Examining an Organization s Application Infrastructure Reality

Examining an Organization's Application Infrastructure Reality

It is a well known fact that more IT expenditure goes to "gluing" or even loosely "stringing" applications together than to their actual software development effort. Also, it is very common to see disparate islands of application infrastructure proliferating throughout an organization, creating unique and interoperable application development, deployment, and administration environments, which ultimately hinders application infrastructure reuse. Having multiple, disparate, and non-negotiating application infrastructure environments within an organization defeats the purpose of application infrastructure and is not a strategic direction toward attaining technical agility. But application infrastructure is not a new concept, so why has it not been leveraged to avoid such a landscape?

In general, organizations typically evolve with a few application infrastructure standards. These standards are typically derived from business influences or from the experiences or skills possessed by senior technical staff, and in the short term these standards are closely followed, even for the purchase of vendor-based business solutions. However, information technology history has proven that over time at some point this governance will be broken, potentially leading to application infrastructure chaos within an organization.

This problem stems from the fact that during an application infrastructure standardization effort, little or no emphasis is placed on developing processes for evaluating the current application infrastructure standards against emerging technologies, which is the underlying reason why organizations are slow or incapable of adopting new technologies. Hence, there is no strategic balance between the need for application infrastructure standardization and the opportunity to leverage emerging technologies.

The ramifications for such an imbalance are huge and can surge through an organization like a tsunami. For example, organizations through their respective business units must respond quickly and cost effectively to industry and customer requirements to be competitive. For this reason, the mantra is to always leverage existing application infrastructure investments before investigating new options for resolving a business solution. The danger arises when a time-to-market business solution is required by a business unit and an organization's current application infrastructure standards will not suffice. At this point, the impetus is to deliver the business solution, implying any inhibiting application infrastructure standards will be sacrificed to implement that business solution if the need arises.

Note

Portal and B2B integration solutions are classic examples in which organizations have invested in binding and proprietary technologies in an ad hoc manner through the lack of organizational application infrastructure standards for emerging technologies.

Over time and with no evolution to the application infrastructure standards, business units will slowly lean toward becoming autonomous IT decision- makers to satisfy their own application infrastructure requirements, which can have the following negative consequences:

• The technical environment within and between business units may increase in complexity and heterogeneity.

• Stovepipe applications built on nonreusable technology may emerge.

• Application integration efforts between business units may evolve in a nonstructured and technologically inconsistent manner.

• Business units may become locked into proprietary application infrastructure technologies, which are promoted through cost-saving incentives provided by one or more of the application infrastructure software vendors .

• The technical staff required to support the business solutions will either be overwhelmed or just have too much technical focus on their own unique technical environments to be cross-functionally productive.

Eventually, an organization will recognize that the application infrastructures between its business units are becoming diverse, restraining the possibilities of integrating existing business solutions in a cost-effective manner. At this point, the organization is forced to begin a standardization effort again to narrow the application infrastructure technology selection to the most favorable for the current and future organizational needs. Whether a process will be implemented to evaluate the application infrastructure solutions against emerging technologies is debatable.