How does ICT help deliver year-on-year savings whilst still achieving business objectives?
In the current challenging economic climate organisations need to be more fl exible and agile to meet growing demands within increasingly tighter budgets. In order to achieve this, many are now turning to Enterprise Architecture (EA) to ensure that their business ‘vision’ is aligned with IT strategy – EA ensures that your IT decisions are the right ones for your business.
What is Enterprise Architecture? Effective EA helps organisations meet their future objectives in the most effi cient way by taking a truly holistic view of the enterprise: it considers organisational structure, business processes, stakeholders, drivers, objectives, requirements as well as technology. Crucially, EA views these as interconnected rather than allowing the business and IT to operate in silos – it aligns business strategy to IT execution.
Why Enterprise Architecture? If you recognise any of the below within your organisation:
• Siloed decision-making leading to a proliferation of diverse technologies/systems/functionalities
• Lack of Business and IT crossover and linkage
• Uncontrolled, wild growth of IT architecture landscapes
• Unmanaged innovation and evolution
• Lack of, or ineffective enterprise-wide governance
• A need to deliver more within increasingly tight budgets – then EA could help you…
The key benefits of Enterprise Architecture are:
• Lower software development, support and maintenance costs
• Increased portability, interoperability and management of IT systems
• Reduced complexity in IT infrastructure
• Reduced risk overall in new investment, and the costs of IT ownership
• A truly efficient and well-governed IT operation
In our experience it’s the tailoring of an Enterprise Architecture framework which delivers the real benefits, but you have to have senior stakeholder buy-in to ensure the business and ICT are truly aligned to achieve outcomes.
Alignment is the key, and this is how year-on-year savings can be achieved.
Margaret Moore
Account Manager Sopra Group: 0131 311 6674 / mmoore[AT]uk.sopragroup.com