What is Enterprise System Transition anyway?

Separately, "Enterprise" is defined as a business organization. Secondly, "System" is defined as a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. Finally, "Transition" is defined as passage from one form, state, style, or place to another.

Considered together, "Enterprise Systems Transition" is the process of moving a business organization's group of interacting, interrelated, interdependent processes, personnel, and technology (software and hardware) from their current state to their desired state, in order to achieve the long-term objectives of that business.

It involves not only understanding where your applications need to be in order to stay competitive, but also, where do your applications "stand" today. It is knowing where you want to go in relation where you are today from both a business and a technical perspective. Only after both of these "as is" and "to be" environments are understood, can effective transition plans be established.

We emphasize the term transition because it implies change from both a business perspective as well as a technical perspective and it is not transparent to end users. In an Enterprise System Transition the "as is" and "to be" states represent entirely different environments. Transition involves not only implementing a more state of the art IT system but also considering the current procedures of the business in order to make those procedures more effective in concert with that new IT system. It is important to note however, that these changes are based solely on considering the needs of the business. Because of it's non transparent nature, it usually involves retraining personnel in at least the interface if not the process also. An example 'transition' would be an IT system replacement.

In contrast to transitions, 'migrations' are used for maintaining current business procedures but making the technical environment supporting those procedures more robust. Migration implies no change from a business perspective only a technical one. As a result, it is transparent to end users. It results in the same interface, the same process, and the same output from the system as was received prior to the migration. An example would be a hardware or software upgrade-- although processing speed may increase, the overall output received from the system stays the same.