The King is dead; long live the King! That famous cry sums up most aspects of modern business practice. The previously existing competitive environment, scope, internal structures, and automation support needs of an enterprise have disappeared and been replaced by other sets of conditions and requirements. In time, those needs, too, will disappear and be replaced by yet another set and much more quickly than before. The concept of “Internet years” applies to most aspects of modern life. To stay viable, an enterprise must learn to live with the new king and begin to prepare itself for the next one, who inevitably will arrive when least expected.

From an information technology (IT) perspective, we recently have converted from a centralized mainframe environment to one with a distributed client/server structure. Even before the latter environment began to stabilize, the rapid emergence of the Internet has created the need for yet another version with its own needs and constraints. This swift succession is likely to continue into the foreseeable future as technology advances and customers demand the services and products enabled by the new capabilities. Adding value in this environment requires that a “stretch view” along with innovative approaches to enterprise automation be used. That will result in some possibly controversial directions, but there is no hope of keeping up with the rapid pace without utilizing paths other than the existing ones.

The basic unit of the enterprise, from an automation perspective, is considered to be a process rather than a particular function of the enterprise. This approach is taken not only because a process orientation is being used for much of the current work in organizational dynamics (e.g., process reengineering) but because it is a more natural construct for determining and defining automation functionality that meets the needs of the enterprise.