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October, 2001 MANAGING IT |
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Most firms know that IT can give them the necessary edge over their rivals. But seldom do they know what consequences of change they should focus on. Take advantage of the current slowdown to make a staged investment in future-proofing your IT investments. By George Eby Mathew As businesses get increasingly intertwined with supply and demand chains involving a network of partners, suppliers and customers, enterprises are pressured to look for new ways to remain competitive. Most companies know IT can give them the necessary edge to thwart competitive forces, but they seldom know how, or what consequences of change they should focus on. There are no easy answers, and additionally they are faced with economic pressures that restrict plans for preparedness for when the current economic slowdown ends. Enterprises have remained internally focused for most of the last century. Since the commercialisation of the Internet in mid-1990s organisations have witnessed an unprecedented pace of reforms. These have progressed in a staged manner. They began with Web-enabled enterprises, moved onto inter-operable enterprises driven by applications and are now scaling into automation where technologies around the Internet are helping them externalise their automated processes, such as through business process integration.
What did these demands mean to organisations? Nothing short of unpredictability in investment and an inability to measure progress towards the certain future that these enterprises were chasing. In these metamorphic phases in an enterprise's life-cycle what takes a severe beating from the technology point of view is the architecture itself, the backbone of IT infrastructure that drives an enterprise's IT today, and the transformed enterprise of tomorrow. This architecture is the single most prominent change-absorbent common denominator across generations of an enterprise. As an enterprise advances in its quest to almost work hands-free, more businesses are expected to be run by the IT infrastructure, adding additional pressure on architecture design. A key deliverable Next-generation enterprises will achieve a significant scale of transformation as their dependence on technology for automation increases considerably. Architecture will be the single largest entity that will bear the brunt of rugged enterprise structures and their resulting demands. From the implementation point of view this boils down to fine grain architecture design, which will provide foundation to the transformation process. Architectures will see tremendous changes in their composition, structure as well as in concept. Unlike today's architectures, which are vertically integrated and singular, future architectures will be seamless in plugging in partners and customers at will and allowing them to offer interplay between disparate business processes. They will also have plug-and-play features that make it possible to incorporate changes in processes or applications as and when necessary, making architectures malleable. This pursuit of a known future would mean that technical architects would bear the maximum load primarily because of the need to visualise enterprise transformation ahead of time and the complexities involved in integrating disparate business processes. Gearing up for the future It is certain that every enterprise has to move into the transformed era sometime in its lifetime. Ideally this would mean that investments today have to be a reflection of what the future enterprise is going to be. This-being a difficult task, because the future itself is not fully known-is where an architect's ingenuity will be measured. The best architects will be recognised for their ability to articulate and simulate futuristic concepts, such as Web services, in existing architectures using current building blocks and paving the way through design to a seamless integration to the building blocks of tomorrow as and when they arrive. The imperative, therefore, is to design architectures that can weather the storms of the future today. Hence architecture design has to be a serious activity in the planning stage itself. Architecture design invites three complexities:
Predictable architectures We believe that by combining the understanding of the future and the present, predictability can be built into IT architectures. One way is to consider the implication of a known future on the existing architecture and building primitive forms of such functionalities today. From an organisation's point of view such a move would ensure that investments are made in the right direction, there is a measured approach to moving to the future and there is clarity on the future the organisation needs to get into. Never in recent business history (as with the current slowdown) has a modern enterprise had the opportunity to slow down its haphazard investment agenda to take stock of the directions it needs to take. The slowdown might have been harsh on a number of counts, but organisations would be better off if they could focus and prioritise their energies on planning for the future in such a way that they are able to incorporate futuristic service demands into their current application development. What to look for in vendors? What an organisation should look for is the ability of a vendor/consultant to offer a reality check as to where the organisation is in the enterprise evolution cycle, offer some measurability to the progress the enterprise is making towards the known future and offer a transformation plan with achievable milestones on the road to the future. Measurability will also provide the organisation with a check on investments as there are clear deliverables expected at each stage of the progress. Such vendors should have a measurement baseline that will help an enterprise to map (in real value terms) the future and the progress it needs to make to meet that future. Infosys, for instance, uses a 4G matrix (TCG matrix) to bring in measurability and predictability to architecture design. The 4G matrix is a collection of functionalities that an enterprise ought to have at different stages of its evolution. This is designed taking into account a holistic view of technology and business directions. This matrix can serve as a ready reckoner for addressing clients' travails during a slowdown. Many organisations are also making elaborate investments in proof of concept centres and in fundamental research in areas like architecture design, which equips their architects to deliver transformation plans from a position of strength. Most managers would agree that enterprises are in an era typified by rapid changes. Today, technology and business concepts die faster than before, newer concepts peak in a few months but dwindle in the few following. Technology firms too have had to work hard to their own advantage to devise newer concepts that would have longer life cycles. Leading-edge vendors such as Sun and Microsoft have invested their R&D dollars in creating solutions such as Web services for the known future that can be relied on for a significant portion of an enterprise's life cycle. We believe that enterprises will have to leverage such concepts and start using parts of them right away to ensure their IT spending is protected against future-unfriendly investments. George Eby Mathew, Principal Analyst, Infosys Technologies Ltd E-mail: george_mathew@infy.com |
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