Enterprise interoperability: Towards a framework for enterprise applications deployment in emerging economy SMEs

Emerging economies are considered to provide the future growth opportunities for the ICT industry. With regard to enterprise applications, the envisaged growth will essentially be driven by SMEs as they represent the largest proportion of the untapped market. In order to capture this future growth market, suppliers of enterprise applications systems have to consider deployment strategies that address "long tail" demand patterns as the comparatively small scale of emerging economy SMEs present fundamental discrepancy from industrialised economy cases. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the fundamentals of this discrepancy in order to establish a basis for a preliminary framework for deploying enterprise applications in a manner that accommodates long tail demand patterns. The proposed framework seeks to overcome the reliance of commercially successful deployment strategies such as COTS ERP on formalised business process models.