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Anatomy of a Business |
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IT - All is not hunky dory IT systems/software/solutions bring in associated new costs: system downtime, data anomalies, new processes. Well who has not heard of data being entered into wrong fields, getting corrupted due to transaction failure, programming bugs, faulty data/program design, system crashes due to power failure, low load tolerance and other "garden variety" nasties. Software also require stakeholders to be trained in its usage. This necessitates creation of a separate training and education infrastructure. Software creates expectations in the stakeholders. If a customer can Order for Books from a website, he/she wants to know the expected date of delivery. So a Customer Support Infrastructure has to be created. In othe words IT adoption creates new processes. At times people or process are not ready to support the IT Systems. IT systems reduce paperwork and the processes built around that paperwork, but the processes consequent of adoption of IT systems carry a cost. To manage new processes systems become more complex and expensive to maintain. At times new IT Infrastructure Management Departments have budgets greater than the cost savings which they claim accrues to the Enterprise by adoption of IT Systems. Cost-cutting expected from IT adoption then turns out to be misnomer at times. Business problems do not vanish instead a new set of problems evolve out of the changing business and process needs. Business Requirements Change and IT Solutions should be Scalable enough to adapt to the changes in a cost effective way. Scalability is largely a Technical issue. It is determined by a rational choice of: These choices determine the cost of scalability. However, even if the System is Scalable Technically, it may still be of NO use to the Organization. IT MUST provide the Enterprise with a sustainable cost of ownership, and a positive ROI; else the level of scalability of the system may not make sense! Missed requirements and poor design lead to awkward and misfit Systems. Sometimes Vendors create solutions to non-existent requirements. At times people want to emulate manual processes in IT Systems. This leads to systems which miss out on actual benefits of IT. Alternative/New processes come about because of IT. Domain Experts oft loose sight of this fact. Movement of data between different systems requires at times sinister dexterity. This creates the problem of Data Duplication and Loss of Data Quality. |
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