[Slide 9] Every S Curve has one or two major themes associated with it. The last S curve started in the late 80s with the advent of a whole new way of working introduced first by the PC and then Networks. It drove a business model shift towards increasing flexibility, as well as a focus onto the real value processes that drive an enterprise. Business Process Re engineering, or BPR, took most of the 90s to come about, because technology to build a truly flexible process structure didn’t exist. Most of the results achieved have been based around improvements in internal productivity through task automation, self-service and sharing data. Today, business is much more complex, yet still able to perform to higher levels of efficiency through the continuing specialization of capabilities from these productivity themes. The new S curve is going to be about achieving similar efficiencies outside the enterprise. The focus will be on improving relationships with the overall market place around the familiar tasks of, selling, buying and managing, all of which are enterprise-centric, as well as new ways of working with others that are market centric; the emerging collaboration and federation models. The new S curve has to some extent started in many businesses, usually with supply chain acting as the first external process. Many of the difficulties that have been encountered in this, or in the building of B2B hubs are due to using the current, or old S curve, technology to solve the new needs. Part of the challenge in jumping from one S curve to the next results from hanging on to plans made during the fast adoption phase of a curve once the specialization and volume periods occur. Businesses are inevitably disappointed that targets aren’t reached – not realizing that they must jump to a new family of technologies to do so. Smart companies re-plan often and jump early so that this expectation gap is minimized.
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