Innovation through IT Architecture
According to Gartner Group’s 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward “IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy.” The question is now how business and IT strategy can be linked and how a firm can use IT to achieve break-through innovation. Increasingly the answer lies in an development and management approach that focuses on IT architecture. The EBIN programme at Lancaster University is one of a very few programmes that explores this topic.
An IT Architecture-centric approach is based on the understanding that IT systems and strategies must be architected in a manner that creates a portfolio of assets that can be cross-leveraged to reshape IT functions in sync with changing business needs. That means IT’s role has to be understood as far more than a collection of software and hardware applications that implements business functions, but a resource that affords and drives new business functions.
This symbiotic link between business and IT is exactly what modern IT architecture and Enterprise architecture is designed to achieve. An architecture-centric approach to IT development and management can avoid the common operational problems that for too long have plagued organisations: - IT systems that have become unmanageably complex and increasingly costly to maintain. - IT systems that are hindering the organization’s ability to respond to current, and future, market conditions in a timely and cost-effective manner. - Mission-critical information that is consistently out-of-date and/or just plain wrong. - A culture of distrust between the business and technology sides of the organization.
IT architecture is today recognized as one of the key enablers of innovation in large-scale organisations. The MSc in E-Business and Innovation at Lancaster University is perhaps the only programme in the UK that explores the relationship between IT architecture and innovation from a theoretical and practical point of view. Through our collaboration with IBM we are offering the ‘Managing IT Architecture’ module which is taught by practicing IT Architects, who bring real-world experience into the classroom. Our students are thus in a perfect position to shape the innovation agenda of today’s (and tomorrow’s!) firms.
3 years ago • 1 note
