Leader: Your company stretches wider than you think

There was a time when running a business meant treating your customers and staff well. That is still clearly the case.

But the concept of a business - or the enterprise, to use modern management speak - is an evolving one. This publication sides with the numerous academics and successful business leaders who now talk about an extended enterprise, one that stretches its tentacles not just to branch offices, home workers and road warriors but also to suppliers and partners.

In short, the modern mindset must be about extending the enterprise and using technology to do so.

That is why this month silicon.com has launched our aptly named Extending the Enterprise special report.

The last few years have seen the rise, fall and rise again (sort of) of customer relationship management, or CRM. CRM has been a buzzword and, while technology to support it is fine in principle (remember the opening line above), at the same time it has too often been a let-down.

But we support it, implemented properly. The relationship management approach, the thinking goes, can therefore be applied to areas such as employees, suppliers and partners. This is examined in a piece by silicon.com contributor Anthony Plewes here. He cuts through the acronym soup of CRM, ERM, SRM and so on - which vendors such as SAP just love - to look at the real benefits of applying IT to managing these processes.

And of course the extended enterprise is all about good management. If your company is in retail, logistics, manufacturing or even a few other areas, there is a good chance that the rollout of radio frequency ID tags - RFID - is being discussed or even done right now. The way Tesco, Wal-Mart and others are approaching this hot topic is considered by contributor Danny Bradbury here. It is in a large part about better managing the supply chain.

Other areas we are focusing on include how best to make a mobile workforce a managed extension to the core enterprise, as detailed by contributor Stewart Baines here and whether it's a good idea to make suppliers your partners.

The extended enterprise is about a range of technologies and all facets of a business. But most of all it is about a way of thinking. Do you have it?