The Ongoing Debate - Enterprise Architects

Interesting article that sheds more light on my posts focused on the role of Enterprise Architects. This article is from IT Business Edge...

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/lawson/three-unusual-places-to-find-enterprise-architects/?cs=36356&utm_source=itbe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EEB&nr=EEB

The Onshore Advantage: A Guide to Evaluating IT Outsourcing Options

Over the last decade there has been a significant focus on outsourcing and offshoring critical Information Technology (IT) functions using a variety of outsourcing models and global locations. Business leaders and IT executives now have a myriad of choices available to assist with reducing IT costs, increasing productivity, managing business surges, and shortening timelines to bring products to market. Today, geographic location is more critical than ever to ensure that you meet your organization’s IT strategy, project and corporate goals.

“Previously, clients were willing to deal with substandard work because the labor rate and free rework made it acceptable, but as offshore rates and other costs climb, client tolerance for poor work has dropped dramatically.” -Forrester Research, Inc.

Based on a number of offshoring concerns that have been raised over the last few years, North American-based outsourcing locations have become increasingly popular due to a robust civil infrastructure, access to skilled resources, lower security risk, similar time zone access and comparable business culture. These onshore locations meet a variety of financial and business case objectives without the risk of what is referred to as the “hidden costs” of offshoring. Such costs include the additional investments that typically manifest themselves over the course of time, such as business continuity, disaster recovery and security. For example, your organization’s outsourcing strategy and business case needs to include the impact of rolling services back to internal resources during connectivity and environmental outages.

Download the white paper: " The Onshore Advantage: A Guide to Evaluating IT Outsourcing Options" at http://www.oaot.com

Data Center Transformation and Consolidation

With a centralized and consolidated data center capability, organizations can reduce the cost of IT operations, provide organizational sustainability and serve the needs of an expanding virtual workforce. Below offers a strategy ensuring minimal impact to operations through every phase of the data center relocation and consolidation process, as follows:

Methodology – addresses critical inputs, outputs and system inter-dependencies Strategy – identifies stakeholders, success criteria and schedule milestones
Discovery – baselines interconnection points and common infrastructure resources
Design – employs industry best practices for a comprehensive and detailed plan
Planning – verifies the backup of all systems for a more systematic migration
Execution – completes action plans, operating procedures and testing to achieve project success


There is a white paper available at http://www.oaot.com

IT to Business Alignment Discussion

Interesting discussion on the role of IT in IT to Business alignment...

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=51825&discussionID=4852736&sik=1246995581726&trk=ug_qa_q&goback=%2Eana_51825_1246995581726_3_1

Federal Technology - The New Federal CTO

Change has been a message we have all heard allot about in the recent months and years heading into the election. Some change is good and some not so good. This post will explore the really good change with the Obama administrations approach to Federal IT and the appointment of a new Federal cabinet level CTO. 

First of all this is not a post about politics or old ways of thinking, it is about what makes sense to take our country into a new millennium with new ideas for sustainable prosperity. While working for Northrop Grumman and consulting to the various civilian agencies across the federal government it become very clear the redundancy in IT initiatives. Each agency although unique in their mission does share common elements of their IT portfolios. HR, Finance, CRM (more constituent management and outreach), Logistics, Supply chain are all good examples of common business functions supported by technology. It just makes sense to consolidate these under one roof and address the common requirements with a standard platform and look at the unique ones separately. 

Having a federal level CTO is a great step in the right direction of potentially one day having a cabinet level agency that was the IT Organization across the federal government. In order to really make this a really we need to address some of the following top level issues:

Budget: Majority of the IT budgets should roll up under the federal CTO and the agencies should subscribe to the IT services required. The individual agencies should only be given a small IT budget to address unique IT issues and areas requiring high clearance levels.

Mandate: This needs to be mandated not a choice otherwise no one will allow this to happen especially if they still retain budget authority.

Mission: The mission must be clear and concise and begin to abandon legacy thought processes and systems and focus on cost reduction rather than increasing budgets.