The “Bitcoined” Enterprise Digital Transformation will kill ERP. It is a strong statement but at this time nothing is more certain than change. When giant corporations are created from a basement in San Francisco or a student hall at Harvard, it is not hard to question the future of an application. If Digital Transformation can “disintegrate” enterprises why could not destroy a concept? Industrial Age x Digital Age In his excellent text “ ”, provokes: “like , no amount of talking or nailing the poor thing to its perch is going to make it come back to life. Call the funeral home and write the obituary.” . Cost Accounting belongs, in his opinion, to the Industrial Era and it teaches people how to determine if any production, cost, scrap or other variances were incurred in the production of an item but this is not relevant if your product is data and “the digital age urgently needs a new cost accounting model.” Old ERP is way past its “Best When Used By” date Brian Sommer Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue Parrot In a second text he details his thoughts hitting the heart of ERP structure “It’s time to put the old ERP solutions out to pasture. It doesn’t many millions or billions your firm spent implementing its ERP system(s), they’re just not relevant anymore” Brian Sommer Corroborating with this requiem says that “the concept of a single ERP suite that meets all of an enterprise’s needs is dead, and has been replaced by a hybrid ERP approach that combines cloud point solutions with a smaller “core” of on-premises ERP function, such as financials and manufacturings. For them “as alternatives to monolithic, on-premises ERP and enterprise applications continue to mature, CIOs and application leaders must take action to address the fast-approaching reality of “ ”. Gartner legacy ERP Digital Transformation Enterprise Resource Planning through the ages Blockchain: The Day After Forget about ERP and the way we run enterprises for years. Despite technological changes, everything is kept in a book. The book of transactions called general ledger. Payable, receivables, cash flow, fixed assets and purchasing. Why? In a simple sentence? Because we need to know if we can take money home! And does not matter if is a small-one-owner or a large shared public company. It is the same. But if there is not a centralised book? We need to know if we can take the money home still. But if there is no money? ! Napsterisation of Everything It was 1999 when I heard this for the first time. Dr. Richard Barbrook, my master thesis advisor and cyber-anarchist, was spreading the news: Internet, as was invented by the US military (ARPANET), . Dr. Barbrook, funnily portrayed here by and the man behind , assumed that “intellectual property was technically and socially obsolete in ”. was the greatest irony of the Cold War. At the height of the struggle against Stalinist communism, it unwittingly bankrolled the creation of cyber-communism The Sun Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto The High-Tech Gift Economy The case for (re)decentralising the Internet “But whose Internet? The ultimate decentralised network has progressively devolved into an array of gargantuan-sized , where the utilities of our 21st century (communication, reputation, payment processing) are run by monolithic companies…”. “The 1990’s virtual frontier heralding a new era of self governance, is not moribund: it’s dead.” stacks In his text he is talking about “ ”, IBM, where is possible to extract value from the with direct communication between devices without a central database. It has a huge disruptive potential and he calls for a (re)decentralisation via . In other text he talks about (!) where instead of sending data back to the centralised mothership for processing and targeting, information would be kept where it belongs: within itself, in your home, encrypted, accessible to no one but its owner. Stephan Tual, founder of the world’s first blockchain consultancy, asked the above question but did not let us behind. Economy of Things Internet of Things blockchain “The End of Big Data” Blockchaining the world Could we decentralise, finally, the book of transactions creating a “napsterised” general ledger? Is it possible via Blockchain? First, lets see what is blockchain and IBM has a good way to explain it: “It is a for a new generation of transactional applications that establishes trust, accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes. It is a design pattern made famous by bitcoin — — but its application go far beyond. With it, we can re-imagine the world’s most fundamental business interactions and open the door to invent new styles of digital interactions. It has the potential to vastly reduce the cost and complexity of cross-enterprise business processes. The distributed ledger makes it easier to create cost-efficient business networks where virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded — without requiring a central point of control.” technology the reason I used in this text Developing Applications Applications can be developed using blockchain technology as , Ethereum a decentralized platform where applications run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. To be continued… Next: How would be an enterprise application? How is possible an enterprise without money? What would be the social impacts of a world without money?
