Senior executives make few choices more critical than deciding which IT investments will be needed for future strategic agility. As it has become increasingly clear that those choices can significantly enable or impede business initiatives, managers must anticipate future strategic moves and make often-complex assessments about how the IT infrastructure must adapt to support the enterprise. Although the goal is to create a unified IT infrastructure that supports long-term, enterprisewide strategies while being responsive to the demands of business-unit strategies, investments by different business units are often made independently. These independent investments are often of a short-term, catch-up or bleeding-edge in nature, and the resulting technologies are often incompatible. Overinvesting in infrastructure leads to wasted resources that weigh heavily on the bottom line. Underinvesting (or worse, implementing the wrong infrastructure) translates into delays, rushed implementations, islands of automation and limited sharing of resources, information and expertise by business units.
Infrastructure investments (say, an enterprisewide customer database or communications network) are often shared across many applications, business initiatives and business units. But sharing requires negotiation about how much infrastructure is needed, who pays for it and who should be responsible for it. To what extent should the IT infrastructure be standard, shared and available enterprisewide? To what extent should infrastructure be customized for individual business units? In what areas should infrastructure capabilities be industry leading?... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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