Current Issues

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Traditionally, IT works with the business owners, who are influenced by application vendors. This results in IT strategies that are application or integration-focused. In addition, governance and funding models have pushed both business and IT stakeholders to do whatever it takes to meet a particular business unit or department need. This results in many “one-off” applications that may or may not be integrated into the existing architecture.

Mergers and acquisitions introduce new software platforms and methodology to an already fragmented architecture, but IT rarely has sufficient resources to complete business systems integration. As a result, IT often ends up deploying multiple systems that perform the same tasks within an enterprise or business unit. Redundant infrastructure solutions for authentication, single sign-on, and data marts, as well as applications (packaged and custom), such as sales force automation (SFA), quoting, and order management compound the complexity and cost for IT. It becomes nearly impossible—and definitely impractical—to modify this portfolio to reflect a change in a business process or accommodate an acquisition.

In many organizations, IT groups integrated these siloed systems using a point-to-point approach that connected the application to both upstream and downstream systems. To track the transactions across the business process, IT propagated some key values across the applications—sometimes inconsistently—and created different operational data stores for each business unit to track key performance indicators. Then, to provide a seamless user experience, IT frequently built portal applications to connect to multiple backend applications, data marts, and master data.

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While effective from an architectural standpoint, such solutions are extremely complex and expensive to maintain or extend. These solutions are difficult to modify, so when the business asks for a change, IT is slow to respond. This creates a perception of conflict.