Incorporating Technology
Outlook is an essential step in establishing IT Strategy for any organizations
in today’s rapid changing business and technology landscape. Considering
technology outlook in architecture development method can eliminate many risks
and also can protect investment because of dynamic nature of today’s business.
It is surprising to note that most methods do not incorporate Technology
Outlook.
Enterprise has multiple line-of-businesses,
therefore when we are thinking about strategy we need to know the business goals
for each LoB along with their respective visions. Each LoB establishes their
own goals based on market situation, market trend, and most of all they want to
position themselves ahead of their competitors. These business goals are also
need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. Establishing a
strategy is a true art of employing stratagems towards the goal of the
enterprise and can be accomplished by adopting a holistic approach. Therefore understanding
enterprise’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing strategy
that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. In today’s dynamic environment Technology
Outlook plays a very critical role, I call it a third dimension. To establish a strategy, typically
we consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go by enabling
capabilities that enterprise does not have. We align IT transformation to
business requirements. This process primarily focuses on business, current
architecture, technology, people, and processes to find the gaps. It is a two
dimensional approach. Architectural thinking and architectural decisions should
also be influenced by the Technology Outlook or the Third Dimension. We design blue
print and the road map based on target architecture, but without considering
the third dimension the strategy may not be effective for a future date. We must
know how much today’s architecture decision will be able to sustain the future changes
due to continuous innovation of new technology and customers’ demand.
The third dimension
needs substantial research and trend analysis. If we look back we see the
change in –
1)
Foundation –
Transformative Enterprise Computing
a.
New emerging applications require substantial improvements in system
characteristics such as performance,
power efficiency and cost/performance.
b.
Solution-optimized systems support aggregation of compute intensive, network optimized, application-specific,
storage sub-systems, together with middleware and system software.
c. Capturing the growth
opportunities require fundamental innovation across the entire stack.
d.
Business has been transformed over time because of system improvements. Like transition from reactive to predictive
analytics, from static to streaming
data,
2)
Foundation – Security,
a.
We see multitier
containment security has emerged to complement perimeter based security
architecture.
b.
The vulnerability and
threat landscape is changing
c.
Rapid growth of
information volume and fast adoption of new technologies making traditional
perimeter defense obsolete.
d.
Far field fraud
detection technologies providing early warnings about security breaches and
fraudulent transactions before such incidents emerge to complement existing
near field techniques.
Similarly we find rapid
change in Business Decision category
3)
Business decision –
Digital Economy
a. International and national government introduced
new regulation and monitoring policy, therefore financial
firms implement mechanism to comply transparency and reporting.
b. Mobile Financial Services and expansion of
mobile banking changing the concept of interactions of customers with the
financial institute.
c. Transparent Securitization
4)
Business decision – Data
for smart decision
a.
Although analytics
technology has a proven and growing ability to create value from data, new
technology made the data usable for all decision makers, not just analysts.
b.
Huge amounts of
heterogeneous data of variable quality require better tools to identify data
that is relevant for smart decision making.
c.
Database technology has
moved from traditional to new paradigm of data management using hardware and
software integration techniques, fabric based computing model. Data access and
storing techniques leveraging new technology that include operating systems,
memory utilization, faster access path.
d. The ability to pull value from massive amounts of data and respond
to real-time information is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator. Value is realized by making smart data-driven
decisions.
We also see the revolution in quality of services and customer
experiences.
Therefore, without considering technology outlook in defining
strategy, deriving Road Map and Architecture Blue print from this process may not
help an enterprise to move in the right direction. So our challenge is:
(1) Integrating Technology outlook into
Strategy development
(2) Strategy that will satisfy today’s need must accommodate
tomorrow’s new technology.
(3) How we synchronize and integrate Business
Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture, future
technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new
business world
(4) How will you deliver strategy while protecting
client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework.
(5) How SOA implementation strategy can
support future technology.
