Today’s business climate is defined by constant change and increasing competitive pressures. As organisations strive to maximise growth, they face more demanding customers, new regulations…
Today’s business climate is defined by constant change and increasing competitive pressures. As organisations strive to maximise growth, they face more demanding customers, new regulations, globalisation, and disruptive effects of latest advancements in technology. There is relentless pressure to streamline processes, sustain profitability, drive sales, and share information in real-time. All of these critical factors are changing the marketplace significantly, and traditional change management and business frameworks are struggling to keep pace.
To meet these challenges, organisations need next-generation digital-enterprise architecture that can help identify and adopt emerging technologies, and optimise the appropriate existing ones.
Typical pitfalls of IT architecture management
Weak link between business and IT: While businesses widely recognise they must play an active role in driving IT evolution, the CIOs and developers usually manage their technology frameworks with little business involvement at application and project level. This means that sustainable enterprise-wide business benefits are not achievable, as only limited levers are available to systematically transform the IT architecture.
Fragmented IT landscape: Most organisations’ IT architecture evolution is a result of numerous sets of applications developed in response to short-term requirements in specific domains. Little regard is given to long-term planning and impact of such applications on the overall IT architecture. This leads to duplicated functionality, fragmented databases, and custom point-to-point interfaces.
Lack of IT integration: IT departments are constantly under pressure to deliver new functionality and enabling new apps, products, business models and processes. The integration of existing applications is often low on the agenda, resulting in loss of efficiency, integration errors and extended time-to-market.
The building blocks of the next generation digital-enterprise architecture
Transforming a large organisation’s enterprise architecture in order to enable a digital-enterprise usually takes a mammoth effort. It requires designing a flexible yet uniform architecture—one that allows the organisation to consume basic business services at market competitive rates, while getting access to the platform for making high-value investments for improving its business performance. The following are the building blocks for this digital-enterprise architecture:
Flexible and secure architecture
Dual-speed architecture: A digital enterprise must use modular dual-speed architecture to balance needs of the customer-centric systems of engagement and that of the transaction-focused systems of record. The faster front-end systems of engagement must allow for speedy deployment, and avoid time-consuming integration. On the other hand, the robust but slower legacy back-end systems of record must provide for stability and high-integrity data management, which needs longer development cycle.
Security is integral: In a digital-enterprise model, cybersecurity is an integral part of cross-functional services of IT.
Not only does an organisation have valuable data to protect, making it attractive to hackers, various digital channels open new interfaces to customers, suppliers and partners, leaving them vulnerable to security breach.
Unbundled IT governance: In a digital-enterprise, business and IT are integrated, and thus, the boundaries between the two are blurred. However, the systems of engagement and systems of record are managed differently from each other. This requires that front-office business performance improvement domain is unbundled from IT back-office business services domain.
Rapid deployment and scaling
Instant omni-channel deployment: New services defining only small incremental functionality should be deployable in hours rather than in several weeks. Such services should also be available quickly across all channels. It should be possible to develop these services in multiple programming languages for different channels, devices and screen sizes rather than being locked into a single development framework.
Decoupled products and processes: Industries that provide digital products, such as banking and telecommunications, need to decouple products from the processes. A telco, for example, could implement its common sales process and reuse it for all its products, such as 4G data services and value-added services like ring tones.
On-demand scalability of IT platforms: In a digital-enterprise, workload expands and becomes harder to predict. his load can be balanced across private- and public-cloud environments through externally supported services.
There must be mechanisms in place to ensure that when one provider has an outage, others can automatically take over the workload.
Intelligent and robust IT
Configurable services: Business users themselves should be able to change automated processes. This would allow them, for example, to eliminate unnecessary process steps without requiring time-consuming coding by an IT developer.
Real-time analytics: Customers generate data with every interaction within an app. The ability to analyse that information in real-time through use of analytics is an integral part of operational capability for the organisation.
Always up: In digital-enterprise operations, days-long maintenance windows are no longer acceptable. Upgrades of systems that impact consumer experience should be seamless, using a concept that allows deployment of a new software or service overlapping with the old version. Additionally, safety-net mechanisms need to be in place so that issues arising in one service do not have a domino effect in harming overall business operations.
By Abhijit Majumdar
The writer is executive director—technology consulting, PwC India
