IntelligentApplications: Read All About It!IntelligentApplications: Read All About It!

The application's the thing, as a 21st Century Shakespeare might say, wherein you hope to catch the dreams, objectives, and collective behavior of your organization. In response to business leaders' hopes for greater efficiency and effectiveness in performing internal processes or reaching out externally to customers and partners, strategic business applications are now found in many places in a typical organization. They go by a variety of names: customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management and optimization, business process management, and so on: in other words, hardly just "enterprise resource planning," or ERP. In fact, ERP providers have themselves broadened out their portfolios of packaged applications so much so that you rarely hear the term "ERP" anymore.

And so, we are changing the name of this Intelligent Enterprise Web Community away from the ERP acronym and toward the more inclusive — and really more important — term, "applications." Here you will find new stories, features, links, and discussion that we gather together to help you move forward with your enterprise applications strategy. Our goal is to make this Web Community a vital, independent resource that taps not only into Intelligent Enterprise content, but also that of our sister publications at CMP Media LLC, and beyond.

The biggest stories in the world of applications will be our focus here. They include the adoption of Web services and service-oriented architecture as the paradigm shift in software development continues to move the industry away from discrete "silo" applications and toward the building-block, component ideal. Business process management is also having a major impact on the future development of applications. Finally, event-driven approaches, such as business activity monitoring (BAM) will forge a closer link — perhaps a "closed loop" — between analytics and business intelligence, on one hand, and processes and applications on the other.

Advances in these areas are critical to reaching what we see as the ultimate goal: the establishment of an "intelligent" enterprise. For a while, many feared that the onrush of packaged applications and monolithic ERP systems would kill software development and squeeze innovation out of the sector. As it turns out, the death notices were premature. The field of applications — whether bought, built, or a little of both — is exciting, and changing fast.

We look forward to bringing information together about applications that you find useful. Please feel free to communicate with us about topics you'd like to see covered here, or other resources we should track down.

Best of luck in building your intelligent enterprise applications!

David Stodder
Editorial Director, IntelligentApplications.com
Editor-in-Chief, Intelligent Enterprise
[email protected]