I’ve long believed many large and mid-size organizations are missing an opportunity by not “engaging” in IT architecture. I confirmed it again the other day during an informal discussion with David C. Robertson, professor at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and one of the authors of the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy”.

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For the second year running we have surveyed European telecoms on their IT use. Our  benchmark study looks at IT spending as a share of revenues and also probes the IT effectiveness of telecom operators. While the IT spend on revenues is easy to measure,  IT effectiveness is more complicated. We have developed a score that takes into account three key dimensions: time-to-market for new products and new tariffs, IT service availability and functional coverage per key IT domain (e.g., sales & marketing, provisioning).

Preliminary findings show that fixed line operators have improved their cost position by about 1 percentage point, which is a a significant improvement, while their effectiveness score rose by about 10 percent. Mobile operators have not improved their cost position but have improved their IT effectiveness by about 6 percent.

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There’s a lot of buzz around the idea that service oriented architecture (SOA) is dead. It’s true that there haven’t been many fans of this somewhat difficult concept, and there haven’t been a lot of large scale success stories for IT departments to brag about. And let’s face, it, it’s hard for businesses to build a strong case for something that promises “improved agility”.

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In many organizations, data quality often is seen as a  technical subject, something  of lesser importance that business units can’t do much about.  Problems predictably are passed on to IT,  which may do some data cleansing, or perform some technical fixes to make the data work one way or another. The business, of course, has an easy  party to blame if data quality targets aren’t met or something goes really wrong. Maybe that’s  a bit of an exaggeration, but we have seen situations like this on more than one occasion.  This make-do approach is disappointing when you consider how data has become a key enabler of  business performance and excellence in operations.

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Architecture... why does this word conjure up images of abstract diagrams, blue prints, wall paper and basically nothing useful? If there is anything strategic about IT, it has to be architecture. And if there is anyplace where strategy and execution come together in IT, it has to be architecture. Very simply the architecture function is about figuring out where the business wants to go and to grow, grouping the required capabilities, and making some smart choices about which groups are core to the business and which are not.

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