Functional Management was THE Management Science for the 20th Century!
For the 21st Century we need Process-Based Management Science and consequently we need a new generation of Enterprise Software that enables automation of business processes end-to-end, rather than automation of Functional Management Islands like Finance, Marketing, Sales, Warehousing. Logistics, Manufacturing, etc.
And it is coming, and promises to be an unforeseen but very welcome boost to technology and software product companies, technologists and others! And it's about time!
Let me explain. Functional Management was born from the brains of people like Robert McNamara and Alfred Sloan. Robert McNamara was at Ford and Alfred Sloan was at General Motors. They developed Functional Management by dividing responsibilities in companies into Product Planning and Design, Manufacturing, Finance, Marketing, Sales, etc. Companies found a rational way of dividing up the responsilibilities in a company and doing them very efficiently and effectively.
During the fifities and sixties, you have the rapid growth of computers and computing in the enterprise.
Enterprise Software companies came up with Financial Management Software, Sales Management, Sales Accounting, Manufacturing, Warehousing and Logistics software packages to automate the transactional aspects of all these functions.
With the rapid adoption of the Internet and networking across the globe in the 80's, you start seeing the birth and adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and integration of these functional systems with one another. Once the islands were automated, they needed to talk to one another and exchange data without re-entry of data from one system to another.
The 90's saw organizations like E-Loan that had totally integrated Loan Processing Software that automated the entire Home Loan Processing cycle. If you were to look at how traditional home loan processing was done before that, you would have seen many small islands of software in a bank that did the same work but were all not integrated.
Companies like Dell integrated all their internal systems, and even Third-Party companies that assembled Dell Computers, into one single system that handled the entire Order-to-Cash-Customer Service business process cycle.
You did your research on what to buy, online at Dell, you configured, and tailored your system, placed an order on that system. A third party assembler, or a Dell factory elsewhere, picked it up from there, assembled it and shipped it to you and updated UPS or Fedex automatically. You then tracked the package on UPS systems online.
It is now one business process oriented system!
Companies do not have much use for Finance, marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, Warehousing islands, as far as they are concerned. To them it is one single company where they ordered what they wanted and got what they wanted!
I think that increasingly in the 21st Century, organizations and companies are moving more towards these kinds of business processes, and portends a huge new market for a new generation of software that are more Process Oriented than Function Oriented.
It's needs are already being filled with SOA kinds of approaches, but sooner or later they will morph into a new generation of software that breaks down the walls between these functions completely rather than just build SOA bridges between them. They don't work as well as they used to, middle of last century. The technology and the speed with which business processes move have changed drastically. They need a new generation of software that mirrors how business is done in this century!
It's coming, and could be a big boost to Technology Companies and technologists worldwide!
The old order changeth, yielding place to new - Alfred Tennyson
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