IT Is Like a Box of Chocolates

In a well-known fable, a group of blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each encounters a different part of the animal, and not surprisingly, provides a very different description. In the business world, IT is very much like that proverbial elephant.

Untold sums of money get invested in IT. Yet, the business people writing the checks understand precious little about how all that money actually gets spent, or where costs can be trimmed.

I imagine business people may understand hardware costs. Those represent tangible pieces of equipment that can be physically viewed or touched. But what about software? I'd guess that's a completely different story.

Some might say that business people don't need to understand the complexities of IT software. They should simply be able to depend on their IT professionals to do that thinking for them. My opinion, though, is that that strategy isn't working particularly well which is why there is such a strong desire on the part of business people to shift responsibility to some external third party -- either an application software vendor like SAP or Oracle, or an outsourcer like EDS or IBM. There's a problem, though, with that approach. You see, information technology continues to grow at exponential rates.

According to Ray Kurzweil, one of the most remarkable and prolific inventors of the late 20th century, "It's the power and adoption of information technologies that moves exponentially." He points out, in a CNET article, that "thanks to Moore's Law and other exponential growth rates, by 2030 a $1 computer will be as powerful as the human brain." How can any reasonable, responsible business person choose to ignore knowing about IT? The World Wide Web, for all intents and purposes, is all of just ten years old. RFID has barely yet inched its way into supply chains. Who could possibly have imagined that CDs would already be almost as obsolete as vinyl records or audio tapes?

Of course, in the world of software, IT professionals themselves are often mired in confusion. IT resources are usually organized as a set of more-or-less independent silos. Each silo is responsible for a distinct enterprise function or application. This isolation is becoming increasingly untenable.

As when listening to the blind men, it can be dangerous to know what reality lies behind their descriptions -- whether and how the different pieces fit together. In effect, business people (as well as IT professionals) need a description of the IT elephant that they can understand and trust. That involves transforming from vertical silos to horizontal integration.

It's the role of "architecture" to describe the IT elephant -- to provide the big picture view. I say "picture" because human beings are predisposed to process information visually. More than 70% of our neurons are dedicated to processing visual information. Sight is unquestionably the sense we humans depend on most for navigating the world around us.

Blueprints are almost synonymous with architecture in the world of construction. These drawings are visual representations that people can grasp and understand. Software architecture, too, needs pictures, illustrations, drawings, graphical representations, so that people can comprehend what's being described.

There are many forms of software architecture. Some deal with individual programs or systems. Others describe business processes, or entities & relationships. One type, Technical Architecture, seeks to illustrate and explain an enterprise's technology portfolio.

When someone looks at past technology investments, what they see is "like a box of chocolates." It's impossible to tell what's inside. IT organizations need to be able to provide something akin to Whitman's Sampler, the first box of candy to come with its own index -- a diagram in the box lid showing the filling in each candy. The index may well be credited with bringing to an end the era of candy pinchers -- those unpopular people who poked a finger into a chocolate coated piece to find out whether it was a caramel or a cream.

The Long Tail

Companies who ignore the impact of Information Technology do so at their own peril. Entire industries can be rapidly disrupted.

In the past, standard economic demand curves almost always followed a simple 80-20 rule where 80% of sales were generated by 20% of hit products. Nowadays, however, non-hits, or niches, is where new growth is coming from. This is what the Long Tail is all about -- describing how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to millions of niches. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better.

Accoring to Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Chris has a blog called The Long Tail as well as an article with the same name published in the October 2004 edition of Wired. Below are some edited excerpts from that article:

There is an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics.

The main problem is that we live in the physical world and that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment.

The first is the need to find local audiences. An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands. In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops.

The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming.

Hits fill theaters, fly off shelves, and keep listeners and viewers from touching their dials and remotes. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, sociologists will tell you that hits are hardwired into human psychology, the combinatorial effect of conformity and word of mouth. And to be sure, a healthy share of hits earn their place: Great songs, movies, and books attract big, broad audiences.

But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

As egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume.

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks. The Rhapsody demand keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre.

Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well -- niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.

As CEO of a small, entrepreneurial software firm, I'm personally fascinated by the power of the Long Tail. My company sells niche products targeted to IT organizations that want to communicate their Technology Architecture in order to standardize and consolidate. In terms of the overall market for Manageware products sold by CA, IBM Tivoli, BMC, HP, and scores of other firms, the niche my company competes in lives along the Long Tail. Hopefully, over time more and more companies will discover us especially since we can help IT organizations reduce their technology portfolio costs by at least 10 percent.

