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The Need For Business-Technology Strategy
Businesses have historically used technology aggressively as an asset for creating products and services but rather passively for operational needs. Only in the last decade did they begin to use technology to enhance their competitive positioning and improve their bottom line. There was an expectation that technology would help increase revenues, enhance profitability by increasing productivity, and reduce the costs of operations through efficiency gains from improvements in the management of information systems. Though these aspirations instigated significant increases in spending on corporate initiatives, many of the benefits expected were never realized. The productivity gains, management of information, and other benefits were still needed to support business functions so many of the initiatives were recast:
- Sales Force Automation (SFA) became Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Data Warehousing (DW) became Business Intelligence (BI)
- Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) became Real-Time Environment (RTE)
The fact that businesses continue to provide "capital appropriations" is a clear indication that there are unresolved needs that require a solution. However, today major initiatives are scrutinized more than ever and are prioritized based on compelling business cases that substantiate a clear contribution to the business. So you must understand the enterprise. Understanding business requirements from a functional and technical perspective is only a part of providing enterprise solutions. It is also important to have solution strategies for outstanding requirements, to understand the business and technical environment, to have data/information aggregation strategies and enterprise resource integration strategies. These understandings are significantly addressed when businesses engage to establish an Enterprise Architecture plan for key areas (business, information, data, and technical). Without understanding this (at least at a high-level), businesses will continue to deploy CRM systems that partition access to critical information, full lifecycle BI initiatives for each area of the business, EAI platforms that continue to overwhelm IT organizations with the complexity of intergrading dissimilar/competing technologies and standards, etc.
The IAM Company is comprised of "Business-Technology Strategy" consultants that have provided Enterprise Architecture plans to various clients. Business-Technology Strategy focuses on planning for initiatives from an enterprise perspective and a standpoint of completeness. This does not displace the detailed planning required for the corporate initiatives (CRM, BI, RTE, etc.) but adds significant value with plans for integrated completeness. Business-Technology Strategy provides significant benefits to corporations by providing the following:
- An assessment of the current business and technical environment
- An assessment of gap and strategic needs (2-3 years) with an approach to solve them
- A business case analysis for recommendations with quantified benefit expectations
- A framework to address the collective business requirements
- An impact analysis of solution recommendations (Change Management Summary)
- A target solution architecture for enterprise planning
- Solution deployment scenarios aligned with business priorities
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