Information Technology Challenges …

The increasing capability of internet technology continues to present significant opportunities and challenges for many organizations that have large investments in, and dependence on traditional supply chains based in legacy systems and technology.  More than ever, organizations need to more effectively leverage technology (web or otherwise) with customers and suppliers to improve supply chains that dramatically improve quality and timeliness of services and products while reducing costs.

 This can be accomplished by implementing strategies and plans to:

Effective Architecture Planning is the Key to Success …

The connection between IT investment and business objectives is often vague, if it exists at all. Organizations are struggling to build, understand, and maintain effective ties between business strategic plans and investments in information systems and technology, and are often overwhelmed with the complexity and amount of effort to achieve this goal.

To be successful, organizations must implement a visible, business-driven planning approach which actively engages business operations with information technology organizations to achieve consensus on a single plan supported by relevant, understandable, and maintainable business, information, application, and technology architectures.

What is Architecture Planning?

Architecture Planning is the process of defining business, information, application, and technology capabilities (target architectures) that are needed to support a business and creating a plan for implementing them. 

Architecture Planning is generally composed of the following steps:

1. Business Strategy: evaluating (defining) business vision, strategies, objectives, success factors, and measures;

2. Current Environment: evaluating the current state of business activities, supporting systems (applications), and development plans; and identifying opportunities.

3. Architectural Decision Framework: defining an objective and visible framework for making architectural decisions including guiding principles and decision criteria;

4. Target Environment: defining target business, information, application, and technology architectures needed to address business strategy and objectives; and

5. Implementation Plan: creating a plan to implement the target architectures.

Why is Architecture Planning Important?

A number of significant benefits can result from architecture planning.  A successful architecture planning initiative will:

 All of this ultimately helps your business become more efficient, effective and competitive.

 We can Help!

Ashton Informatics, Inc.  provides an extensive service offering for Architecture Planning including:

Representative Clients