New Enterprise Stack – Part 2 – System of ?

Recap from New Enterprise Stack – Part 1

In part 1 of this series, I have covered topics like what is an enterprise stack, old enterprise stack, factors affecting its relevance to employee productivity and engagement. In this part 2 of the series, I’ll discuss the elements of new enterprise stack and its facets.

Visualisation of New Enterprise Stack

The fundamental premise behind the new enterprise stack is to provide a unified experience to employees to help actualize their work “in-the-flow”. Multiple systems/apps to perform day-to-day tasks create cognitive load and friction for employees which in turn causes productivity loss and active disengagement.

1. System of Record (SOR) – records lowest level of transactions e.g. employee details like date of joining, designation, department, location etc. or customer details like billing name, billing address, billing, cash collected etc.
2. System of Micro Experiences (SOME) – platform that triggers a set of micro experiences (around a work process) that nudge an employee with a data driven, contextual call-to-action.
3. System of Engagement (SOE) – platform that delivers a unified and frictionless experience of communication, collaboration, engagement and work process automation.

Facets of New Enterprise Stack

Most enterprises intuitively understand SOR layer but struggle to actualize the full potential of the stack due to lack of understanding of SOE and SOME layers of the stack. Below are the key facets of the new enterprise stack:

1. An SOE is essentially crafted with data driven UX and does not require elaborate training, onboarding or change management for users. Think of Facebook or its enterprise version Workplace From Meta
2. When evaluating SORs, enterprises need to robustly evaluate the APIs and webhooks provided by the vendors. The more robust these building blocks are the more powerful the nudges for micro experiences.
3. SOE and SOR have fundamentally different DNAs and any attempt by a vendor to do both is destined to fail. Marketplace is littered with the carcasses of those trying to do both. Lack of enterprise wide adoption of SAP JAM, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Jabber, Microsoft Yammer etc. despite being bundled with respective SORs led to the creation of new age SOEs – Workplace from Facebook, Slack and Microsoft Teams

In part 3 of the series, I’ll elaborate more on the System of Micro Experiences. Enjoy reading part 1 and part 2. Please share your feedback.