A Culture of Standards

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation, writes about the culture of standards that the Internet brought to the IT industry. Below are edited excerpts from his blog entitled "Business Innovation in an On Demand World":

Before the Internet era, technology companies competed with each other to try to establish control points with their proprietary interfaces and protocols. The Internet showed everybody how much more valuable IT becomes when you can connect and access everything regardless of vendors, and started the IT industry on a whole new strategy based on embracing open standards.

The rise of standards is misunderstood and even feared by many who see it as a commoditizing influence on the IT industry. But, standards that can turn businesses into commodity providers with price as their chief competitive differentiation, can turn other businesses into successful innovators, who will leverage those standards to quickly and efficiently create differentiated offerings. In other words, far from just commoditizing what businesses and individuals do, a standards-based Internet is unleashing vastly more customization and individuality. It is making its users feel empowered, distinctive -- special.

History has shown us that over time, all successful technologies and services become increasingly standardized and available to more and more people at lower and lower prices. But history has equally demonstrated that those same standards open up enormous new areas to people's innovative capacities.

I find it fascinatingly revealing to juxtapose IBM's position on standards as expressed by one of its leading strategists with that of its longtime archrival Microsoft.

In case you haven't been following the news of late, my home state of Massachusetts has once again created quite an uproar vis-a-vis Microsoft. You might recall that Massachusetts, and Massachusetts alone, held out after the Department of Justice and a number of other states settled their landmark antitrust suits against Microsoft, long after Judge Thomas Jackson handed down his original decision finding Microsoft guilty of violating antitrust laws (see a column I wrote a long time ago entitled "Microsoft Makes Massachusetts Mad"). Last week, Massachusetts state officials approved a proposal to standardize desktop applications on the OpenDocument format. The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC (Word), XLS (Excel), and PPT (PowerPoint) formats used by Microsoft Office, as well as Microsoft Office Open XML format (see my earlier blog posting entitled "XML Uber Alles"). This decision by Massachusetts officials effectively eliminates Microsoft, which has chosen not to support OpenDocument, from the state's procurement process.

Microsoft, it should be noted, could add native support to Office for OpenDocument , but won't.

People from Massachusetts know, perhaps better than anywhere else, how proprietary companies can fall by the wayside. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the center of the minicomputer universe was based in the corridor between Routes 128 and 495. But once great companies like DEC, DG, Wang, and Prime are all now essentially gone because they were stuck in their ways.

The question is, in a world of open standards, how does Microsoft justify closed-format documents? Only the market can provide the answer. In the meantime, I find it terribly ironic that IBM, once the world's most proprietary company ever, is today leading the standards charge while Microsoft, the company that along with Intel disrupted technology forever, is now cast as the great defender of proprietary.

Cardiac Pats & Sox

My beloved New England Patriots beat an immensely talented Pittsburgh Steelers team with yet another last second field goal by Adam Vinatieri and yet another Joe Montana-ish performance by quarterback Tom Brady -- all the while overcoming immense adversity once again after losing safety Rodney Harrison and tackle Matt Light. I just can't imagine how anyone cannot love Bill Belichick's boys.

Meanwhile, the Olde Towne Team, also known as the Boston Red Sox, are tied with the same exact record as their archenemy, the New York Yankees. Everyone in Red Sox Nation is scared to death that their hearts will soon be broken as the season winds down with a head-to-head showdown between these two ancient rivals. Last year, when Beantown won its first World Series in 86 years, it was mostly because of the Yankees unprecedented, Red Sox-like, big choke. I can't wait for these two teams to face off for the final three games of the season.

I've got to believe Boston's hospitals, renowned for being among the best in the world, are leaders in treating sports fan-related cardiac arrests.

Roberts Rules

Judge John Roberts will be the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It's really sad, though, that only three Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to support him -- Leahy, Kohl and Feingold.

There's no question that Judge Roberts is a conservative. So is George Bush. But, it was plainly obvious throughout the Senate hearings that John Roberts is somebody who is both intellectually and temperamentally qualified.

The Democratic Party is demonstrating once again why the Republicans control both the House and the Senate as well as the White House. As David Brooks pointed out on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, "the reason a lot of Democrats voted against Roberts is because they're in the throe of their interest groups."

George Bush could easily have sent to the Senate an idealogue. But John Roberts is no John Bolton. The Democrats should have acted just as the Republicans did when Bill Clinton's nominee Judge Ruth Ginsberg won her confirmation ninety-six to three.

