Development and Maintenance of a Business Enterprise

The Information Revolution marked the dawn of a phase when technology available to entrepreneurs grows exponentially with diminishing half-life as result. Strategies to manage a business enterprise have to adapt from static positioning to real time navigation to provide for agility in planning and execution. Since many of the product and services offered are software based development of the systems continues while in use. This puts the personnel of both the supplier and the customer in the loop of development of the end-product or the final solution. Less effort is spent to protect and defend intellectual property and more to play a leading and often disruptive role in the market. Well admired business concepts like benchmarking, incremental improvement rigid organisational structures and delegation of accountability are replaced or modified to be able to deploy specialists at the coalface and to lead rather than follow in a fast changing environment.

Autorentext

Willem Barnard started his career in research and development of complex systems and later on went into marketing there-of. For the past twenty years he was engaged in corporate management during which time he was appointed and lectured as Professor Extra-ordinary by the Universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria.