Bimodal IT Is Essential to Successful Application Rationalization

"Application rationalization" is a label that applies to a broad range of initiatives designed to address the cost, risk and inflexibility of existing application portfolios. Although many organizations have recognized for years that they need to rationalize their application portfolios, very few success stories exist. Meanwhile, all of the imperatives that initially drove application rationalization initiatives still remain.
Many application rationalization initiatives failed because they set the wrong targets. A common mistake was to set a target for a reduction in the number of applications. As a result, initiatives focused on eliminating small, inexpensive applications while ignoring the core challenge: the large, complex application portfolio.

When IT organizations avoided that trap and sought to address the core challenge, they eventually recognized that application rationalization is only possible as a byproduct of business process standardization and simplification. However, very few business leaders have been willing to take on the disruptive business transformation required to deliver such process standardization and simplification. Without business leadership, the IT organization has been powerless to rationalize the large, complex application portfolio.
Despite the difficulties, the problems remain. In fact, the imperatives for change become stronger over time — but so do the inhibitors. There is no pain-free, "silver bullet" solution to the challenges inherent in large, complex and aging application portfolios. A radical transformation is necessary. The core of this transformation will be a move to bimodal IT.

http://www.gartner.com/document/3311518?ref=feed  

Weekly Blog 10

Sourcing executives must plan for smart-machine-based services to evolve within 18 to 24 months, and radically impact current or planned infrastructure outsourcing engagements. Smart machine capabilities must be contracted for in order to realize the full benefit of cost optimization enhancements.

Smart machine technology with IT operational automation will impact IT infrastructure services in the next two years. Many types of smart machine technologies exist that will address a number of delivery costs. Labor will be displaced with virtual agents, and the elements of failure will be addressed with predictive tools that eliminate problems before the environment is impacted. However, many organizations will be caught in a contract that will not allow them to take advantage of changes that will drive significantly better services at a much lower cost.

Smart machine functions that drive a more effective speech and text interface will provide additional market disruption, as the cost and quality impact to manage the infrastructure environment could be exponential.

Service levels currently are measures that are reasonable, based on the current use of human interactions and machine errors. With the advent of technology to replace the human factor and provide analytical-based predictive solutions to adjust to machine failure, the need for current levels of service will be replaced by higher levels of service, even to an ultimate point of no disruption. interactions and machine errors. With the advent of technology to replace the human factor and provide analytical-based predictive solutions to adjust to machine failure, the need for current levels of service will be replaced by higher levels of service, even to an ultimate point of no disruption. the need for current levels of service will be replaced by higher levels of service, even to an ultimate point of no disruption.

The cost savings impact will require significant investments in the automation technology. Thus, the benefit of having an automation platform to build off of will go a long way in allowing the market to adopt a standard. However, the standardization has a drawback in that it may take away some of the competitive advantage of the offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery will also produce a dichotomy in the market of the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots potentially will not be able to keep up with price reductions and eventually will be squeezed out of the market.
 the benefit of having an automation platform to build off of will go a long way in allowing the market to adopt a standard. However, the standardization has a drawback in that it may take away some of the competitive advantage of the offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery will also produce a dichotomy in the market of the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots potentially will not be able to keep up with price reductions and eventually will be squeezed out of the market. t it may take away some of the competitive advantage of the offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery will also produce a dichotomy in the market of the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots potentially will not be able to keep up with price reductions and eventually will be squeezed out of the market. lly will not be able to keep up with price reductions and eventually will be squeezed out of the market.
 
 the benefit of having an automation platform to build off of will go a long way in allowing the market to adopt a standard. However, the standardization has a t it may take away some of the competitive advantage of the offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery will also produce a dichotomy in the market of the haves and the have-nots. The
offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery will also produce a dichotomy in the market of the haves and the have-nots. The
d the have-nots. The lly will not be able to keep up with price reductions and
 
 

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  offerings. This resulting radical change in infrastructure service delivery

Week 9 - Engage the Business by Developing an Application Strategy Together

Application organizations struggle to keep up with demand from the business, which therefore sees IT as too costly and slow. Simply working through the backlog when there will never be resources to get it all done leaves both sides (the business and IT organization) frustrated. Basically, all application organizations need a prioritization mechanism to ensure the most important work for the enterprise gets done and the "nice to haves" or limited-value work goes to the end of the line.
Application organizations often avoid developing an application strategy, not knowing what one is, let alone what information to consider or what stakeholders to involve. It may be considered an annual IT planning exercise, executed by a small IT team (or worse, mostly outsourced to a consultant) and published to the world. Too often it is focused on technologies, platforms and tools, rather than on the business needs; therefore, it is ignored by the business.
At some point, application organizations wake up and realize they need a strategy. Gartner recently followed up with clients who inquired about application strategy two years ago, and we asked what triggered their decision to create one. Figure 1 shows that the most common reason is that the business is transforming itself and needs to transform the applications that support it.

Some organizations are quick to jump to a narrow strategy based on perceived technical goodness or cost control. How many have selected an ERP vendor for the back office, and then the CIO has issued an edict that all new applications will be bought from this same vendor? These one-size-fits-all strategies do not always meet business needs, creating friction and hampering performance. A thorough evaluation of the business trends and application needs of all stakeholders is required to form a strategy.
To be successful, the process and the participation across business and IT are more important than the output. An application strategy document is mainly a communication vehicle to capture the facts, lay out the options and set a proposed direction for discussions with stakeholders. It must continue to evolve as stakeholders and business strategies change and as new needs surface. An application strategy is simply a step-by-step road map for evolving the application portfolio, processes and organization to meet the strategic needs of the business, while minimizing the cost of building and maintaining the portfolio.
As part of the broader IT strategy, the application strategy must document the business facts and needs that affect application strategy. It also must outline what technical and methodology approaches will be used to deliver applications that meet the business needs, as well as provide the necessary flexibility and agility as the business strategy evolves. It should not be too technical or focus only on IT goals.

Reference
http://www.gartner.com/document/2993628?ref=solrAll&refval=170779361&qid=26bc0a81e487d0ba90e74452030b8975 

Week 8 - Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategies

This first Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategies takes off from where the "Hype Cycle for Virtualization, 2015" landed. The "hype" for virtualization with hypervisors is diminishing in this increasingly mature market. Rather than fade away, virtualization is being refreshed and reiterated with new bimodal use cases, continuing to abstract software from hardware at the host. Containers and microservices are evolving with Mode 2 technologies and applications that measure the consumption of resources, rather than provision. These are equivalent to a utility company charging for watts used, rather than calculating from volts and amps generated and supplied — creating a more granular resource control model.
The Nexus of Forces, through to the Internet of Things (IoT), is creating a continuous stream of new technologies requiring provisioning and orchestration, where old approaches fall short or are incomplete. The Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategies involves software-defined anything (SDx) infrastructures and data centers, which extend to machines, homes, adapters and sensors. This drives big data analytics — in-memory functions driving bigger storage pools and tiers, which, in turn, accelerate the growth of big data.
Infrastructure strategies support new modes of operation for infrastructure and operations (I&O), while accommodating traditional legacy ones. They also track existing mainstream technologies that can be classified as Mode 1, allowing the continuing evolution of Mode 2 (see "Infrastructure Agility Primer for 2016" ), and they encompass all forms of hybrid data center architecture, including private and public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud platforms.

Business Impact: The use of host-based controls in cloud computing environments is desirable as these can scale automatically as the workloads they are protecting spin up and down. Furthermore, the protection can move with the workload across on-premises and public cloud IaaS in hybrid data center configurations. Although nothing can materially change the balance in securing against system attacks, security control isolation is a worthwhile step forward.


http://www.gartner.com/document/3363317?ref=exploremq 

Week 7 - Using EA to Support a Palette of Business Strategy Approaches

In this week I have read about how EA to support of the Business Strategy Approaches. Enterprise architecture (EA) drives organizational change and transformation and the delivery of business outcomes. But what change and transformation means, and the outcomes being driven, will be different for each organization. Enterprise architecture has a range of tools, models and techniques to suit almost every situation. As organizations pursue different business strategies and outcomes — and often organizations pursue more than one strategy at a time; in different business units, for example — enterprise architecture, including its deliverables and approach, must be tailored to suit the strategy. 

Every organization defines a business strategy based on its environment, its vision for the future and how it views its competitive advantage. From that flow the priorities and business outcomes it pursues. Over the years, there have been many approaches to classifying a business strategy. In this research, we have built on these and our own surveys to identify five common business strategies we see our clients pursue (see Figure 1). Our aim is not to be definitive in categorizing business strategy, but to help enterprise architects think about how to tailor and align their EA practices. We will also identify five different roles EA plays in support of the business strategies.
 

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 6

In "Digital Business Success Will Be Driven by Economic Architecture," we defined economic architecture as, "a discipline for driving an enterprise's business model through financial metrics and key performance indicators. It is a critical tool to plan, track and manage future-state value creation mechanisms."
Economic architecture enables business and IT leaders to better express the financial underpinnings and potential benefits of their digitalization initiatives and the impact of their investment decisions. By integrating the different economic architecture elements (income statements, balance sheets, market share and so on), coupled with microeconomic and macroeconomic trends, EA practitioners can illustrate and highlight a variety of business and technology investment scenarios from different financial perspectives, which should be attractive to business executives and boards of directors.


