Organizations are now looking at the benefits of  taking the enterprise architecture (EA) approach and have realized the importance of doing things in a structured way. Today organizations consider scalability, availability, agility, architecture approach, mana­gea­bility and performance when it comes to running a business. There is a shift in their mindset and they are no longer looking from a department centric approach but taking the entire organization into consideration. Hence, IT people have now started spending more time on EA exercises and the vendors will thus have to come out with products and techno­logy that are scalable, managea­ble and agile among others.

In order to give their customers a product or a service, an organisation will have to lay down a physical organization ie physical factory, sales office and distribution office. This organization will then run these departments by executing various processes. Another element of an organization is that it should be proficient in technology to serve the customers better. Thus EA today needs to be aware of custom applications, packaged applica­tions and structured and unstructured data rather than concentrating on the needs of individual department.

Ashwani Chandhok Director-Enterprise Architecture, Oracle

It is shared services that is the most explicit output of an EA exercise. Shared services are those software services that an organisation can share across the various departments so that the benefits (standardization and cost reduction) of the same can be leveraged across the business units.

Again, any investment in IT implies that an organization in the first place will set-up a data center and invest in a server, firewall, storage and networks, etc. An organization with an EA exercise can also arrive at potential horizontal services that can be common and leveraged across the various applications.

Thus it is the potential horizontal services where all the technological innovations will take place and that throws open opportunities for vendors, solution providers (SPs) and all the other people involved in the business.

Master Data Management is another area where technologies will have to be designed to ensure that that the organization has a master copy that can be used for reference purpose in times of dispute.

Again most of the data in the organizations today is unstruc­tured and thus they can have a common large file server and can define the storage space for all the content. So management of enterprise content management/image digitization and process enable­ment are all about automating the business process from end to end.

Thus in future only those technologies will pick up that can help achieve standar­dization, encourage integration and consolidate the various applications on a data center.

So SPs can eye the above space and by offering the above services they can help their customers reduce their organi­zation's operating cost and improve their bottom and topline.

Pooja Sharma
poojas@cybermedia.co.in

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