3 Ps of Strategic IT

While working at The Coca-Cola Company we were introduced to the 3Ps at Orientation which were People, Products & Price which translated in something as follows:

"we need the right people to produce the right product to sell at the right price"

I would agree that this is true even today for any enterprise. In my opinion following are the 3Ps key to a Strategic IT.

People:
As always people are the key assets to all organization, especially the ones that make a difference. This is true not only for folks in the leadership positions but also the developers, system administrators, administrative assistants as well as the security guard at the data center. It is important to identify the exception and key people within an enterprise and do whatever it takes (within reasons) to keep them.

Platform:
Even though business keeps asking for solutions, which could be a packaged or custom applications - the platform on which it developed is key. In my experience, even if we adopt a packaged solution for a specific vertical, the customization required to tailor it to the companies specific needs is still very expensive and as for upgrades - forget about it. Might as well do a brand new implementation.

It is heartening to see that all major solution vendors have been focusing on migrating their packaged applications an open standards and tools based platform - which will make it easier for customization as well as future proofing for upgrades.

Process:
When I refer to process - it is not the business process (which is also key) but the process put in place to enable change. Due to fast changing business environment, business will need to transform itself much more rapidly or risk going out of business. This requires IT to help facilitate innovation - a key process that needs to be put in place and made know to the entire organization. And just like any other business process, this innovation/transformation process should also be reviewed on a periodic basis.

Just my thoughts and as always do feel free to drop me line with your comments and/or feedback.

- Yogish Pai

Legacy Business Processes and Business Architecture

Today’s reality is that most if not all of the businesses of any significant size have legacy systems and processes and we do not have the luxury of creating a business architecture from scratch. Any business architecture effort must take this fact into account. In a legacy dominated world, one of the difficulties in creating business architecture is having to deal with the processes that have evolved around the limitations imposed by technology. In such environment, a typical business process may involve multiple steps where the user must manually gather information from multiple sources, restructure/refine the information in a excel spreadsheet (or a paper) and upload into another system for further activity.

In such situations the business process reflects the problems associated with the underlying technology, where data is not integrated and/or is of poor quality. Additionally, applications supporting the business process are inadequate. This might be a good opportunity to re-engineer the business process and not simply automate the manual steps. At the same time, the representation of business design (business architecture) must reflect the current state.

I think it is important to have a good understanding of the business events that initiate business processes and the outcome of the process. Capturing of business events and how a business reacts to such events should be an important component of any business architecture.

Ashok Kumar