Today, the reality is that most organizations will progressively develop their approach and practice of EA, and as part of the EA efforts, they will evolve their economic architecture. This is because many organizations are still figuring out business-outcome-driven EA (see Note 2), and many organizations are in the early stages of developing their digital business strategies that extend beyond the current focus, which is still predominantly on digital marketing and selling online and through social and mobile.
 
As more organizations begin to embrace the value proposition of economic architecture and use it as a competitive weapon, we expect the pendulum to shift. According to respondents in Gartner's 2015 Digital Business Survey of IT, Business and Marketing Executives, the top mindset or behavior that has to change for their organization to realize, build and optimize its digital opportunities is understanding digital business models, developing clear value propositions and justifying investment


 
One of the keys to business growth lies in continuous innovation; consistently unlocking value by revisiting the organization's value creation mechanisms or economic architectures. In the digital era, inventing, or investing and deploying technology is done because of identified business opportunities that will re-engineer the income statement and balance sheet. In other words, to be competitive and successful, organizations must understand what they can do with new business/operating models and technology (new and emerging) to change or enhance their financial positions. Conversely, they must also continuously revisit their economic environment and financial statements to find new opportunities to introduce new business/operating models that exploit technology.

EA practitioners: 

1. Gain a thorough understanding of your company's strategic capabilities, value drivers and differentiators. Do the same for the industry or vertical in which your company operates and competes. Understand your current and potential competitors (such as, digerati, ² interlopers and players in adjacent industries), business and operating models, and key financial and performance metrics (economic architectures)
2. Find ways to evolve and transform your enterprise through understanding the environment in which it operates. Also, consider rearchitecting the company's business architecture, information architecture, solution architecture, technical architecture and other viewpoints of enterprise architecture based on economic and financial drivers.
3. Provide business and IT leaders with the diagnostic deliverables, economic consequences and actionable deliverables that help focus and balance their organization's investment decisions.
4. Use economic architectures as a competitive weapon, balancing short- and long-term targeted outcomes the business seeks to achieve by exploiting the economic architectures, and making digital investment recommendations that will change the organization's business direction and drive its competitive advantage.
   
   
   
   
    
   Regardless of your organization's level of EA maturity, EA practitioners must begin to reactively and proactively apply economic architecture as another viewpoint of EA to provide higher business value to their organization. EA practitioners do not need to become economists or financial and accounting experts. However, they must be comfortable and conversant with the different and more-sophisticated business, operating and financial models that will underpin digital business initiatives. They must identify, understand and examine the current- and future-state business economic and financial levers that are susceptible to digital transformation and thus business strategy and the future business state. Ultimately, EA practitioners will be required to proactively leverage and manipulate their organization's economic architectures — driven by making investment recommendations in digital technologies — as part of EA, to continuously change their organization's business economics, value-creation mechanisms, and profitability, and to drive targeted business outcomes.  
   
   
   http://www.gartner.com/document/3184121?ref=feed 

 
 

Business Outcome-Driven Enterprise Architecture

Last week I was reading article how different Business outcome- Driven Enterprise Architecture are used. Regardless of the specific framework or combination of frameworks that you are using, organizations can increase the business value and impact from their EA efforts by developing a stage plan that is focused on business outcomes. A business outcome is a statement of a specific business benefit result that is measurable, achievable within a specified time frame, and in support of the business strategy and objectives. 
A business outcome is expressed as a change occurring with a specific short- or long-term time frame. The best way to ensure that a business outcome is targeted to meet business needs is to map it to the critical strategic questions that senior executives are asking. The focus on business outcomes shifts the thinking away from "what enterprise architects do" and moves it toward "delivering signature-ready deliverables that drive business change," thus enabling enterprise architects to take a pragmatic approach to developing EA. Once a stage plan is created, with a defined focus on business outcomes, the EA team can work on effectively executing the stage plan through the EA delivery cycle.

Stage Planning: Focus on Target, Frame and Plan
Thinking in terms of stage planning guides EA practitioners through the practical steps to:
Target: Clearly identify the highest priority target business outcomes that EA efforts will address in the next iteration, based on understanding the disruptive opportunities and threats impacting your business and your business strategy.
Frame: Streamline EA development to create only the deliverables that directly address the highest-priority business outcomes and address the questions and concerns of specific stakeholders.
Plan: Decompose the deliverables to identify the tasks, dependencies and resources required to create those deliverables.

Key Challenges

• Leading enterprise architects develop enterprise architecture in iterations. Targeting a limited set of business outcomes for each iteration is critical to the success of the EA program.
• Enterprise architects must clearly frame the deliverables that are linked to the target business outcomes to guide and focus the enterprise architecture development.
• Planning for EA development must concentrate exclusively on the deliverables required to address the target business outcomes.
  
   http://www.gartner.com/document/3118219?ref=feed