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Let Insight help your organization strategically align business objectives and IT resources.
Is your company’s information technology (IT) optimally supporting your organizational goals? Do you have a technology roadmap and plan established to ensure IT remains in lock-step with your business? Insight believes that your organization’s business should drive its IT, not the other way around. With this in mind, Insight takes an enterprise architecture approach to IT Assessment to help its clients align their information technology (IT) activities and resources with strategic business goals. Insight views enterprise architecture as being complementary to IT activities inventories and more descriptive of the broader enterprise resources that the IT activities support.
Insight considers four domain perspectives when conducting an IT Assessment: business, information, applications, and technology. This type of a holistic approach allows each of the IT activities to be consistently analyzed and evaluated from the perspective of your company’s domain area.
- Business Domain
Defining the business domain will focus on creating a shared understanding of your company’s operational strategies and goals, organizational structure, management controls, and other business functions and processes critical to organizational success. These determining criteria will be important to help analyze how well each IT activity supports your company’s strategic and operational needs. Any gaps identified when determining specific needs and any promising opportunities for enhancing capabilities will directly impact Insight’s final recommendations for the prioritization of strategies and allocation of resources.
- Information Domain
Defining the information domain will focus on creating a shared understanding of the types of data and repositories of knowledge that are required to support your company’s business domain, independent of software and technology. This understanding is important to help answer questions such as: what types of data are formally and informally collected; what is the quality and comprehensiveness of existing data; what new types of data need to be collected; what is the level of availability and accessibility to existing data; do data redundancies exist; and, do opportunities exist to integrate and aggregate data in order to create meaningful synergies of information?
Analyzing and defining the information domain will also include identifying any formal and informal data models in use by your company such as information architectures and logical and physical data structures. Thinking strategically about the value and ways that data and information is used to support decision making will usually impact IT related strategies and initiatives.
- Applications Domain
The application domain is essentially an inventory of your company’s software applications and business architectures and is closely correlated to the IT activities inventory. The reason to include the business architecture in the applications domain is to help identify the associated business functions and any programmatic interfaces that exist between the inventoried software applications. For example, multiple applications may share a common email messaging or data sharing service that will need to be identified as part of the applications domain since it is important that the business function be understood independent of the technology and infrastructure that it is built upon.
- Technology Domain
Defining the technology domain addresses the physical technology and infrastructure of your company, with a focus on the strategic management of the hardware, application servers, operating systems, productivity software, network and phone, development languages, social networking services, data integration services, and other relevant technologies utilized. The purpose of understanding the technology domain is to ensure that investments in technology are being fully utilized, are cost effective, and provide the support and capabilities needed by the other three domains.
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To see how we can provide the insight to further your organization's goals, contact us now.
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