What the Generational Shift means for Enterprise IT Enterprise IT is slowly but surely shifting away from traditional ERP systems to Analytics, Big Data and AI-powered applications that will automate and enrich business processes. The transition though will not be easy - to prepare for this radical shift in the Enterprise IT landscape, companies must consciously build up new skill sets. The ERP skillset in IT which has been the norm for the past 30+ years, is one of supporting transaction processes, interfaces, and rigid UI screens. Problem solving is linear in this mode. The skills gained in these jobs by IT personnel is less analytic and more transactional support oriented. To replace the transaction system and process mindset, ERP experts will need to undergo training and develop skills to build automation tools using AI concepts, analytic applications and statistical data mining methods. Not only this, IT personnel need to be trained in newer modes of problem solving
Recently I read a book about "Risk savvy decision making" by Greg Gigerenzer. The author talks about risk taking within organizations being driven by two types of cultures – "positive" and "negative" error cultures, with the negative error culture being less prone to risk taking. Relating this to the enterprise software world, most IT organizations that deal with enterprise software such as SAP, in my experience, tend to be highly risk averse and have a strong negative error culture. This negative error culture manifests itself in many ways within Enterprise IT organizations: They spend an enormous amount of time (in most cases, years) trying to implement and upgrade software. They have long bureaucratic processes with multiple layers of approvals for implementing any change. They think defensively when selecting service providers and software solutions, preferring unproven solutions from large vendors to best of breed solutions from smaller sp