Articles

London is by far the largest city in Western Europe. Although the city’s boundaries can be defined in a number of different ways, the City of London is officially defined as The Square Mile at the heart of the financial district. However, others will define London by governing agencies, postal code, or the outer commuter belt, any of which can significantly expand the city’s boundaries.

Numerous articles have been written and research conducted on exactly how one of the world’s most success investors, Warren Buffett, chooses how and where to invest. His methods are not mysterious or convoluted. He looks at three fundamental things:

• The Economics
• The People in Charge
• The Price

Buffett sets a standard in these areas, and if a proposed investment meets the standard, he invests; if not, he doesn’t. That’s it. We all know the success of his method.

Large information technology projects fail too often. The statistics have been disturbing for decades—with seven in 10 enterprise projects not delivering on their promised results. This is important because, over time, the value of your corporate brand and enterprise IT success rate are related.

When enterprise architecture (EA) works well, it is a tremendous asset to the business units that employ it. EA provides the ability to manage complexity across a number of domains, decrease costs, reduce redundancy, increase revenue, improve processes, and expand business opportunities.1

Since the turn of the decade, forward-thinking executives and technologists have pondered how to use enterprise architecture and IT planning processes to drive enterprise strategy. This has not been an easy road.

In the run up to the dot-com bubble, IT organizations went on a spending binge. Most companies purchased technologies without proper due diligence or strategic planning. By 2000, CIOs had a larger share of the enterprise budget than ever before.

During my tenure as editor-in-chief of A&G, I am fortunate to have been exposed to many interesting perspectives on EA written by our contributing authors. In my time as an EA coach, I also have had the pleasure of working with a diverse collection of private and public sector organizations with active EA programs. These two viewpoints afford me the unique opportunity to analyze both what experts are saying about EA as well as how organizations are actually doing EA. Not surprisingly, these two perspectives don’t often align.

In the dynamic business environment of staggering globalized economy, today’s enterprises are more than ever forced not only to react to changing situations but to proactively seek emerging business opportunities that help them stay “ahead of the crowd.” To enable this enterprise agility, it is important for managers to know what their enterprise is good at, and in which parts there is potential for improvement.

Anyone who has ever served as a change agent knows how challenging it can be to run up against die-hard critics, who it often seems will resist change until their last ounce of breath. Of course, not all criticism is bad; that is why we ask people for and encourage “constructive criticism.”

In truth, every criticism, as hard as it may be to hear, can be used constructively—even if it wasn’t meant that way!

What an ISO 20000 audit can tell you about your ITIL implementation without having to do an ISO 20000 audit

ISO 20000 audits are valuable, incisive looks into the way in which service management processes work across your organization. Organizations that choose to do them can gain deep insight into how well they develop and deliver services to their customers. However, audits like these can be extremely difficult and time consuming, and organizations can fall into the trap of working to pass the audit without defining and realizing tangible benefits for the business.

First, let us agree on the meanings of our terms. We see enterprise architecture (EA) as a scientific sub-discipline both of computer science and business management. The twice mentioned word “science” here emphasizes our certainty that EA is an exact discipline able to produce precise approaches and solutions. We also see computer science as the underlying scientific discipline that governs the progress of IT as an industry.