New Series: The Intelligent Enterprise

by Cronin Almeida and Maryanne Steidinger

Intelligent Enterprise – The way ahead for an Integrated Enterprise. This is a series of blog posts that delves into the various aspects that constitute an Intelligent Enterprise.   

Wikipedia defines the "Intelligent Enterprise" as a management approach that applies technology and new service paradigms to the challenge of improving business performance. An Intelligent Enterprise has to adapt, adopt, and respond to changing market conditions, new economic environments, supply chain variations and customer demands. All of this has to be done in a flexible environment for operations to optimally run.

An efficient showcase of an Intelligent Enterprise is the collaboration that combines the various levels across departments and geographies to create a comprehensive repository of best operating practices and methodologies that can reflect the immediate needs of the organization and its clients.

James Brian Quinn, in his book “The Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service Based Paradigm for Industry” quotes:

“At their core, most successful enterprises today can be considered Intelligent Enterprises, converting intellectual resources into a chain of service outputs and integrating these into a form most useful for certain customers. Clearly enterprises providing law, accounting, financial, architectural, applied research, health care, education, consulting, design and most forms of entertainment services primarily sell the skills and intellect of key professionals. But in manufacturing as well, most of the processes that add value to materials derive from knowledge based service activities.”  

So that's our premise as well.  In the coming weeks, we will be talking more about the Intelligent Enterprise. We will touch on the needs, market demands, and components of an Intelligent Enterprise, and its value to an organization.  Stay tuned!