Home Agenda & Programmes Mastermind Keynotes One-on-Ones Hotel & Travel Partners ITxpo Brochure (PDF) Documentation Florence, Italy 10-12 March 2003 San Diego, CA, USA 23-27 March 2003 Orlando, FL, USA 19-24 October 2003 Past Symposium/ITxpo Sydney, Australia 12-15 November 2002 Cannes, France 4-7 November 2002 Tokyo, Japan 23-25 October 2002 Orlando, FL, USA 6-11 October 2002 Johannesburg, South Africa 4-7 August 2002 San Diego, CA, USA 29 April - 2 May 2002 Florence, Italy 8-10 April 2002		Roy Schulte, Gartner Vice President and Research Fellow New Architectures for a New World of Connected Business Thursday, 7 November 2002 Managers of IS groups need to adopt architectures for information and technology that can be applied within and between applications. But they need to accept that some “city planning” will be required to coordinate the structures and that common standards cannot and should not be applied universally. Managers should be selective in the amount of effort they expend on enforcing architecture. This is the advice of Roy Schulte, Gartner vice president and research fellow, speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2002 in Cannes, France on Wednesday. Schulte said that the emergence of virtual enterprises having interconnected “enterprise nervous systems” means “a fundamental shift in information system architecture and business-strategy enablement.” Four forces, Schulte said, are transforming business and the architectures it runs: The collapse of time and distance means shorter product lives, increased competition and blurred business boundaries Shifts to the buyers’ viewpoint means more choice and power to the buyers Erosion of price and margin means that the pace of commoditization is increasing while barriers to entry are falling in some markets Business processes extending across multiple organizations means that workflows are more tightly bound among business partners These pressures mean the emergence of the integrated virtual enterprise to cope with the new, Internet-enabled world of chaotic competition. Within this world, enterprises need to enable application integration across a growing and changing set of independent systems. This, in turn, means that enterprises more than ever have to accept that their preferences for how to design systems and for technical and information architectures cannot and should not be universally imposed. There are three aspects of an enterprise architecture: 1. Design patterns such as two-tier or multi-tier architectures 2. Information architecture such as object and data models 3. Technology architecture such as choices of hardware and software A technology architecture, often defined in a list of preferred products, can reduce variety but it cannot eliminate it. “No single technology standard can be applied across all application systems, departments and time,” says Schulte. Similarly, a formal information architecture cannot and should not be imposed across the entire applications portfolio. But management should still enforce an information architecture within important new applications expected to have long lives. IS departments should maintain a balance between variety and conformity within applications. They should also establish an architecture for exchanges between applications. Schulte said this would be like a city plan providing a framework that organizes the interactions that occur among separate application systems. The city plan should address the same aspects of architecture as those found within systems: design patterns and architectures for information and technology. Schulte says that enterprises should maintain a living city plan within a central integration competency center to provide the mechanism for integrating an enterprise nervous system. This will be different from classic IS architectures just as the skills of a city planner are different from those of an architect. The architecture for applications and the linkages between them need to be specified with clear goals in mind. They then form a key component of the IT strategy for the enterprise and help create a tight linkage between business and IT strategy. The architecture of an enterprise nervous system (ENS) will help enterprises plug into the emerging global “grid” of what Schulte calls “hyper-connected enterprises”. Jonathan Green-Armytage Gartner Staff Back to Overview Focusing the Lessons of Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2002 Mastermind Keynote: Microsoft Puts Costs High on Agenda Mastermind Keynote: The Powerful Cocktail of Real-Time Enterprise More... New Tablet PCs Draw Crowds at ITxpo New Architectures for a New World of Connected Business Choosing Mobile Applications The Powerhouse Vendors: Their Strategies and Challenges Successful CRM Management Requires High-Quality Data New Attitudes Needed to Achieve Successful Sourcing More... 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