A Foundation For Your Agile Enterprise

Since Jan. 20th, there has been an excitement for what the future holds. Opportunities will be presented to us and there will be challenges that go along with those opportunities.  We are living in some tough economic times for sure, but now is the time to prepare for the next economic scenario.  This is your opportunity for change.  It will be a long, hard road but the benefits of getting out of this "siloed" and brittle infrastructure will pay off in the end by allowing your company to put themselves in a place where IT and business are one and IT is run like a business to better meet the needs and the demands of their customers.

I stated at the end of 2008 and into the early part of January that I'm making 2009 the year of elevating the conversation and taking up the cause of Business Technology.  I've said it many times, in many different meetings; over the next decade companies will be challenged to change in a way that they may never have thought of and for which there is no precedent.  Which begs these questions; “how quickly can your company identify and respond to change?  If you do identify it, can you leverage it to your advantage?”

As our organizations become more complex and demanding, more resources are required to maintain existing service level agreements, leaving fewer resources available to respond to change in the business.  Since being able to adapt to change is critical to our organization’s success, it is imperative that we develop a standards-based framework that leverages best-of-breed technologies and components to create a new level of integration between the business processes and IT.

There are a few things that are necessary to have an approach to creating/building a flexible, agile enterprise.  I have always approached my client’s organizations with four fundamental design principles in mind; simplification, standardization, modularity, and integration and applying these principles with drivers like:

• maximize financial return
• improve performance
• increase agility
• minimize risk

and design rules like:

• service-oriented architecture
• virtualization and application delivery
• model-driven architecture

I'm a big fan of this little bit of insight (it's not new by any means, but it's my credo for this crusade); "there is no such thing as an IT project; there are only business projects with IT components."  I can tell you with almost perfect certainty again that companies that have recognized this fact have seen the advantage of elevating IT to the role of strategic partner.  The goal of this strategic partner status is to work closely with the business and to marshal IT resources to support business objectives.  When this happens, companies can move more swiftly to capitalize on those opportunities to change and leverage it to their advantage and take the initiative to deliver their products and services that customers are demanding.

You too can take these fundamental ideals and implement them within your existing organizations.  What will you gain? You will benefit from a reduction in IT complexity and associated operating costs, and also have an infrastructure that is flexible and able to meet business needs, but more importantly, interact with and give customers of your business what they are demanding.

Some of my clients that have changed the way that IT is deployed within their companies have realized considerable cost savings and improved their business processes by taking these ideals and implementing a strategic plan around application delivery and virtualization.

In the next article we will address the methodology of IT Service Delivery and what this can do to drive change and convergence with the business.  This interconnection will highlight how you can build an IT infrastructure that synchronizes business and IT, and gives you the ability to leverage change to your competitive advantage.