From my experience, Enterprise Systems have long been attempting to “boil the ocean”. The lure of revenue often blinkers their understanding of the purpose they were originally built for.

While good at optimising an organisation’s internal standard processes, Enterprise Systems often venture outside of their functional comfort zone. With massive customisation, expensive support and increasingly expensive licences, they hammer themselves into areas they were not designed to automate.

And now, the proverbial chickens are starting to come home to roost, with research showing that these systems have failed to provide the value they originally promised and, in many instances, have failed to provide any value at all.

At DocFusion we believe these systems should “stay in their own lane” and focus on their strengths. In the same way one would never expect an Olympic runner to take up pole vaulting, these enterprise systems should not attempt to cover areas for which they were never designed.

Five years ago, 80% of an organisation’s technology spend would have been with less than 10 vendors. Today that number is more likely 200. The cycle of custom systems, to closed systems, to open systems, to commercial off-the-shelf systems – and back to custom systems – has taught us some lessons. It is now very clear that no individual system is a business panacea, nor is custom development (even if it is agile) the answer.

In our mind, in the world of “hybrids” (cars, offices, etc) IT needs to evolve as well. The adage of “horses for courses” has relevance in the digital world. The word “hybrid” in IT should refer to the ability to choose the best fit-for-purpose applications with seamless integration capability. Low code platforms should complement build-outs for business-specific and non-standard processes. These “hybrid”, “best of breed” solutions have long been spoken about, but their limited open integration capabilities made them inefficient. In the IT world of today, these problems have been solved.