Information Technology Architecture as a Practical Tool to Improve IT Management Maturity

By applying IT architecture as a practical tool, IT management can identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the future of business by taking logical steps and linking all-important business aspects.

Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes an underutilized asset or even the business liability. Information and its management cycle are complex. Organizations, especially large enterprises should develop a practical information technology architecture as a framework to concentrate on the business information requirements that support the company’s growth, achieve the value of corporate information as a resource and define how it should be used strategically to best business advantage.

Information Technology Architecture provides a framework in which sound strategic planning can happen grounded in present state realities and translates business initiatives to IT projects: With information as the lifeblood of contemporary organizations, a disruption in the information flows can seriously disrupt processes and production. IT needs to maintain their value in an environment of increasing growth and business complexity. Information architecture like the organization’s nervous system, orchestrates information into the knowledge/insight in enabling business collaboration and optimization. IT management can leverage IT Architecture as a strategic planning and communication tool to keep focusing on top prioritized business issues and be able to see beyond tactical solutions and reach strategic dimensions.

Making an objective IT organizational strength assessment by leveraging IT architecture allows IT budget, resources, and talent aligned with the business strategies/objectives to improve IT effectiveness. IT Architecture is also a useful tool to visualize strategic perspectives and focus on building IT enabled business solutions in anticipating complex problem-solving. Conflicting strategies waste resources and lead conflict behaviors. IT architecture is a practical tool to diagnose and outline the areas where possible conflicting priorities may lie and outline how they are able to be handled by the organization in terms of resource allocation such as time, budget, people, etc, in order to arrive at an optimal solution for the benefit of the entire company.

Information Technology Architecture helps IT management achieve a situational balanced compromise or tradeoff: IT architecture design and deployment are not for their own sake, It has two purposes: one is to describe how IT supports the “maintenance” and “keeping the lights on” efficiently; the other is to describe how IT enables business change, especially the large-scale digital transformation when the current vision is implemented and in the various stepping stages on the way to the “nirvana.” Fundamentally, it's about delivering IT enabled business solutions with continuum. To overcome the “problem-solving” impasse, it’s critical to leverage ITA architecture as a useful facilitation tool to challenge, debate, and learn by applying holistic thinking and opening the dialogues to achieve a situational balanced compromise or tradeoff.

IT architecture helps to shape a longer view which is essential to make sure that the patterns and impacts IT organization is going to provide in business solutions can be sustained not only in the "systems," but in the systems of people. It helps to achieve a situational balanced compromise or a trade-off, also understand IT management in the company scope, facilitate IT-enabled business initiatives, responsibility, objectives, and needed resources to be successful. 

Information Technology Architecture helps IT management improve the growth capacity and maturity of the organization: Companies today tend to focus on the use of verifiable information about the capabilities of both the enterprise itself and its influencers in the ecosystem in which the enterprise operates and brings an understanding of how information technology is managed. The IT architecture can be used as a collaboration instrument to create a decent capability map and it is a high-level diagram describing the key IT-enabled business capabilities and flows to help IT management create an organizational strategy-capability mapping.

IT leaders can use IT architecture as a useful tool to create an abstraction for conveying to the business the value of change by making wise IT investment to improve the growth capacity and maturity of the organization. The value of capability maps is to identify capability patterns of the enterprise, offer insight to senior management in developing focus on what they truly do well and make holistic investment decisions, as well as make a road map that sets goals for strengthening the strength and building differentiated IT-enabled business competency.

A digital IT organization brings greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, and technological touches. By applying IT architecture as a practical tool, IT management can identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the future of business by taking logical steps and linking all-important business aspects such as goals, objectives, actions, etc, together to enforce IT-enabled digital competency, in reaching high-level maturity.

Posted in: EA,Information/Data Management