Applications

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.

The CIO walks into the boardroom. He proudly tells the board that he‘s hired “Global System Integration Leader” to be the prime SI for the organisation’s upgraded ERP system. The board fires him on the spot. When he asks for an explanation for his firing, the board tells him that it’s the third time that he’s hired the “Global System Integration Leader&...

In many organisations there is a major disconnect between user expectations relating to software quality attributes and expectations relating to the costs of providing applications that meet those attributes. The desire to reduce IT costs easily leads to a situation where quality is compromised to a degree that is unacceptable to users. There are three possible solutions: Invest heavily in quality assurance measures, Focus on the most important software features at the expense of less important ones, or Tap into available tacit domain knowledge to simplify the organisation, its processes, and its systems.