Great point regarding 'external events'. Organization's need to manage/support the fringe of the enterprise, where its people connects with the outside world of partners, suppliers, and customers. It's broader than external events - it's really all interactions (client requests and events) that inform value creation.
This requires bridge technology that can support interactive processes that follow users/events, versus trying to force them into rigid workflows.
While Workday is innovative relative to SAP - they are on the Cloud, but their Object Oriented approach is not 'of the Cloud'. Same for SaleForce.com - market leading execution and highly evolved tech, but I'm not sure they are technical innovations.
If you really want to manage interactions and improve the understanding of them and flexibility of response you need to move to Web-style architecture (the most successful network in history) and web-thinking.
We (www.ideate.com) extend the notion of the social graph to everything in the enterprise - people, processes, functions, rules, business entities, etc. in order to reason on relationships (context) and recommend or direct next steps. The result is expert / ERP level-systems with the dynamics of the web.
So to answer MMONDO - Yes, the ERP dinosaurs have to rethink their approaches as the equation has just changed.
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