Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail company. You have many accomplishments that the business leadership team (and Board of Directors) has recognized: a streamlined supply-chain management system that reduces costs and out-of-stock conditions...

It’s 2005 Imagine you’re Sara, the CIO of your retail company with 10,000 employees. You have 500 employees within IT reporting to you. Your manager, Fred, the CFO, calls you into your office and asks: “Sara, how many applications does IT support?” My first thoughts (as Sara) are: “why is he asking?...

I recently completed a study of over 500 US-based customers in which I wanted to understand: what types of applications are being delivered and managed generally, how much does it cost to deliver and manage those applications how are web services being used how well are cloud computing...

I’m currently conducting a study that looks at understanding how enterprise businesses build, deploy, and manage their line-of-business applications. As part of the study, I interchange the notion of an “Application” with a “Service”. The two are not really the same; in my world a “service” is an application...

In a recent study of enterprise customers, I found that most reported an increase in the adoption of web services in the coming year. While that may not be a big surprise, what I found surprising was the lack of a commensurate focus on management practices of those services. Activities such as service...

In my last post I referred to a study my team was conducting around SOA and web services management patterns. The high-level purpose of the study was to gain insight around: whether service-orientation practices were being used for building web services (as opposed to simply building a bunch of...

There seems to be a steady stream of books published on the role of Information Technology within the business it supports. The role of IT is constantly evolving and has changed significantly from the days when the IT organization was often referred to as “data processing.” Today, in many industries...

Hello to everyone, and our thanks for stopping by our blog. My name is Elliott Morris, and I have the privilege of managing the War on Cost team and working with Brett, Bruce and Erik. Before I start adding posts to our blog, let me tell you a little more about the War on Cost team and what it is we...

For years, organizations have been chasing the holy grail of “ROI on IT investments”. The typical approach has been focused on the TCO ("Total Cost of Ownership") methodology, wherein one measures the current annualized cost of the IT environment, the future/anticipated (and presumably lower) annualized...

In general, there are six different types (archetypes) of line of business (LOB) applications prevalent in modern corporations today: Rich Client Applications – Applications of this type are usually developed as stand-alone applications with a graphical user interface that displays data using a...

Successful adoption of Service Oriented Architecture has been a topic of discussion pretty much since the beginning of its introduction to enterprise businesses five or six years ago. As companies have worked to adopt this approach to building more reliable and agile applications at a lower price, they...