It’s All About the Architecture!
There is an architecture for each epoch. In the 70s and 80s, there was limited computing power and no internet; EDI was used to transmit data point-to-point—one-to-one. Within the enterprise, departmental system modules were strung together like a vast spaghetti of custom-code libraries. Things moved pretty slowly. System maintenance was a bear!
Today, we are living in a world of complex relationships with billions of connected nodes: organizations, processes, people, places, and things. This is a world of many-to-many. Our customers and partners require always-on, instant response, and with that expectation of instant responsiveness, the lines have been blurred between planning and execution. As we share processes, information, and goals with our partners, we need a technology architecture that supports these complexities, this need for speed and the supply chain’s collaborative requirements. That architecture is a shared operating3 platform to enable supply chain partnerships.