Hardware and software should be treated as assets to a business. Justifying investments in hardware and software assets requires an understanding of the relevant application portfolio as well as the ability to address the cost concerns of stakeholders. The application portfolio should be viewed from several angles taking the past, present and future of the particular technologies being used into consideration.
Technologies can be used either to increase business transaction efficiency or to enable the business to transform and improve itself in some other way. An understanding of the impact of technologies and their usefulness as intelligent and strategic partners requires effort beyond intuitive decision making.
It is surprising to see that most technology upgrades are taken for granted and are expected to resolve every problem that the business (client) organization faces at the time. It is a simple fact that technologies evolve incrementally and they cannot be expected to be exploited to the fullest potential from the very beginning. However, it does not mean that vision into the future should be avoided!
Not much attention is generally paid to the power/ potential of the features or what value is gained or lost in the name of a given upgrade.
Virtualization of servers is one such topic. There are several areas where this technology will impact an organization. Budgeting for hardware spending, avoiding the hurdles of direct support of multiple operating systems, enabling adoption of grid computing models are just a few considerations.
I will touch upon a few other topic areas that Techno Savvy managers and IS professionals are bound to come across at the time of this blog.
SOA - service oriented architectures.
Successfully migrating to SOA requires understanding the impact and fit into the business environments. SOAs allow even small organizations to participate in the Electronic data Interchange. Using Web services, SOA can be part of powerful enterprise architectures that can integrate components of Information Systems minimizing costs of development and maintenance. They are flexible enough to allow the IT groups to be more responsive to rapidly changing business needs.
Multi-core processors
Moore's Law has been the force behind the single core processors for the last 30 -35 years. Data centers' concerns focused more on heat generation and power consumption with decrease of transistor size. Benefits of multi-core processors address the above concerns along with improved performance. Combined with 64 bit computing power of Operating systems, multi-threaded processing environments offer increased speeds for data and transaction processing. The impact on data center concerns looks positive with the additional support of virtualization (both software and hardware).
Emerging technologies need to be understood in the context of the impact on the business as a whole. It is beyond concerns such as cost and efficiency of current processes. Bottom line - Technologies have the potential to change the way business is done. Misusing them leads to chaotic conditions for the businesses.
Points to Ponder:
What mix of knowledge and education is needed for an IS professional to understand the Common issues which must be faced when utilizing the power of enterprise architectures and technologies?
What analysis techniques help proper utilization of Technologies to serve to their fullest potential?
References:
1. Principles of Information Systems Management by John Ward.
- Chapter 5, Managing the Portfolio of Applications (page 110, table 5.2)
2. Innovation Begets Innovation By: Vizard, Michael. eWeek, 6/5/2006 Supplement, Vol. 23, p34-34.
3. The next evolution in Enterprise computing: The convergence of multi-core X86 Processing and 64-bit Operating Systems by Kelly Quin, Vernon Turner, Jessica Yang, (white paper, IDC opinion April 2005).
