Jack Dempsey, Vice President of Research and Development, Exact Software Americas

With little room for error in an uncertain economy, CIOs must consider all aspects of interoperability, integration, accountability, and compliance when managing their IT infrastructures. Otherwise, productivity initiatives rooted in technology will become mired in challenges that erode the value of the IT investment. Regardless of size, today’s businesses are seeking to maximize growth using their existing resources. So how is this achieved in today’s complex IT environment? Here are five handy tips.

1. Make collaboration a reality
Often we think of collaboration primarily as a means to communicate more effectively with colleagues within your organization, but there are actually three critical channels that you must consider to truly make your business environment more collaborative—internal, external, and interdepartmental. Whether you’re working with customers, co-workers, partners, or suppliers, fostering collaboration requires a reduction in the number of systems that do not communicate with one another. For example, customer portals are a well-conceived and useful tool that facilitate communication and cooperation between your business and your customers, but if they’re not tied back to the ERP system, key business processes are not connected and potential productivity gains are extinguished. By integrating your communication systems, the information channeled through them is structured and controlled well enough to actually improve productivity, not impede it.

2. Take the mystery out of your data
Seamless integration of data is an important step, but that only takes us so far. It’s easy to get bogged down trying to figure out what all this information means. There has to be a better way, and there is. By applying business process automation, we can quickly make sense of the wealth of data available. This involves using automated mechanisms designed to alert decision makers about issues outside the norm. For example, management could be instantly alerted if a regular customer has scaled back on purchases or if an error occurs during the manufacturing process. In either case, the organization gains early insight that allows them to take action, capitalizing on new opportunities and reining in potential problems.

3. Avoid static reporting systems
Static reporting systems will show you the data, but they are limited to a single perspective. Multiple perspectives require multiple reports, and that slows down your access to information. Alternatively, business analytics provide multi-dimensional analysis of trends, empowering management to “turn on a dime” in response to rapidly changing economic and market fluctuations and other pressing issues.

4. Limit use of SOA
Seamless integration across business divisions reduces overhead costs. However, be judicious in your application of SOA to achieve this goal. Many businesses intend to use SOA to sew together disparate business systems. The level of effort to do so is substantial but has long-term ROI implications. One could validate well-known and tested middleware solutions that allow for the sharing of data across these islands. Another alternative to consider, short of a SOA rewrite, is to simply expose the desired business logic via Web Services. In either approach, the desired result is to reduce the lost productivity due to the lack of streamlined knowledge sharing across the enterprise. Instead, focus on bringing consistency to technology platforms to create a more productive ecosystem.

5. Rethink regulatory compliance
Maintaining compliance is a dynamic process. Organizations are constantly changing and must always take care to be (or stay) compliant. Attention to staying compliant eats up bandwidth, so try to automate with technology. It’s also important for companies to find and utilize technologies that look after compliance for the entire organization and not just a single compliance issue.

To that end, don’t introduce technology that’s foreign to

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (2 votes)

Reply