The Next Generation Enterprise: A CIO Perspective on the Vision, its Impacts, and Implementation Challenges

This article presents a senior-executive perspective on the “grand vision” of a Next Generation Enterprise (NGE), its organizational and individual impacts, and the organizational and technological challenges associated with implementing this vision. It is based upon discussions that took place at a CIO Panel, consisting of nine senior executives from a wide cross section of organizations and organized during the “Academia/Industry Working Conference on Research Challenges 2000” (AIWoRC ’00 Conference) to address the central theme of the conference: “The Next Generation Enterprise: Virtual Organizations and Mobile and Pervasive Technologies.” The paper first presents theoretical notions about virtuality, virtual organizations, pervasive and mobile information technologies (PMITs), and authors’ conceptualization of a prototypical NGE. This is followed by a synthesis and summary of the panel discussion under five major thematic areas: (1) the shaping of the emerging NGE vision as enabled by modern-day PMITs, (2) the significant organizational impacts and changes occasioned by the NGE vision, (3) the crucial impacts that the NGE model may have on individual work and personal lives, (4) the critical organizational issues and challenges in implementing the NGE vision, and (5) the major technological issues that, if left unattended, may hamper translation of the NGE vision into a reality. The paper concludes with remarks about the crucial requirements for making the NGE vision a reality.