Investing in a business aligned IT solution

IT Alignment has proven to be, it is no longer sufficient. The pace of business change and the rate of technology innovation are both accelerating to the point where business and IT are converging. The increasing rate of IT purchases by lines of business is certainly a key indicator that this is occurring. Some may even predict the commoditization into an operational support and management role, as if structured IT will soon become a computing utility while digitized innovation becomes a core line of business responsibility.

Regardless of the term used to describe it, successful enterprises are already beginning the journey to the future, defined by the following attributes:

• Fully leverages existing investments Whether used just for back office functions such as Finance or for common customer facing processes such as Order Management, ERP systems are not going away and in fact continue to be supported and enhanced by ongoing development. ERP systems serve the critical business requirements for a system of record and a compliant transaction engine. In order to bring digital innovation to the enterprise, IT leaders need the ability to leverage and build upon ERP investments rather than ripping and replacing core functionality.
• Delivers unique and agile business processes outside of ERP Such processes need to exist outside of ERP, whether as best of breed applications or services, either on premise or in the Cloud. By decoupling such business processes from ERP, enterprises can achieve the process agility that the business needs while delivering the standardization from ERP that the enterprise needs.
• Ensures cross platform process interoperability All too often cross-platform processes run through batch interfaces or fixed, point to point integration, resulting in process latency or costly workarounds as applications change and integration is broken. Furthermore, such processes often run unmonitored, resulting in costly errors. Cross platform business processes need to run as efficiently as they do within a single application.

Overall this is a key process from an IT point of view as a means to making a businesses IT run a lot more effectively.