Enterprises are facing a challenging time with the economy like never before. Improved productivity and quick time to market have become common mantras. Yet every once in a while technology fads interfere with business decisions in formulating a scalable vision.
Can your IT be technology savvy yet manage change quickly?
Organization
In rough economic times markets shrink. Cost conscious customers want their it sooner, cheaper and their way. This means thinking across projects, people and departments in your organization. There are several ways to leverage technology to your benefit and build a sustainable IT plan for now and the future but the inherent structure of an organization defines the success or failure of the IT initiatives.
Leadership
Agile organizations need a new breed of leaders who can challenge existing processes and seek for better ways to reduce costs. With strong leadership comes assertion in ideas and a project portfolio that is consistent, cohesive and a strategic fit in alignment with organizational goals. Once project teams realize the broad organizational goals, short-term thinking is replaced with long-term success.
Innovation
Too often people misunderstand innovation with doing something different. Most times, the solution is right before our eyes and yet failure to analyze and adapt causes opportunities to slip. Understanding the role of technology and understanding emerging trends can bring unprecedented improvements in performance and cost. It creates such a dramatic change in processes, products, or services that they transform existing markets or industries, or create new ones.
IT Strategy
The role of technology is clear: provide value to businesses. Without an overall business driver, technology is but a prototype or of experimental value. Research that cannot be transformed into a product or overall solution is a drain on the organization’s resources and diminish growth.
Most common strategies for managers embarking on strategic IT missions are as follows:
Architectural Scorecard
An architectural scorecard is a powerful concept of understanding any particular aspect of the IT and any given point in its evolution. At initiation, brings together the most important aspects of the strategy:
- Why: What is the business driver? What is the scope?
- With Who: What are the other interacting elements?
- What: What are the primary goals, objectives and requirements?
- How: How can we achive it at a logical level?
- With What: What tools and historical data are available?
- When: What is the overall impact of the change?
Planning before rushing into implementation directly influences quality and success of the overall enterprise architecture.
Simplify through Delegation
Over time, legacy applications become a patchwork change requests and an unmanageable labyrinth of functionality without proper documentation. Modernization calls for carefully analyzing modules that work independently and separating them into components that can be managed separately yet providing “services” for other applications. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabled applications provide not just increase the life of existing applications, it can help in important decisions such as replacing a legacy component with a commercial application at a later date.
Centralize using a Portal
For those who predicted the demise of portals, it would be a surprise that they still exist and will continue to do so. Enterprise portals provide a common starting point for various applications and serve as the central place for most commonly sought information. A web-enabled interface can interface with a host of web services from your IT infrastructure providing rich information without users having to go to individual applications. User security and access to various applications not just simplifies authentication and autorization mechanisms but a smart way to centralize user profiles across the enterprise.
Virtualize Server Infrastructure
Regardless of whether an enterprise has 10 or 1000 servers, decision to consolidate servers can save costs. Virtual machines are easier to manage, run on the same hardware infrastructure as the host operating system and provide huge benefits in managing server resources such as disk space, memory and CPU allocations across applications. Management and maintenance of virtual servers cost less over time and brings in much needed flexibility within IT organizations.
Plan ahead for Disaster Recovery
When times are good, everyone seems to be happy but how would one keep the lights on when things go bad? Most disasters due to inaction or the denial that something could go wrong. Planning ahead of time to safeguard data against a potential virus, a rogue application, a natural disaster or just simple application crash due to a power outage or unexpected hardware failure can decide the enterprise’s ability to sustain in the future.
Aligning IT goals with business goals and levegaring modern technology is essential as organizations sustain this economy. Gaining competitive edge with a long term IT plan is a business plan. To know more on how OpenGambit can help in your long-term vision, please request more information through our site or contact us.