Applications Services: Frequently Asked Questions
How Should CIOs Align IT With Their Company's Economic Model?
There are time-honored principles for aligning IT with your company's economic model, starting with an understanding of the business architecture.
This business architecture includes:
- Industry context, consisting of changes to the competitive landscape
- Business context, consisting of the company's approach to revenue growth, margin expansion, cash flow and quality
- The business model, which is how the company is organized and governed to deliver value
- Business processes, or how operations work end-to-end to deliver results
The IT architecture must be well-aligned with the business architecture and designed to deliver consistent quality over time. To do so, you must have an application and data architecture that is mapped to durable business processes and technology that is appropriate to the scale at which the company operates. In addition, the IT organization must reflect how the business is organized, and a governance process must be defined to manage investment decisions and trade-offs.
How Should CIOs Go About Establishing a Modernization Plan?
Most major organizations claim to have a modernization plan. Not to have one would be old fashioned. However, successful implementation of end-to-end data and business processes integration requires not only a technology architecture but also a parallel business architecture. You simply can't have a modern business model without modern processes, software and infrastructure that are tightly integrated.
The challenge for CIOs is multifaceted. First, they must grasp the competitive business context of their enterprise and understand the durable processes that drive the business versus organization structures that are perishable. Then they must be able to build a realistic multiyear modernization plan for the enterprise and establish process, data and investment governance structures with the executive team. Finally, CIOs must be able to articulate the value of the above to their business constituents continuously and with passion.
What Is EDS' Approach To Modernization?
Businesses must leverage the knowledge trapped in their legacy systems in order to become more agile. In today's self-service world, your business applications must be able to support changes quickly, while keeping pace with competitors and avoiding disruptions. With EDS, you get a modernization partner to guide you on this journey. We take a holistic approach to modernization. We look at the entire enterprise's information technology (IT) environment and modernize only the applications that will lead to high overall costs and negatively impact performance and quality.
EDS works with the client to create a flexible modernization road map that addresses its critical applications and infrastructure requirements. The applications and the infrastructure are inseparable when it comes to quality, availability and agility of the business processes. Modern applications require a modern infrastructure. Renewed legacy systems and newly developed functionality can be integrated to work in new ways through a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The entire platform must support agile business processes.
Does EDS Use the Same Modernization Strategy For Every Client?
EDS uses multiple modernization strategies to address risk levels, benefit potentials and business priorities of each application:
- Re-learn – Discovery process that captures the intellectual property investment
- Re-factor – Code optimization to improve the run time efficiency of an application
- Re-host – Migration of legacy mainframe applications to lower cost modern platforms
- Re-interface – Process that leverages and extends the application's features and value
- Re-architect – Forward engineering applications to modern SOAs
- Replace – Exchanging legacy applications with standard or newly developed applications
- Retire – Decommission legacy applications from the applications portfolio
What Is the Value and Risk When Technology Is Woven Into the Business Fabric?
Building customer-driven self-service processes with Web-enabled applications that use real-time data requires a rock-solid and secure infrastructure. This type of always-on infrastructure is costly. The expense comes from its intensity – the volume of transactions it has to support and the number of devices such as kiosks, PDAs and pervasive edge devices like RFID tags connected to it. The value of these investments comes from the reduction in labor, improved customer service, market share gained, or dramatically improved supply chain and operations productivity.
What Are the Keys To Winning With IT Today?
The keys to winning with IT today are no different than they were 40 years ago. You need to get alignment right, design the business and its enabling technology with an end-state in mind and deliver new capabilities in an evolutionary way. However, the speed of business has accelerated and the stakes are enormous. Modernization programs have exponentially increased the complexity and risk of IT.