Filling in the Gaps: Adding Engagement to Your Enterprise Software

Enterprise software arose to answer specific needs within corporations — from processing bills to tracking legal matters or managing content. In its inception, it helped enable the mastery of what would be considered simple tasks on an individual level, but were immensely complicated challenges when multiplied to the corporate level. Gradually, this software became more sophisticated, facilitating terabytes or petabytes of information. 

However, enterprise software is like steel plumbing — expensive to lay, difficult to manipulate or move and often more expensive to replace.

Due to the increasing complexity of the business needs these solutions handle, it is often extremely difficult to modify workflows, user preferences, reporting and more without intervention from IT and potentially more bills from the software provider.

Companies are looking towards a new model of systems of engagement, which encompass not only management of tasks or processes but also the communications and collaboration preferences of its users on a whole. These systems — enabled by technologies we know and understand such as email — serves customers, partners and employees equally, removing the barriers that prevent out-of-department stakeholders from taking part in vital processes that impact their goals and productivity. A system of engagement is focused on in-the-moment tasks and decisions, leverages social and cloud technologies and includes short, rapid, iterative release cycles.

Rather than trying to compete with existing enterprise software installations, these systems of engagement are embracing an “App” approach that enables them to fill in the gaps of existing software infrastructure. Forrester Research has coined the term “Smart Process Apps” for this new software and predicts it will be a fast growing segment of business software.

Find out how you can get ahead of the curve by reading our whitepaper on the transition from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement.