Systems Consolidation - Is it Business or IT Strategy?

While presenting an architecture blueprint targeting consolidation of few applications, one of the meeting attendee asked couple of interesting questions,

1. Why do we need to consolidate?
2. Isn't Systems consolidation more of an IT strategy than a Business strategy?"

Answer to the first question was easy on the lines that consolidation is required as there are multiple duplicated systems supporting similar business processes. Dupliction is costly, increases complexity, reduce agility, impacts productivity, exposes risk etc.

Answer for the second question was the universal answer, "it depends". It could be business driven or IT driven. Multiple systems supporting same or similar business processes in an organization could be because of different reasons and need to be understood before a system consolidation strategy is considered. Following are few reasons that I observed in my experience,

1. Business Silos: Multiple line of business with similar business processes developed systems in isolation.
2. Time-To-Market: Business grew with a very fast pace and new applications were developed for time-to -market reasons for immediate requirements without considering enhancing existing systems or reusing them.
3. Autonomy: Business required to have repetition for autonomy and flexibility reasons.

It also depends upon other factors like organization core business, strategies, products and distribution channels, geographic locations, business model, current state of the applications landscape etc. In some cases multiple systems might be desirable to support the organization business model.
Systems consolidation strategy could be Business driven or IT driven. In the case of a business driven consolidation, a holistic business services analysis can be performed to identify commonalities in the business services/process across multiple line-of-businesses. This top-down approach allows to consolidate systems supporting similar business services. It also considers the organization long-term goals and strategies. However, this requires upfront buy-in and long-term commitment to implement.

IT driven consolidation strategy on the other hand is usually driven to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing the number of systems . It is a bottom-up approach and may focus on moving business logic/data from multiple similar systems to a single system. It may not consider long-term organizational goals/stratgies.

At the end of the day, both strategies work, add value, and help organizations to optimize its resourcess.

Another Modeling Language-ArchiMate

ArchiMate is a modeling language for Enterprise Architecture and recently adopted by the Open Group. I attended a seminar yesterday, "ArchiMate-Adding value to TOGAF" by Remco Blom. Following are few takeaways from this session,

• ArchiMate complements TOGAF ADM in the areas of Business, Information, and Technology
• It’s a higher level modeling language and not a replacement of UML or BPMN.
• It offers a meta model to relate different domains Business, Application, Technology
• It provides visualization for Enterprise Architecture analysis
• There are multiple tool vendors offer support for ArchiMate including , Bizzdesign, Troux, Telelogic,IDSScheer, and Casewise
• The language needs to be enhanced in order to better align with TOGAF
• There are no explicit security view exsit
• Open group announced the launch of the ArchiMate Technical Standard at the upcoming Open Group conference at London.
• The Standard is available in the book form at VanHaren publishers
• Language tutorials are available at http://www.archimate.org/