About Platform Vision
Embracing IT Challenges: Facing the Legacy
The IT legacy in many organizations is an increasingly fragile and complex infrastructure built over twenty or more years and based on a “best of breed” approach. In many cases these in-place technologies lack support, are out of date, and may be held together by the experience of one or two key individuals. This legacy results from the dynamic nature of IT and technology in general, and does not reflect the organization’s IT leadership. It does, however, represent how siloed solutions can nearly paralyze an organization’s IT infrastructure. Even worse, once a siloed environment is in place, the need to be reactive quickly surpasses the desire to be proactive—culminating with a gradually increasing budget that shows little to no return.
IT challenges compound when one company merges with or acquires another. The resulting infrastructure usually consists of siloed solutions. IT leaders immediately begin to look for ways to integrate the silos and reduce overhead associated with similar, yet incompatible solutions. It is the nature of mergers and acquisitions to blend infrastructure solutions without losing the inherent benefits the combined organization can enjoy. This reduction of silos happens as a matter of course, in at least some small way, any time two companies come together.
The “best of breed” approach was for many years the standard by which IT organizations built, maintained, and grew their investments. This approach stood primarily because no vendors provided enough products to present a compelling platform solution at a reasonable price point. Today, however, following a platform strategy is more cost efficient over the long term than a siloed approach.
Aligning IT and Business: Platform Vision
Platform Vision breaks down the IT infrastructure into a series of solution patterns that interconnect traditional IT service offerings. These solution patterns take traditional services and consider their life cycles—in terms of functionality and relationships with other services—as part of a comprehensive platform solution. Armed with this contextual information, IT leaders can identify and build strategic platform-based solutions that align with their organizational business goals and maximize the return on IT investments.
Whether it’s security, collaboration, or business intelligence, every organization needs similar IT infrastructure services. Years of line-of-business (LOB) investments often run parallel to these infrastructure efforts—but direct alignment is usually elusive. Getting the most out of LOB investments is paramount to organizations, which is why we created Platform Vision. The Platform Vision model and framework help organizations to understand the big picture, what the pieces of the puzzle are, and how those pieces fit together—including IT infrastructure services and LOB applications.
Platform Vision is fueled by the years of experience and knowledge our experts bring from across multiple industries and technologies. The unique depth of knowledge and breadth of experience from consulting—through our executive management level—gives us a broad understanding of the challenges businesses face every day.