IT has come a long way from being just another utility for the business in old days to becoming a living and breathing entity for enabling the business. During its evolution from a business utility to business enabler, it has gone through a lot of discovery (planned as well as accidental) & innovation phases and in the process, the role of a CIO has transformed from being a technical manager to business-focused technology leader. Someone who understands company’s vision & mission and is competent enough to synergize its business strategies with IT.
That itself can be a daunting task and it therefore goes without saying that “Business IT alignment!”can be the most time-intensive and critical aspect of a CIOs prime agenda. That is true but while CIOs are investing most of their time to bring the business and IT in alignment, sufficient amount of that time and consideration must also be given to the fact that there will be a need to transform the business to leverage business expansion opportunities in future. Will the current IT strategy and planning enable business expansion in future? Is there a clear understanding of IT levers that would help in business expansion? What would be the impact of a merger, demerger or a spin-off on the existing IT systems/applications? Does the current architecture offer a zero or least resistance path to future expansion?
Today’s CIO has to be a visionary and have crystal-clear answers or guidelines to these questions. To arrive at these answers, one must know how information is laid out within the IT landscape. What information is most crucial for the business and how is it secured. What are the interfaces that exist internally and externally that play an important role in compiling this crucial information. What are the systems/applications that will decelerate or act as a bottleneck while operationalizing the business strategy? What kind of legacy systems exist within the IT arena. How much of the current untapped investment can be best used to modernize some of these legacy systems. How is every IT system aligned and contributing to company’s core business processes.
If every CIO keeps this information handy and updated, it will act as a quick reference guide to assist them in making quick and informed decisions. This information will create a snapshot of company’s current IT state. Having this information in place can help creating an application inventory consisting of all the applications within an enterprise. Along with painting a bigger picture of IT, this information can also be used to detect quick wins from application rationalization perspective. If the information is captured accurately, it will help identify the logical retirement or consolidation opportunities and capitalize on those quickly. Carefully reviewing the inventory will also open up opportunities to improve some set of applications to better align with the business processes. In tough times, when one has to dig out the opportunities for cost savings or reducing the total cost of ownership, this inventory can be used as the starting point to kick-off the Application Portfolio Rationalization initiative. One can also use this inventory to enable knowledge transitioning to and from CIOs.
The time required to build such application inventory depends on:
• Number of applications
• Number of active development projects
• Interaction time with CIO/CEO/CFO to capture strategy level parameters
• Interaction with application owners/leaders to capture application level details
• Interaction with business/end users to capture functional expectations from these individual applications
Based on my experience, an IT organization with around 250 applications of varied sizes and complexities would typically consume 6-8 weeks of time to create a comprehensive application inventory. If you do not have a formal application inventory in place, put in some efforts to create one. There is no better time to do that than “Right Away”!
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Miriam
http://www.craigslistguide.info
Posted by: Miriam | Feb 21, 2009 at 07:13 PM