Realistically, this cultural shift takes place in spurts. "You don’t wake up one day and it’s a different culture," he says.

Companies also need a measure of resolve to succeed. Often, a crisis makes it clear why change is necessary. Other times, company leaders have the charisma or force of personality to effect the change. At TD Banknorth, Petrey implemented a ruthless approach to standardization for acquired companies. "We do rip and replace," he says. That way, he says, platform heterogeneity can’t get a toehold in the organization.

Collaboration Time

As an organization gets its platforms standardized, the next logical place to look for efficiencies is business and IT processes. For example, chemical manufacturer Celanese saved about 40 percent of its IT costs through its four-year standardization and consolidation effort, notes CIO Karl Wachs, in which the company rolled seven data centers into one and 13 ERP systems into one. The consolidation began in Stage 2 as a platform effort and was completed in Stage 3, when the company could begin the business-process standardization needed to run the company on one ERP system.

Understanding business processes sufficiently to standardize them is no small feat, says Wachs. It requires intense collaboration between IT and the business. But the effort helps both groups understand that different business units use many of the same core processes. "Our base chemicals unit works differently than our plastics groups, for instance, so they have different sales processes and thus different implementations of CRM," Wachs says. "But, in reality, they are different flavors of the same functionality, so we could put all the functions in one system and make them configurable for each of the business lines."

To do the deep analysis required to come to these realizations, you need ongoing metrics, Wachs says. Without them, you can’t assure proper governance of your services, much less of your business processes. ZapThink’s Schmelzer points out that governance in this case means both the policies for specific business and IT processes and the system by which the enterprise decides how it creates and deploys its business and IT systems, such as architectural review requirements and funding priorities.

Moving from the second stage to the third can produce subtle benefits. At TD Banknorth, the business units needed more sophisticated products to compete. That required IT to keep improving its abilities and levels of sophistication. At the same time, cost pressures require the CIO to deliver these more sophisticated tools with the same level of resources. This pressure leads to an optimization approach, bringing the enterprise into the third architecture stage.