Applications

Organisations looking to develop and deploy mobile applications must realise that the mobile device market will undergo significant change over the next five years. This creates serious challenges for developers within enterprises, who must either create applications for specific devices and different form factors, or attempt to develop cross-platform applications that will still meet end-user expectations. IBRS has identified four high-level architectures for developing mobile applications, each of which has specific strengths and weaknesses. This research provides an overview of these architectures.

Pattern-based and repeatable processes, such as gathering operational data, validating data, and assessing data quality, offer potential for automation. The Web and software-as-a-service technologies offer powerful tools that facilitate automation beyond the simple mechanical pumping of data from one system to the next. Operational management tasks that focus on administration and control can and should be automated, so that managers have time to think about the organisation as a system, and can focus on continuous improvement.

The implementation of Business Intelligence is critical to the optimised operation of even the most basic business functions. When executed well it provides quantifiable competitive advantage for private sector organisations, and improved service delivery outcomes for the public sector. IT has a significant opportunity to enhance its business relevance by ensuring that Business Intelligence best practice is active and transparent across the organisation. Organisations without a comprehensive investment and capability in Business Intelligence will struggle to complete and will operate below their potential.

Does every organisation need a dedicated ECM system? Not necessarily. Given the breadth of the topic, it is common to use a combination of different systems to adequately address enterprise wide management of content. When embarking on an ECM initiative, it is important to set clear priorities, and to explicitly define the limits of scope, otherwise the solution that is developed may primarily be a costly distraction.

SharePoint is well known as a platform for small-scale knowledge management, team collaboration, and Web applications. However, some organisations have begun experimenting with SharePoint as an alternative to large-scale Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, handling more than 100 million documents. The lessons learned from these initiatives indicate that while SharePoint can deliver ECM, such projects require a great many technical and planning skills that are foreign to most SharePoint implementation teams in Australia. It is almost certain you will need to hire short-term project specialists to be successful.

CIOs today are often faced with deciding whether to buy integrated systems solutions and services from major vendors or buy best of breed solutions from multiple vendors and manage the integration project in-house. Organisations that have engaged external services providers on a major scale and eroded their IT skills base typically find they have no option but to buy the integrated solution. Conversely those with specialist skills in-house and the need to develop their people, often find in-house systems integration solutions more attractive.

Lock-in to software technology always goes hand in hand with lock-in to knowledge. When using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software, most of the lock-in relates to elements external to the organisation. In contrast, the use and development of open source software encourages development of tacit knowledge that extends into the public domain. It is time to move beyond the passive consumption of open source software, to remove business-risk inducing restrictions on the flow of knowledge, and to start actively supporting the development of open source software.

Lock-in is often discussed in relation to external suppliers of products and services. In doing so it is easy to overlook the lock-in relating to internal tacit knowledge and in-house custom software. The opposite of lock-in is not “no lock-in”, it is lock-in to an alternative set of behaviour and structures. Even though organisations can sometimes suffer from an excessive degree of external lock-in, organisations also benefit from lock-in, in the form of reduced costs and risk exposure. The art of lock-in involves continuously monitoring the business environment, and knowing when to switch from external to internal lock-in and vice versa.

To date vendors such as Microsoft and Apple have been able to exploit operating systems as an effective mechanism for creating locked-in technology ecosystems, but the emergence of the HTML5 standard and Google Chrome sees the value of such ecosystems tending towards zero. Providers of Cloud Computing services are united by the goal of minimising the relevance of in-house IT, from hardware right up to operating systems and higher-level infrastructure software. Enterprise application vendors such as SAP1 and Salesforce.com are pulling in the same direction. To avoid sunk IT costs and a dangerous level of technology lock-in, any further developments of in-house architectures and applications that ignore this trend should be re-examined.

When reviewing options to reduce IT costs, ensure the application systems deployment strategy is included in the list of tasks in case the current strategy is costing more than expected and the benefits are proving elusive. Unfortunately the review is often overlooked because the perceived ‘cost of switching’ to other solutions and the business risks are viewed as too high and the task seen as a distraction from day to day business operations. CIOs must disabuse management of these views.