Why Technology Automation?

Technology modeling provides companies with a mechanism for keeping up with five important industry trends:

- Team members and managers need to be able to trace individual technology assets back to the processes that they support and ultimately to the business objectives that they are intended to facilitate.

- IT managers are being asked to control costs and maximize the value of their investments in technology.

- More than ever before, technology specialists need to visualize integration points and improve how technology systems work together.

- Companies need a single, unified view of their IT assets, so that they can deploy and enforce standards and develop a technology architecture that is both extensible and durable.

- The IT department needs to improve coordination with vendors , including software and hardware manufacturers and service providers.

Technology Decisions Should Trace Back to Business and Process

The first and most important argument in favor of technology automation is that it provides a vehicle for the team to start with each individual IT asset that is proposed for the project, and then trace each asset back to the processes and business objectives that it supports. This is, of course, the primary purpose of all the activities of BTM, but it's a point worth bringing up specifically during our discussion of technology automation because some of the most egregious cases of the business/technology disconnect are spread by the "technology for the sake of technology" misconception . By cross-linking elements in the technology model to corresponding elements in the process and business models, managers can trace back expensive IT decisions (to install an ERP package or purchase a new application server, for example) to the business rationale that is behind them, helping to reign in the notorious fascination that technology specialists often seem to have with the latest and greatest inventions .

Pressure is Increasing to Manage IT Costs

The second trend that is driving companies to examine technology automation is an increased awareness of how IT costs are weighing down the business. Since many of the tangible costs that are involved in a typical project are either the result of specific IT assets (acquiring new or updated packaged solutions, hardware, and networks) or the indirect result of such systems (software development, package implementation, integration, support costs, and so on), a technology model can be a powerful tool for making sure that companies get the most bang for their IT buck.

This is why it is important to link technology models directly with IT asset management, a discipline that aims to catalog financial, contractual , and configuration information about key software and hardware assets. Technology modeling helps companies make intelligent decisions about where to deploy existing assets, what new assets need to be purchased, and what assets have become old or obsolete; it represents an ideal opportunity to make sure that assets are used as efficiently as possible. Companies can achieve this goal by establishing standards in the model that make it easier to develop and integrate new assets, and by identifying existing assets in the technology model that can be reused in upcoming projects. This last point is especially true for legacy systems, which, although they may be a key part of the technology infrastructure, have been in place for so long that the current IT team has never taken the time to catalog their full capabilities. By examining legacy systems during the course of technology modeling, IT project teams often find that they can reuse existing functionality rather than reinventing the wheel with newer technologies.

Research shows that technology models ”especially when coupled with business and process models ”help companies manage IT costs. In one extreme example, META Group describes how "a consistent mapping of business drivers, the IT capabilities used to enable them, and the underlying IT resources (e.g., infrastructure, applications) enabled IT executives to cut 30,000 worker hours and $135 million from their 2001 IT project list." ^[1]

Integrating Disperse IT Systems Is More Important Than Ever

Cost management isn't the only reason that standards are important during technology automation. Standards also help to promote unified technology architecture, making it easier to integrate and share data between otherwise isolated systems. Today's IT environment is characterized by the increasing number and complexity of enterprise applications. But, with competing, proprietary vendors jockeying for position within the market, integrating information from each platform remains a huge challenge. Meeting this challenge, in fact, is one of the most important advantages that technology automation provides: By providing a unified view of IT assets it discourages one-off technology architecture decisions that only take into account what is best for the current projects. (This is similar to end-to-end impact analysis which is discussed in Ch. 3, since it helps decision- makers avoid a myopic point-of-view and instead, take the complete, big picture into account at every decision point.)

Technology Architecture Needs to Be Extensible and Agile

Another advantage of technology automation is that the standards captured in the model promote extensibility in the technology architecture. Even after the "dotcom bust," technology innovation continues to progress at a blistering pace, so companies can't afford to lock themselves into a static IT environment. Instead, CIOs need to make sure that their IT investments meet today's latest standards, and also whatever standards tomorrow may hold.

Since predictive modeling is by definition preoccupied with designing the future state of a system, it makes sense that technology modeling would be a prime predictor of upcoming IT change. In the general sense, technology automation helps to promote unified standards and holistic design decisions, which make it easier to modify the technology architecture to reflect changing technologies, business processes, and so on. More specifically, the extensibility enabled by technology automation helps companies to improve the speed and agility with which they can put new technology to work. Ultimately, this lowers the barriers against IT change, and helps companies to focus on low-risk, short-term projects that make incremental changes rather than long- term , high-risk projects that aim to make many major changes all at once. This shift, of course, has impacts that ripple out beyond BTM to include things like culture and the organization.

IT Departments Want Closer Communication and Collaboration With Vendors

The final trend that is driving companies towards technology automation is the increasing importance of interaction and collaboration with technology vendors who provide software, hardware, integration services, and out-sourcing. IT departments make huge financial investments in technology vendors, both in terms of the actual contracts themselves and in related support, implementation, and upgrade costs, so choosing the wrong vendor can add astronomical costs and time delays to almost any IT project.

Technology automation helps to improve how project teams collaborate with vendors to limit the risk of cost and time overruns. In general, technology models make it easier to link requirements to the real software and hardware that supports them. In doing so they provide visibility into how specific packages can (or cannot for that matter) meet the project's ultimate goals. One obvious time when technology models can help to make better decisions is during the vendor selection process; the project team can attach a model to their request for proposal (RFP), and then compare each vendor offering directly to the model to determine the appropriate package. This same interaction can also be facilitated in reverse, when vendors supply potential customers with models that describe how their offerings work off-the-shelf. In addition, technology models can function as an intermediary between the IT department and technology integrators or out-sourcing services. META Group, in fact, predicts that by 2005 over 40% of Global 2000 companies will "promote architectural alignment in sourcing, as early adopter successes become apparent." ^[2]