The one thing you can count on to be constant is change, especially in business. And, as the pace of business change continues to accelerate, organizations need to be increasingly agile in the face of sudden market shifts, new competition, changing customer behaviors, cascading mergers and acquisitions, and fast-evolving technologies and standards.
Agility requires having to change business processes and rules more frequently, and constantly finding ways to leverage new types of information and complex new combinations of information — including existing enterprise information from mainframes, legacy applications and metadata, plus an unprecedented flow of information from outside the enterprise in the form of supplier, industry and customer data.
New data collection technologies up-the-ante even further. Web services have dramatically enhanced our ability to collect new types of data from outside the enterprise while Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) initiatives promise new magnitudes of unique real-time data that somehow has to be consolidated, cleansed, transformed and deciphered.
Keeping Up
Here’s the problem: IT complexity is outpacing the ability of enterprises to keep up. Companies have more sources of information to harness, more data to integrate, and more people clamoring for more types of information (faster, better and cheaper) than ever before.
IT departments are already challenged to react. Changes in information conditions, requirements and environments are coming too quickly and resources are often too stretched for companies to adapt fast enough. IT departments have reached the point where the only recourse is to shift the burden onto existing systems with people providing the direction.