In today’s marketplace, the dynamics of enterprise software continues to evolve. With each new step in the evolutionary process, the information technology mix becomes more complicated for organizations of all sizes. With virtually every new technological shift, a series of “must have” enterprise applications find their way to the market, each designed to address a specific, critical need. As these new products are introduced and accepted, some older applications may no longer be useful, or fall out of favor and are discarded by the organization. More unsettling for the owners and users of the software are those instances when the software vendor elects to stop supporting a particular product or when the vendor itself ceases to exist due to merger or attrition. Oftentimes, these legacy systems are internally maintained long past their expected shelf life because they have become so vital to the inner workings of a company’s survival.

As these new layers of complexity are added, it becomes more and more challenging for management, assisted by the IT department, to keep its fingers on the pulse of the organization. Each enterprise system presents its own unique challenge for accessing and manipulating data. Report run times, system manipulations, and non-standard report processing times can render “real-time data” obsolete. Even worse, changes in course or other corrective action initiated by management, based in whole or in part on this data, can prove to be ineffective, fatal, or fall somewhere (with any luck) between “successful” and “fatal”.

Fortunately, the solution to this dilemma can be found in a new breed of enterprise software designed to overlay the enterprise systems already in place and provide real-time reporting and the capability to take corrective action. Take for example Relevant Business Systems’ Business Wizard, which creates specific views of system information in a roles-based environment. When used with the Relevant system or integrated with other enterprise software systems, Business Wizard provides instant access to real-time financial and operational data and provides extensive research capabilities using dynamic drill downs and displays. Similar in some respects to the Business Intelligence products widely available today, this new breed of software takes the additional step of providing intelligent drill downs, which greatly reduce the need for IT intervention to simply produce a report. More importantly, access to the individual software systems that lie underneath the application can be gained directly from the user’s desktop, allowing for further investigation or the initiation of corrective action. With the availability of existing templates, charts, graphs and reports, along with the ability to create user-specific templates, Business Wizard can be deployed across the entire organization. Executives, department managers, and other power users can monitor and act upon the real-time information that matters most to them.

Business Wizard, and other products like it, may very well bring about yet another shift in IT. If that turns out to be the case, it will be less about which new “killer” application companies feel compelled to evaluate and more about how they can better utilize what they already have. The ultimate benefit to the end user will be more tactical, and thus less expensive, software purchases that increase the organization’s overall intelligence.