John Schmidt
There Is A Silver Bullet – Really!
Last month in The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in IT I highlighted a disturbing phenomenon – that in highly data-driven organizations that have large IT departments, as they get larger they become less efficient. In short, diseconomies of scale begin to creep in which slow down processes and drive up costs. The article went on to identify the root cause as a high degree of manual IT processes which don’t scale well. The question I will address in this article is what can we do to tackle the problem, and what is it worth? (more…)
The Biggest Application Is Not What You Think It Is
If you are asked “what is the biggest application in your organization”, what would you say? If you’re in banking you might say it’s the Hogan deposit system. If you’re in Telecom maybe it’s the Amdocs Customer Care and Billing system. If you’re in retail, you might say the Retek Merchandizing system. If you are a manufacturer, it might be your SAP ERP system. The list goes on, but you get the point. The prevailing perception is that the core business application of whatever industry you are in is the biggest application. But this is a case where perception is not reality. (more…)
The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in IT
I’ll get to the secret in just a minute, but first an observation about the cost of IT. Forrester has been conducting a cost of IT study for many years with the most recent results published in the 2013 IT Budget Planning Guide for CIOs. The report includes a chart of total IT spending as a percent of revenue by industry and company size. Cost as a percentage of revenue is a key performance indicator for IT efficiency as organizations increase in size. I first noticed a peculiarity in the data in the 2007 study and I was wondering if it had changed over the years – it hasn’t. The observation is this; for many industries, the cost of IT as a percent of revenue increases as organizations get larger. What is going on here? Whatever happened to “economies of scale?” Instead we seem to have “diseconomies of scale!” (more…)
Leading Indicator: 89% of Financial Service Firms Have Adopted ICCs
The latest survey by Informatica Professional Services shows that 59% of enterprises have, or are in the process of, implementing an ICC. The figures vary greatly by industry however. For example, in Financial Service Firms the percentage is 89% while for public sector organizations it is just 25%. What can we take from this? (more…)
Heathrow Airport Security is NOT Lean
This is a Lean Integration story – trust me, it will become clear as the story progresses.
I’ve now passed through London’s Heathrow airport security at least five times in the past year, so that makes me an expert. A common pattern I have observed is when the x-ray scanner notices something “suspicious” (like fluids or creams that should be in a separate clear plastic bag.) Then the nightmare starts. (more…)
A Big Hairy Audacious Vision
Integration technologies have been around for 20 years (as long as Informatica has been in business) and have proliferated in corporate IT. We are now at an inflection point in the business needs and maturity of integration best practices which we can call Next Generation Data Integration (DI). If we’re going to talk about the next generation, then first we need to put a stake in the ground to describe the current, or prior generation. Furthermore, for it to be a “generational” change, it needs to be a significant step-function improvement in how the work is done and in the business value generated by data assets. Or as Jim Collins said in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, we need a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. (more…)
You Don’t Need A World-Class Team To Have A World-Class Competency Center
If your goal is to implement a world class Integration Competency Center (ICC) or COE, the best people you could find to make up the team already work for you. If you don’t currently have technical superstars on your team, you can still have a leading-edge world-class ICC that will “wow” your internal customers every time. You don’t need a world-class team to have a world-class competency center……you need a world-class management system. (more…)
Data: The Currency of Business Process
If money is the currency of commerce, then data is the currency of business processes. The functions of money in an efficient market are to act as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. If you sell your car, you are willing to accept some pieces of paper money (or the electronic equivalent) in exchange because you trust the law and order provided by the legal and financial systems that back it up. Similarly, businesses need data as the currency to facilitate efficient communications across global business processes. A manufacturer is willing to start making things because the distributor’s inventories are running low because the retailer’s sales forecast are increasing because the marketing campaigns are driving increased demand. The players in the value chain (whether inside a company or across organizations) need to trust the data. In short, both money and data require governance. (more…)
Top Seven Favorite Quotes From Lean Integration
The Kindle has a nice feature that is virtually impossible with paper books; it combines the highlighted sections of text (in essence an electronic yellow highlight marker) from all readers and identifies the passages with the greatest number. The View Popular Highlights function shows you passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. Here are the top seven highlighted quotes from Lean Integration[1] as of the end of 2012. (more…)
Data Integration Is Now A Business Problem – That’s Good
Since the advent of middleware technology in the mid-1990’s, data integration has been primarily an IT-lead technical problem. Business leaders had their hands full focusing on their individual silos and were happy to delegate the complex task of integrating enterprise data and creating one version of the truth to IT. The problem is that there is now too much data that is highly fragmented across myriad internal systems, customer/supplier systems, cloud applications, mobile devices and automatic sensors. Traditional IT-lead approaches whereby a project is launched involving dozens (or hundreds) of staff to address every new opportunity are just too slow. (more…)
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