Mobile Applications - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 478

The agile organization is composed of small, autonomous teams or sub-
contractors who work concurrently and reconfigure quickly to thrive in an
unpredictable and rapidly changing customer environment. Each constitu-
ent has the full resources of the company or the value chain at its disposal
and has a seamless information exchange between the lead organization and
the virtual partners.
Thus, a network enterprise is a coalition of enterprises that work col-
lectively and collaboratively to create value for the customers of a focal
enterprise. Sometimes, the coalition is loosely connected; at other times, it
is tightly defined, as in the relationship between Dell and its component
suppliers. An enterprise network consists of a wide range of companies—
suppliers, joint venture (JV) partners, contractors, distributors, franchisees,
licensees, and so on—that contribute to the focal enterprise's creation and
delivery of value to its customers. Each of these enterprises in turn will
have their own enterprise networks focused around themselves. Thus, rela-
tionships between enterprises in the network both enable and constrain
focal companies in the achievement of their goals. Therefore, liberating the
potential value in customer relationships hinges on enterprises effectively
managing their non-customer-network relationships.
Though they appear similar, there are fundamental differences
between the agile and lean approaches for running a business.
Lean production is at heart simply an enhancement of mass
production methods, whereas agility implies breaking out of
the mass production mold and into mass customization. Agility
focuses on economies of scope rather than economies of scale, ideally
serving ever-smaller niche markets—even quantities of one—without
the high cost traditionally associated with customization. A key
element of agility is an enterprise-wide view, whereas lean produc-
tion is usually associated with the efficient use of resources on the
operations floor.
22.2 Process-Oriented Enterprise
Enterprise systems (ESs) enable an organization to truly function as an inte-
grated organization, integration across all functions or segments of the tradi-
tional value chain—sales order, production, inventory, purchasing, finance
and accounting, personnel and administration, and so on. They do this by
modeling primarily the business processes as the basic business entities
of the enterprise rather than by modeling data handled by the enterprise
(as done by the traditional IT systems). However, every ES might not be