Posts Tagged Business Process Integration
Business Process Integration is key to IT-Savvy Companies
There is an excellent interview in the MIT Sloan Management Review and also carried by Wall Street Journal on Nov 30th.
In this article, Dr. Peter Weill is interviewed and he has recently co-authored the book “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain”. Dr. Weill believes that companies can increase the effectiveness of their IT investments by treating Information Technology as a strategic asset.
This article really hit home with our team at Adeptia because it articulates exactly the benefits of Business Process Integration that we make to our customers and prospects. Some of the key points (paraphrased) made by Dr. Weill are:
- IT-savvy companies use their technology to reduce costs today by standardizing and digitizing their core processes.
- IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies for two reasons: One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture. Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.
- When we talk about an operating model, we’re talking about the degree to which a company integrates and standardizes its core processes. Integration, which involves providing access to data across the company, and standardization, which involves reducing variation in the company’s business processes, are the two things IT does better than anything else.
- The real secret to IT-savvy companies is that each project links together—like Lego blocks—to create a reusable platform. IT-savvy companies think reuse first.
We ourselves could not have said it better.
Add comment December 6, 2009
An Enterprise Architecture Framework for all seasons…
Document: Adeptia Enterprise Architecture Framework. (27 slides, 15 mins to review).
Over the years, as we sell and deploy our software for our customers, we are amazed to see how many companies do not have an Enterprise Architecture approach in place for their IT infrastructure. This is not just limited to smaller companies for whom an IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) may be an overkill but even many mid-sized to large businesses have not yet invested in putting an overarching enterprise architecture in place.
There are many reasons for not having this architecture in place but some of the main reasons we have observed are:
- Growth of business from when EA was not needed to now when it is
- Focus on day-to-day problem solving and short-term IT issues
- Focus on “must-have” needs rather than “nice-to-have” initiatives which is how EA is perceived
- Lack of skills in-house to drive, implement and manage EA
Although having an Enterprise Architecture in place is certainly not needed to successfully deploy Adeptia solutions, we recommend our customers to think about having fundamental practices of EA in place to get the maximum advantage from their investment in Adeptia. A well-executed Enterprise Architecture really gets the most value out of a process-centric and SOA-based software solution such as Adeptia.
Some of the benefits of Enterprise Architecture are:
- Aligns business strategy with technology investment
- Creates a vision and strategy for Information Technology
- “Blueprint” on how to view and approach IT projects
- Presents a Functional and a matching Technology view for every initiative
- Helps put a plan in place on how to get to the vision in an evolutionary, incremental way
- Provides a structure for consistent IT decision making
An Enterprise Architecture for each company would be unique as it will take into account its business model, strategic objectives, size of the business and IT applications and systems. Adeptia helps its customers by providing a “framework” to help them think about a model for how to design an EA that best meets their needs. Here is a document that describes the Adeptia Enterprise Architecture Framework. (27 slides, 15 mins to review). Please keep in mind this is only a “framework”, which is a roadmap or a starting point, and not a full-blown Enterprise Architecture.
This document recommends having two perspectives to an IT Enterprise Architecture: A Functional View and a Technology View. An EA would have the following four key elements:
- People
- Processes
- Systems
- Information
Each of these elements have a number of other attributes as defined in the document.
We have found that this framework provides an excellent starting point to companies that have not thought about Enterprise Architecture or need a high-level introduction to taking a consistent approach towards all their IT projects and initiatives.
1 comment October 28, 2008