Why are Democrats so stupid? The answer is simple. M-O-N-E-Y. The whole political process is this country revolves around campaign contributions. And where does all that money get spent? Mostly on 30-second attack ads. What's the solution? I propose a constitutional amendment banning political commercials on television.

Is Anybody There? Does Anybody Care?

Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?

-- John Adams' character
from the musical 1776

Almost any large enterprise can cut its IT budget between 10 to 25 percent by consolidating, standardizing, and simplifying. Headcount can be reduced by eliminating technical support roles. Annual maintenance fees to vendors can be decreased by pruning technology portfolios. System disruptions can be minimized by trimming the number of potential points where failures can occur.

What's needed to save money and improve performance is a Technology Architecture -- one of the four cornerstones of Enterprise Architecture. It's imperative that every enterprise understand what it already owns -- its existing technology terrain. How can any organization ever hope to move forward successfully if it doesn't know where it's starting from?

The Y2K debacle five years ago was caused primarily because most enterprises lacked any formally documented Technology Architecture. IT organizations everywhere spent untold sums of money trying to identify what systems and services their enterprise owned. Unfortunately, today, Technology Architecture at most of these same IT organizations is no better than what existed a half decade ago. It's almost the same problem we just witnessed in New Orleans where the government was no better prepared to respond to the Hurricane Katrina emergency than it was for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I personally have tried to make Technology Architecture as approachable and affordable as feasibly possible. The combination of my ITscout web site and ITguide product offering brings Technology Architecture capabilities within reach of any IT organization regardless of its size or complexity. All that's necessary to get started is for some architect to commit to performing a technology audit. ITscout primes the pump by providing graphical taxonomy models, classification hierarchies, category descriptions, and lists of products and related vendors. ITguide provides a simple, intuitive, inexpensive tool for modeling, documenting, and communicating Technology Architecture.

The business case for Technology Architecture is compelling. Who wouldn't want to cut costs by at least 10%?

If you agree with my assertion that consolidation, standardization, and simplification will generate substantial savings, that there's a valid business case to be made for Technology Architecture, then please help me spread the word. The problem is a lack of exposure. Most people -- both technical and non-technical -- haven't a clue how to define 'architecture' let alone 'Technology Architecture.'

America's Nightmare Worsens

With the national debt at $4.5 TRILLION and growing, President Bush is confident his plan is working.

Even before Hurricane Rita has come ashore, Newsweek has already estimated the cost to rebuild the Gulf coast after Hurricane Katrina will exceed $200 billion, which coincidently, is just about what the massive nation building effort in Iraq has cost so far. What's President Bush's response? He says, "It's going to cost whatever it costs, therefore, we should not raise taxes."

I think Rob Corddry of Comedy Central got it right in a Daily Show report entitled "Faith-Based Accounting" explaining how this administration's fiscal policy is paid for through supply-side economics. According to the doctrine of faith-based accounting, Republican presidents cut taxes. This makes people happy and the president popular. The tax cuts deprive the government of money, and after 8 years the deficit balloons to astronomical size. Then, with the economy in tatters, a Democrat is elected. He has to cut the deficit by raising taxes making people unhappy and him unpopular, perfectly setting up the next election where a Republican uses the Democrat's tax hike against them to win back the White House and start the cycle all over again.

The Key To Successful Blogging

According to marketing pundit and best-selling author Seth Godin, blogs work when they are based on candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, and controversy.

Below are definitions of these terms taken from The American Heritage Dictionary:

candor (kàn´der) noun

Frankness or sincerity of expression; openness.

urgency (ûr´jen-sê) noun

A pressing necessity.

timeliness (tìm´lê nès) noun

Occurring at a suitable or opportune time; well-timed.

pithiness (pîth´ê nès) noun

Precisely meaningful; forceful and brief.

controversy (kòn´tre-vûr´sê) noun

A dispute, especially a public one, between sides holding opposing views.

You, the readers of the ITscout Blog, need to be the judge of how well I'm doing with the five items listed above.

How Do You Share Valuable Information?

The Internet is to the Information Age what Henry Ford's assembly line was to the Industrial Age. Information at your fingertips has become as much a reality today as affordable automobiles became in Henry Ford's time. But, what do you do with all that wonderful information that you run across? The media pumps out a constant barrage of content every day, every week, every month, every year. Scattered within that deluge of data are occasional nuggets of gold. What do you do with a jewel when you find one?  How do you share it with your colleagues?

