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Revolutionizing Supply Chain Management Through Most organizations exist within a complex labyrinth of vendors, suppliers, customers, distributors,and business partners. Understanding and leveraging these supply chain relationships are key success factors in navigating an increasingly interconnected world. To meet this goal, companies should formalize a supply chain alliance in which cumulative benefits exceed what an individual company could achieve on its own. This article discusses basic supply chain challenges and outlines holistic governance structures needed to address those challenges. Synchronize EAI with Tactical & Strategic Initiatives Enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged as the latest information management trend. Unfortunately, a typical EAI scenario is likely to focus on near-term integration tactics and ignore long-term integration strategies. As trends go, EAI is one of the better ones to emanate from software vendors and trade rags in recent years because it is driven by real and immediate business requirements. Gaining ultimate leverage from this particular trend, however, requires blending near-term EAI tactics with ongoing support requirements and long-term information integration strategies. Chaordic Development: Seeking order in a sea of chaos? Chaos in the case of an IT project means being caught up in the miscommunications, politicking, competing agendas and confusion inherent in large-scale IT initiatives. Executives must address the underlying weaknesses causing these failures and this requires leveraging the inherent chaos within these environments. This article discusses how "chaordic" organizing principles can help large-scale IT initiatives succeed where they have failed in the past. Project Team Integration: Halting a Pattern of Failure Consider this familiar scenario. A business unit wants a system replaced, but cannot articulate why or how. IT executives have hired consultants to design a replacement system, but they are not working with the corporate architecture group. The existing support team, depleted by attrition, thinks any redesign effort without their input futile. To top it off, the entire project lacks executive sponsorship. This article suggest a solution. Stop Treating the Symptoms and Treat the Disease? Why do executives spend millions of dollars treating symptoms of systemic information ailments instead of treating the disease? These symptoms include a lack of data and functional integration, inadequate real-time support for customers, sales people and other front-line users, the inability to deliver relevant information to users when they need it and a loss of competitive advantage to more nimble competitors. This article discusses why and how executives must stop treating the symptoms and treat the disease. A Transition Strategy for Moving IT Beyond the Year 2000 Fueled by globalization and the view that existing management structures are becoming more archaic as technology surges forward, corporations are reinventing themselves at a rapidly increasing pace. As we enter the coming millennium, we can expect changes in organizational structures that will make the reengineering craze of the 1990’s pale by comparison. Companies need to craft strategies to use year 2000 project infrastructures as a catalyst to launch IT and business initiatives for next millennium. Knowledge Mining: Business Rule Extraction & Reuse Any organization with a large installed base of legacy systems should consider using business rule extraction, and the reuse of those rules, as a key component of future IT initiatives.This article provides IT organizations with a practical, systematic approach to business rule capture and reuse. Challenge Your Outsourcing Vendors: To fully leverage outsourcing partnerships, you may need to reevaluate the factors that motivated your decision in the first place. Are you offloading undesirable IT functions? Are executives seeking departmental cost reductions? Perhaps management wants to refocus on core competencies. Whatever the initial motivation for outsourcing, avoid pursuing tactical considerations to the exclusion of comprehensive, long-term opportunities. Define your information strategy, and challenge your outsourcing vendors to find a way to help get you there. Realigning IT with Business Strategies Business executives face some difficult decisions as they examine the post year 2000 landscape. Business executives must reassess how they can more effectively leverage IT resources by realigning information architectures with corporate business strategies, otherwise, the gap between IT and business will grow wider and corporations will suffer. Business Process Reengineering and the Legacy Systems Challenge Business process reengineering (BPR) allows management to realign organizational functions along more strategic lines. Companies should examine processes now supporting the business and redesign those processes to reflect more efficient ways to achieve organizational goals. BPR is not an isolated phenomenon in today's highly automated environments.This article integrates BPR and legacy migration strategies. Legacy Business Rule Capture: Last Piece of the Redevelopment Puzzle Whether driven by redesigned business processes, cost issues or other factors, IT has been chartered with providing organizations a competitive edge through information technology. The objective of the majority of these systems "redevelopment" efforts is to replace, integrate or somehow accommodate legacy systems to more effectively meet business goals. By some estimates, over seventy percent of today's companies have or are performing business process reengineering (BPR). BPR realigns business processes along more strategic lines by examining current processes and redesigning those processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness. As more organizations launch BPR projects, one issue becomes painstakingly clear. Radically altering business processes within highly automated work environments typically requires modification to the information systems that support those processes.This article outlines how to deal with this challenge. |
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