What do you do if the business has not articulated any objectives for IT? What do you do if the business strategy has not been clearly articulated?
The following short examples show that high level objectives for IT can be identified in a variety of business contexts where there is no clear steer for IT. The process of deriving objectives and working through them with the business will clarify the role of IT.
Case example
Industry - Retail
Business Context - Struggling retailer looking for a buyer
IT Context - legacy applications, aging infrastructure
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Retail
Business Context - Struggling retailer, central costs too high, no clear direction
IT Context - complex legacy applications, complex distributed infrastructure, extensive data duplication, over staffed IT
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Retail
Business Context - Struggling retailer, central costs too high, board committed to business transformation
IT Context - complex legacy applications, largely sound and recent infrastructure, partially outsourced, weak development and operations
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Retail
Business Context - Struggling retailer, central costs too high, recent takeover by venture capitalists, no clear direction
IT Context - complex legacy applications, largely sound and recent infrastructure, partially outsourced, weak development and operations
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Utility
Business Context - highly cost constrained, looking for external investment
IT Context - suite of packaged applications, up to date infrastructure, operational weaknesses particularly availability, largely outsourced but relationships poor
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Multinational conglomerate
Business Context - NYSE and LSE quoted, SOX compliance issues,
IT Context -mix of legacy and packaged applications, mix of legacy and up to date infrastructure, operational weaknesses particularly availability, largely outsourced but relationships poor, several years of low investment, little cooperation between business units, high infrastructure costs
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Case example
Industry - Financial Services
Business Context - market leading company, customer services issues following restructure
IT Context - legacy applications supporting business model adequately but difficult for end users, up to date infrastructure
Appropriate Objectives for IT
Strategic IT objectives fall out of strategic business objectives. The process only gets difficult when IT leaders try to take the business beyond its objectives. This is a legitimate activity for IT strategists. For enterprise architects, it just means another reserve strategy to develop some high level architecture for.
Given a set of high level objectives for IT, enterprise architects can explore how to achieve them. The key points to understand to get to these objectives are -