Companies need to find innovative and distinct methods to achieve organic growth, says Simon Carpenter, director of strategic initiatives at SAP Africa.
"There comes a time when there`s nothing else to acquire, no one else with whom to merge or competition laws prohibit such mergers and acquisitions. The acquired companies and the new mergers must be made to work and they still need to grow to enhance shareholder value. Thus generation of organic growth is inevitable," says Carpenter.
Organic growth can be achieved through finding ways of adding value by creating products and services, or by delivering old products and services at lower costs, he adds. "To prosper, you have to become a flexible and an adaptable organisation."
Service-oriented architecture (SOA), he says, is what is needed to give flexibility and the ability to re-order and re-design a company`s business processes.
Carpenter says companies have been driven by their monolithic software, hardware and infrastructure capabilities that may have achieved great process integration, but do not allow for flexibility.
"In order to have operational ability that allows change needed for organic growth, a company must stop responding to its IT and make its IT respond to the company.
"SOA inherently solves the problems of business process orchestration and supports the underlying principles and data system integration because services present themselves in a way that makes them easy to consume," says Carpenter.
Roy Blume, a BMI-TechKnowledge analyst, says: "SOA can be useful in unlocking an organisation`s technology to build flexibility and adaptability into the organisation through the IT system, all of which can aid in a company`s quest for organic growth."
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