For instance, I just read a fascinating article entitled "Google builds an empire to rival Microsoft" published by ZDNet. The article makes the point that "Google's architecture can scale. Using commodity hardware, Google can deploy more capacity at a lower cost and more quickly than a competitor relying on a system built with brand-name hardware." It goes on to say that "Google's move into Web services -- its Desktop Search and Sidebar products, for example -- has prompted Microsoft to reorganize and combine MSN with its platform products group to help the software giant fight off Google's encroachment on its turf."

So, what do you do with this valuable piece of information?  How can you find it again in the future?  How can you share it with your colleagues?

The problem with the media is that everything is temporal. It's published when it's news but then it quickly fades away. Good luck finding this article again in the future using a search engine like Google.

When I encounter a great resource, like the article referenced above, I store it away inside ITscout. That way I, along with others, can easily find this information again in the future.

ITscout is my personal playpen. I'm the only who gets to store any information there. But what if you'd like to become your own IT scout. My company, Flashmap Systems, has just released a $99 per month product called ITguide that allows others to create what amounts to their own implementation of ITscout. It enables an IT professional to keep track of information about IT products and vendors. And, for an additional charge of $495 per month, someone can share their ITguide content just like I share ITscout's content with thousands of people all over the world.

ITguide comes bundled with ITscout's graphical 3-layer, 4-model Technology Architecture framework. Using ITscout's content as a starting point, ITguide is designed to capture and communicate information about:

• product categories
• products
• vendors
• legend icons

Tools are often a lot like the media. There's so much crap pumped out there, but every now and again you stumble on something really terrific that you want to save for posterity. I know how much I depend on ITscout for capturing and communicating information about IT. ITguide lets others enjoy that same capability.

Help Me... Help You...

Cameron Crowe's film, Jerry Maguire, has some wonderfully memorable one-liners, such as:

"Show me the money."

"You had me at 'hello'."

"D'you know that the human head weighs 8 pounds?"

Another memorable line from that movie is the title of this posting:

"Help me... help you."

Enterprise Architecture Is Very Hard To Do

It's really easy to screw up Enterprise Architecture initiatives. It's not unusual to see loads of money get spent that generates virtually no return on investment. That's probably why on multiple occasions I've seen entire architecture teams disbanded. Management just didn't see any value add.

Most of the time, the primary driver for Enterprise Architecture stems from a desire to model and document business processes. The only problem is modeling and documenting business processes is really difficult.

For decades the computer industry has seen wave after wave of consultant-led fads promising to harness business processes. In the 80's it was called CASE -- computer aided system engineering. In the 90's it was referred to as BPR -- business process reengineering. Nowadays the buzzword du jour is BPM -- business process management. Yet, the holy grail continues to remain elusive.

I think business types are often willing to spend and spend in pursuit of process mastery because process is something they truly understand. After all, organizational structures are almost always based on functional decomposition which is a tried and true method for modeling processes. Of course, that also explains why businesses need to constantly undergo reorganizations whenever processes change.

While it's fairly easy to create simple flowcharts that describe the individual steps comprising a task, it's a whole other story to come up with a way to enable development by exception where a generic process can easily be extended to handle special cases. In other words, the tools and approaches for modeling business processes still lack the kind of capabilities inherent in object technology.

Without an easy way to accommodate exceptions, changes can result in the baby getting tossed out with the bath water. That is, the original process needs to be chucked and an entirely new one developed in its place. Obviously, that's both risky and expensive. Make a mistake and suddenly the enterprise architects find themselves in the doghouse, if not out in the cold.

I don't have any magic remedy that promises to handle development by exception. My experience has taught me to concentrate on the process of modeling processes by focusing on business events because I have found business events to be the most reusable facet of computing.

My other advice is to find additional ways to demonstrate to business people how to save money using enterprise architecture. That's where you can help me help you.

Most business people have an incredibly difficult time thinking about and talking about IT. They need a roadmap to help them better understand what they already own. Creating such a roadmap is what Technology Architecture is all about. It provides a picture that shows business people how and where past technology investments have been made. It's often incredibly illuminating for business people to see costly duplication. It's also immensely helpful to spot holes in existing technology portfolios.

I have personally spent years developing a web site called ITscout that provides a generic picture for illustrating the entirety of IT. What enterprise architects need to do is define for their own organization a custom picture detailing their own specific situation.

