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1 Introduction
Process is King
IT departments must provide on-demand solutions maximising use of existing investments and utilising open standards to help enable working across the value chain Service Oriented Architecture is the key way forward - but must be positioned around an open and flexible framework
In today's business environment, success is driven by the need to support the transactional and knowledge processes1 used within and across the organisation in the quickest and most effective way possible. A recent International Conference of Chief Information Officers and IT Directors in food retailing positioned ?Improving Business Processes? at the top of their current agenda, ahead of gaining competitive advantage, cost control and innovation.2 One has only to compare the performance of organisations that use IT effectively with those who do not to see how important IT is to the business: take the contrasting fortunes of UK supermarkets Tesco, which has made widespread use of IT to improve business performance, and the merged Morrison/Safeway chains, where significant IT issues, particularly around the accounting solution, have thrown doubt on the potential success of the merged organisations3.
The role of partners - suppliers and customers - in the business is increasing, and these members of the value chain (see Figure 1) are being heavily incorporated into the business' core processes. Each company generally has a number of suppliers and customers with whom it has direct contact. However, each of these customers and suppliers has their own supplier/customer ecosystem as well. The need for information to flow easily and securely up and down these value chains is increasingly important - and many members of these chains may be several steps removed from the business itself.
As well as dealing with more complex value chains, businesses need to move increasingly quickly to take advantage of shrinking windows of opportunity: from finance to heavy industry, product lifecycles are shrinking fast and competitive responses often need to be measured in hours or days, not weeks or months. IT departments find themselves faced with an increasing demand for on-demand solutions - supporting variability of process and variability in process load, whilst at the same time financial pressures mean that legacy IT investment cannot be thrown out and a complete replacement solution sought.
All this leads to a requirement for evolutionary architectures which will help maximise existing investments in hardware and software as well as enable new applications to be added as the business changes. The IT industry's most recent solution to this problem isSOA. Quocirca research shows many organisations are considering a more open approach based on SOA going forward. However, it is easy to get SOA wrong, and to hurt the business further. The business must be the priority - and the technologies must support the business processes as they evolve. This paper aims to give senior IT and business managers a strategic view of the technology and business issues to consider when purchasing new technology solutions in an increasingly open environment.
2 IT challenges - managing heterogeneity and delivering flexibility
Heterogeneity is a given ? existing investments must be maintained
Businesses are paying too much on IT maintenance - rather than on IT investments Standardisation is the way to future flexibility
Virtually no-one can start from scratch with their infrastructure. The vast majority of companies have different existing hardware platforms, operating systems, applications, development tools, reporting systems and systems management solutions, either developed within the business over the years, or gained through merger and acquisition activity. The silo mentality of past years, with many applications and hardware environments being managed in isolation to each other, has led not only to the need for multiple human resources replicating jobs being carried out by others, but also to a lack of capability in being able to identify where real root cause problems lie. Indeed, today's businesses are spending between 70-85% of their IT budgets4 just in maintaining the existing systems - if this can be lowered through better centralised management, greater re-use of services and better root cause analysis, then more money can be allocated to investment in new functionality, rather than in running existing non-optimised systems.
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