Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »August 01, 2001 — CIO —
Not so long ago, enterprise architecture was the loser at any business mixer: big, unwieldy, unyielding and nearly always out-of-date. Heck, architecture wasn’t even invited to the three-year rave party hosted by Y2K, Nasdaq and the letter e. But when the nightclub door finally opened and corporate America staggered out, wincing in the daylight and fresh out of cash, there was architecture, looking better than it had in years.
While the tech party is over for now, CIOs are re-embracing the corporate standardized platforms and applications that compose enterprise architecture as a way to contain costs and ensure business alignment. But this time around, the focus is on flexibility. As companies struggle to regain control but retain enough vision to accommodate the next big thing, some are building an architecture that’s rock steady on the bottom with quite a bit of play on top. Think of a well-built skyscraper with upper floors that intentionally sway in the wind.
That design may give some CIOs vertigo, but not David Watson, a longtime IT executive who has served as corporate vice president of technology at several Fortune 500 companies. Though Watson puts his foot down?hard?when it comes to choosing IP protocols, networking operating systems and cabling, he’s willing to give ground at the database/hardware/OS level and, at the top, is perfectly happy to support a fairly wide range of business applications?provided, of course, they return strategic value.
"We are quite rigid at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that actually improves our ability to flex in the upper tiers," says Watson, now CIO at Enfrastructure, an Aliso Viejo, Calif., startup offering outsourced infrastructure and facilities to other companies. "You have to have an architecture, and it has to be flexible, but some parts should be less flexible than others."
If enterprise architecture developed a bad reputation in the past couple of years among business users, it was well deserved at least some of the time, according to Peter Weill, director of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research in Cambridge, Mass. "Architecture was presented as a standards issue at a very technical level. [CIOs] took a one-size-fits-all approach that was driven by best practices in IT, which was the worst approach," Weill says. Architecture should indeed be driven by best practices, he notes?but in business, not technology.
For Watson, that means focusing attention and spending resources on the task-specific, sometimes customized applications that drive particular business units, including best-of-business front ends, Web enablement and custom XML development. "The application decision should always be predicated on business requirements," Watson says, "but if someone’s proposing a solution that requires a different level of support, you should have the ability to do it."