Innovation through IT architecture

An interesting statistic was recently provided in the Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs – 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This serves the theme of this blog: innovation and an architectural approach for CIOs to make a difference! Working with CIOs globally we find that in their zeal to deliver new innovative capabilities to the busin

An interesting statistic was recently provided in the Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs – 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This serves the theme of this blog: innovation and an architectural approach for CIOs to make a difference!

Working with CIOs globally we find that in their zeal to deliver new innovative capabilities to the business, they believe the answer is to invest in large teams of developers, placing them in the business units they serve with a directive to be responsive. Although this helps to align development efforts for specific departmental needs, this approach fragments IT's ability to innovate in a consistent, predictable, and sustaining manner.

The result of not coordinating multiple development teams against architectural drivers, standards, patterns, maturity models, and such can lead to similar applications being built in completely different manners, with different vendors selected, different technologies used AND creating new complexities, waste, inefficiency, poor performance, difficulty to reuse and recreate quickly.

So how can companies drive innovation while remaining responsive to the business? Some visionary organizations are implementing a top-down architectural driven approach similar to what we were successful with. These organizations are recognizing that their IT strategies must be architected in a manner that creates a portfolio of assets that can be cross-leveraged to afford agility and drive rapid innovation.

To do this, we coach organizations on the need to understand and address the following:

Service Portfolio – create a Business & IT portfolio. Institutionalize and drive a top down effort to collect, maintain, track, and live the drivers and metrics of business in terms of current state and target state in terms of products, services, channels, industry competitive benchmarks and identified gaps in terms of cycle times, functionality, regulatory changes, and so forth. Additionally, firms must map and coalesce their current state and target state of applications, information repositories and infrastructure components. Ensure IT allocation and unit costs are captured and well understood in a standardized classification or taxonomy. Capture this in a repository, maintain this, and utilize business intelligence tools to identify opportunities to create new capabilities