There is a concept that my diginomica colleague Phil Wainewright has been developing and refining for well over a decade. Frictionless Enterprise – a business architecture that optimizes the use of connected digital technologies to strip out cost, delay and opacity from operations – began as a response to the SaaS revolution and cloud computing. True SaaS made frictionless possible in a way that on-premise software never could. Phil has mapped this methodically where he argues that the traditional enterprise, structured around sequential processes passing static documents from one department to the next, is poorly equipped for the digital era. The answer is to eliminate institutionalized friction – not only from internal operations but from interactions with customers, suppliers and stakeholders too.

Full opinion : Against the frictionless mean – why enterprise AI needs a counterargument.