Cloud, mobile, AI and the unbundling of enterprise apps

The traditional suite of enterprise applications -- ERP, HCM, CRM and SCM, or more prosaically money, people, sales and spend -- reflects the functional organization of the traditional enterprise. In other words, these applications have their roots in functions that were originally defined by the need to marshall operations using the flow of paper documents around the twentieth-century enterprise. Those functional boundaries are beginning to dissolve in the digital enterprise. Connected technologies, most notably cloud computing and smart mobile devices, make it possible to connect up data and processes across the old demarcations. Where once each separate function managed its own dataset and only occasionally married up data with adjacent operational silos, today's connected digital infrastructure makes it possible to share data in real-time and access it anywhere.