Friday, April 28, 2006
Entropy creates IT portfolios
Nick Malik has a wonderful post entitled: Help wanted: who pays to simplify your IT portfolio? and acknowledges that entropy creates IT portfolios. I recently read an article on Unilever where Accenture won a large-scale deal to convert over a thousand disparate IT systems down into one single instance of SAP. It would be interesting for any Accenture bloggers to provide insight into Nick's questioning as to what they believe the right answer to be?
The one thing that troubles me with how EA is currently practiced by the masses is the lack of acknowledgement of the architecture pendulum. Over time, we will go from glass house centralization to highly distributed back to vendor consolidation and then to distributed service-oriented architectures and back to some other paradigm. While it is IT's job to justify their existence, don't business folks who pay for our salaries simply acknowledge this as the pendulum effect? Why would they even participate or more importantly make long term committments to anything?
| | View blog reactionsThe one thing that troubles me with how EA is currently practiced by the masses is the lack of acknowledgement of the architecture pendulum. Over time, we will go from glass house centralization to highly distributed back to vendor consolidation and then to distributed service-oriented architectures and back to some other paradigm. While it is IT's job to justify their existence, don't business folks who pay for our salaries simply acknowledge this as the pendulum effect? Why would they even participate or more importantly make long term committments to anything?