To model and document an organization's Technology Architecture, individual architects need to be able to implement the equivalent of ITscout's functionality. Now, for the incredibly low price of just $99 per month, an architect can leverage the generic ITscout solution by using its graphics, category descriptions, lists of products and related vendor information as a starting point for modeling and documenting a Technology Architecture. Once a Technology Architecture has been modeled and documented, the architect can, for an additional $495 per month, go ahead and publish his or her own mini-version of ITscout where people in the enterprise can query and explore.

The product offering described above is called ITguide. A highly-intuitive, quickly-deployed tool, ITguide captures and communicates all of the data pertinent to a company’s technology architecture -- including their products, product life cycle status and enterprise architectural strategy. With ITguide, companies can easily access documents describing their internal corporate initiatives, domain strategies (platforms, networking, servers, services), corporate and business strategies, technical reviews, product retirement plans, why products are being used or retired, when exceptions are acceptable, etc. ITguide also helps to identify:

• What products are not compatible with organizational standards or a company’s current architecture
• Obsolete, redundant, or duplicate products in use
• Software that should be retired
• Opportunities for re-negotiating key software maintenance and support contracts

By providing this technology view in a graphical format understood by technical as well as non-technical users, large companies can potentially save millions of dollars in pruning existing licensing costs, avoiding redundant IT evaluations/purchases, and implement corporate or division-wide standards.

As an added incentive, the first 100 companies who sign up can choose a charitable/non-profit organization that will receive an additional subscription of ITguide for free. So, help your own enterprise as well as a charity of your choice get a better handle on the technology needed to manage complex IT infrastructures.

The Best A Man Can Get

I remember watching Saturday Night Live about 30 years ago, back around 1975, when a very funny parody commercial came on touting a revolutionary new Gillette razor that had three blades instead of the two on the then new Trac II. Supposedly, the first blade pulled the whisker away from the face, the second pulled it further, and the third blade chopped it off. The tag line was something like "Trac III -- the razor for people who will believe anything." Well, of course, nowadays Gillette's Mach3 with its three blade cartridges is the most successful razor ever.

Scroll forward to 2004, after Schick had introduced its Quattro four-blade razor, and The Onion, a hilariously funny satire e-zine, ran an article allegedly written by James M. Kilts, CEO and President of Gillette, promising the development of a new five blade razor. Well, sure enough, yesterday Gillette introduced Fusion featuring a five-blade shade.

Life imitating art imitating life...

Architecture Is a Very Hard Sell

For the most part architecture is viewed as a cost because it is a cost. It's money you have to spend to do something you'd rather not do.

Architecture addresses problems that emerge because of deeply flawed organizations beset by poor management, siloed cultures, and inadequate communication. Unfortunately, like America herself, way too many businesses have not been investing in infrastructure, have not been investing in research and development, and have not been investing in education. Ultimately, this lack of investment will lead to failure. This is as true for businesses as it is for America.

What architecture provides is a way for business leaders to think about, and talk about, IT. It literally bridges the gap between IT and the business.

Why spend money on architecture? Because IT needs to model and document:

• business processes
• business objects
• business solutions
• technology investments

Architecture is money well spent if it can provide business leaders with a better way to think about, and talk about, IT.

Create Your Own Technology Architecture

Architecture is about:

1. modeling
2. documenting

Technology Architecture is about modeling and documenting an enterprise's technology portfolio which consists of all technology investments (both past as well as planned future).

As illustrated by the graphic on the right, technology portfolios include:

• Business Intelligence
• Applications (built or bought)
• Infrastructure

Now, for just $99/month, you can build your own Technology Architecture using ITguide, a simple tool based on ITscout's 3-layer/4-model Technology Architecture graphics and content.

Please read ITguide's press release. In addition to announcing the product, it also explains how the first 100 companies to sign up for the service can choose a charitable/non-profit organization that will also receive an additional subscription of ITguide for free.

Unraveling the mystery of IT costs

According to the September 2005 edition of The McKinsey Quarterly Newsletter, increasing the level of transparency in IT can help leaders of business units to understand the link between consumption and costs.

Below is an edited excerpt (full text available only to Premium Members):

• Few companies fully understand their IT costs and why those costs keep rising.


• An IT cost transparency program gives business managers a catalog of IT products, bills showing IT usage, and management reports that segment costs by product type and business unit.


• Once a business unit sees the link between the products it consumes and their cost, it starts making smarter choices. At the same time, IT improves its cost-management skills.


• When IT and the business work as partners, they can cut IT costs and make IT investments that add more value.