IT directors and chief information officers need to develop IT
strategies that help businesses to operate flexibly, which allows
them to adapt quickly to ever-changing market forces.
The role of IT has traditionally been to define standards for
technology and processes as part of an overall IT strategy. This
strategy is often called an enterprise architecture. However,
analyst Gartner has warned that such architectures are unable to
cope with the dynamic nature of businesses. Rather than define what
IT products to standardise on, Gartner recommends IT departments
focus on defining formats and protocols.
During the Enterprise
Architecture 2008 summit this week in London, Gartner
distinguished analyst Nick Gall urged delegates to look at real
world successes of
flexible systems such as Swift, the banking exchange network,
Salesforce.com and the
UK's NHS Connecting for Health programme. He said such system
have succeeded because of their inherent flexibility.
Swift connects 8300 banks in 203 countries using a small set of
standards for inter-bank communications. Salesforce.com's Force
platform defines just 17 application programming interfaces, yet
the product can be adapted to any enterprise application area. The
NHS's electronic prescription service defines a handful of IT
protocols that enables GPs and pharmacies to exchange patients'
prescriptions.
The benefit of these systems is that they do not specify IT
products, just a small number of formats required to comply with a
business process. "The GP and pharmacist can run their business any
way they want as long as their software is complaint with the
e-prescriptions standard," Gall said.