Conclusion

What we hoped to accomplish with this article is to explain certain essential dimensions of the enterprise systems suite that will serve as the foundation of the intelligent enterprise of the 21^st century. Similarly, to enterprise resource planning systems, the e-business enterprise systems suite is a collection of powerful applications that are often viewed as individual and autonomous applications. In fact, the middleware and enterprise application integration industries have sprung to bandage the leaky infrastructures of an assorted array of enterprise applications. An architecture has emerged for the integrated e-business enterprise systems suite that many companies have yet to put their confidence in. Business has identified with individual components of this architecture but only a few agree with the single vendor perspective.

Clay Christensen (1997) has identified disruptive technologies to be one of the fundamental causal mechanisms through which our lives have improved. Disruptive technologies are said to (typically) have enabled a larger population of less-skilled or less-wealthy people to do things in a more convenient, lower-cost setting, which historically could only be done by specialists in less convenient, centralized settings." The enterprise systems technologies will continue to bring intelligence that had previously only been available to high-level managers and decision-makers, to decision-makers at all levels of the organization. This will empower employees like never before. The companies that figure out how to do this effectively will surely disrupt their competition.