Corporate Investment Banking Innovation

Restating the obvious: Business and IT have planned, designed and operated business systems in a silo-oriented manner with disconnected decisions and actions as to how the business needs to executes and systems are created.

In the first article in this series I stated that there is not silver bullet or single strategy that solves all. There is but, proven methods and successful strategies that multiple firms have employed to attack the legacy problems in their existing datacenter infrastructures and iterate their way towards at once generation datacenters and IT delivery ala Cloud Computing Models.

The most imposing barrier facing Business

The most imposing barrier facing Business and IT organizations today is the lack of comprehensive & holistic insight into how the Business executes across the IT Supply Chain.

An effective strategy to create a common dialogue focus is a system thinking process of "day in a life". How does the business originate, service and fulfill the generation of revenue and servicing of clients. Dimensions of the dialogue need to incorporate the definition of the value chain of the business and how various business processes transcend across this chain in a typically daily process. Variations such a business calendar events, client behavior demographics, demographic coverage and wall clock changes must be identified and understood. As these points of view and understanding are gathered it is essential to ensure that they are captured along with business driver linkages, key performance indicator identification and any associated perceived deficiencies. Ensure all of this is accurately documented, reviewed and signed-off by the business to help prioritize decision-making and support strategy creation.

The key is to NOT stop there

Now the key is to NOT stop there. The Business and IT need to at that time understand and correlate the runtime execution of the business processes across the IT Supply Chain. This means how does transactions, service requests, fulfillment requests, marketing actions, content sharing, online collaboration, financial & compliance reporting in fact occur across the various elements and processes of the IT systems located in their datacenters.

Once the day in the life framework is defined and documented it becomes critical that firms start to gather objective data on usage demographics, performance demographics, economic demographics, system demographics IT Standards demographics (application patterns standards, infrastructure pattern standards, deployment model standards and systems management & monitoring practices. This should be captured in a some kind of portfolio management system linking demand and supply behavioral models that have been captured through the process defined above.

The readers

To some of the readers, the step above is a no-brainer. Others may believe it is unnecessary or not an effective investment of time. In either case, proven strategies and successful IT organizations have a very strong discipline and understanding of current state. It is the organizations that link business value creation with demand prioritization and profiling tied to IT capabilities that will create, implement and operationalize successful transformation strategies of their business and IT operations.

Tony Bishop is former Founder, Chairman & CEO of Adaptivity, a Top 150 Company in Cloud Computing. He is an innovative IT executive, with an excellent track record in strategy, design, and the implementation of business-aligned enterprise research platforms across large organizations. He most recently served as SVP and Chief Architect of Wachovia's Corporate Investment Banking Innovation Group, where his team designed, built, and implemented a leading-edge service-oriented architecture and utility computing infrastructure. Bishop and his former teams have been recognized by the industry with awards from Always On, SYS-CON, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld, Waters, and Wall Street & Research, among others, for their efforts in building world-class technology to differentiate their business. He has 20 years working as a user and as a supplier in various design, strategy, and architecture roles across multiple industries. He is the recipient of "40 in accordance with 40 - Most Innovative IT Leaders," Premier 100 IT Leaders as selected by ComputerWorld in 2007, and a member of Wall Street Gold Book 2007.