barely, but it is possible … is that a variety of business processes, each explicitly optimized for a different, well-defined business context, might arise. That would make life interesting, I’d think.– Bob ——– Technology Industry