Economist and financial analyst says the current economical condition is the worst since great depression. The crisis exist in all fronts. The magnitude of global issues are very high. The financial & economical growth are not bright in near future. Companies are looking for cost optimization and eliminating discretionary spending in all areas.
Enterprise architects can play a signficant role in any organization to optimize the current spend and provide facts based data to eliminate the discretionary spending. Enterprise architects are the best qualified and well suited person to perform this role since they understand holistic view of organization from financial, organization, application, business, information and infrastructure perspective.
Potential cost optimization areas where enterprise architects can assist an organization
- Contract negogiation with existing providers (software, hardware, maintenace and enhancement, right sourcing, contractor, professional services)
- Application portfolio assessment – Sundown or eliminate applications in the landscape does not add signficant value to core business processes
- Technology simplification – Eliminate and reduce the technologies in the landscape
- Sourcing strategy – Bundle the applciation for cost effective service offering
- Reduce technological complexity – Migrate the enterprise software (like IBM websphere or BEA weblogic, IBM DB2, Oracle, Portal server and etc)usage to open source software
- Maximize Web 2.0 technology for corporate colloboration- (Use Wiki, Blogs, youtube and etc)
- Assist business teams in optimizing the business processes – reduce steps in return reduce head counts
- Explore to migrate current licensing models to the term based licenses to improve the cash flow of organization
Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others 
Hello Praba,
There needs to be the balance between moving an organization forward like using new collaboration in an enterprise and the total cost of ownership. Do you see enterprise architects developing and selling the business case justifications or just assisting in building them?
Dear Brian,
I envision the most successful enterprise architects would be building strong business cases for organization to optimize the cost structure. Enterprise architecture (as per previous post has 6 perspectives and one of it is financial) provides integrated holistic view of organization and enables enough data points to the EA’s to identify and drive the cost optimization initiatives for organization. Cost optimization does not necessarily means being ideal until the economic turns around.. it is making a wise decision in taking the organization in a direction focusing on transformation initiatives like business innovation, strategic alignment with business and sourcing partner, consultative, nimble,agile.
IT in an business organization (like automotive, Finance) is a business enabler and key objective of IT is to add value to the core business. Over the years, IT organization focused primarily on technologies, technological innovation (use virtual server), IT process improvement (use better tools like CA clarity and etc) and lost sight on providing value to core business. All IT improvements (as mentioned before) are required but that is not the purpose of an existence of an IT organization.
I hope I answered your question and I welcome your comment.
Thank you,
-Praba
interested articie to enhance knowlesge
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