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My last 2 posts in this subject have centered on how the CIO has a plethora of competing forces and factors influencing their decisions and how we can help to stem some of this by looking to break the enterprise down into smaller sub-sets determined by unique business units. Even still attempting to comprehend potentially hundreds or even thousands of applications, there functional purpose, inter-linked processes and the impact of change on the people defining, developing and supporting them is no easy task. To enact real change and deliver a vision or strategy for that change requires the ability to understand or know enough whilst not being bogged down by the detail. You need to understand how much of your IT estate is viable for the future mode of operation without remediation, how much should be demised either through not being core or strategic to the business or through aged IT that is no longer fit for purpose. Finally you need to know which applications are strategic and would benefit from re-investment providing cloud native capabilities delivering high-value outcomes to your business.
Knowing this at a high-level allows you to build a vision of the future for your enterprise. You and others can begin to visualize change – a key contributor to success. You can begin to build financial models that release costs after successful transformation of demised, re-platformed or modernized applications. You will have a grasp of the size/shape and effort required to deliver the transformed services, allowing for operating models to be built and populated as you transform. This abstracted view allows you to understand the complexity of transformation without being hindered by detail. Yes, there will always be surprises – applications that are more complex than first thought, cross-functional dependencies, license restrictions and geographical nuances. But wouldn’t they have been there anyway? And if you are transforming 1000’s of applications and services these surprises will always be the exception to the rule. You will however now have a clear strategic view of your enterprise application portfolio that will allow you to execute on a future state vision underpinned by fact. Not a bad place to be. In my next post I will discuss how we can analyze and finally deliver a transformed enterprise that will help you finally deliver your primary objectives of reducing cost, increasing value and improving agility. The post Perfectly Placed for a Federation Transformation – Abstract & Understand appeared first on InFocus. |
