IT Management

This chapter presents the main issues of IT management with special emphasis on business, IT strategies integration and on trends that are taking take place in this discipline at the beginning of the 21st century.

Application Layer

The goals of the Application Layer of the Enterprise Information Infrastructure are: 1. To empower the organization (via enterprise computing-EC) in optimizing the use of resources, such as manpower, money, material, machines, management, and the marketplace in business, 2. To empower individuals (via end-user computing-EUC and enterprise computing (EC) - Figure 4-22) in gaining cognition about managed resources and processes in the business environment. The strategy of implementing these goals is based on the growing expansion of the applications’ integration across all business functions in the networked and Web-driven environment. The integration of business applications in an enterprise is the natural process that follows the pattern of reproduction processes in nature. The first stage in these processes is the growth by division of functional organs; and the next stage is the consolidation of these organs into a non-redundant wholeness. In such a way the evolution of nature takes place with feedback from the environment.

The New Informated Business Architecture

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union are certainly monumental events in the history of the human race as the 20th century nears its close. Monumental changes are taking place in business organizations and in the managers who run them. The business community is shifting its paradigms and the manner in which it does business. To avoid “Future Shock,” one must look beyond the trends of the past and discover the rules that will govern business in the Twenty-First Century, the Information Age. By knowing the nature of such changes and how to anticipate them, the strategist can elicit extraordinary leverage in shaping the future. Drucker (1980) in Managing Turbulent Times, writes that one of the most important skills during times of turbulence is anticipation. This chapter explores the effects of the information age (Figure 1) upon the global business enterprise which is shifting from an old paradigm to a new one, in the way Kuhn (1970) described paradigm shifts in science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We will also suggest that since all major business dimensions have shifted paradigms, a new era in business requires a new set of rules.

IT Development

In this chapter trends of IT-driven enterprise development are presented. These trends compete among themselves for supremacy. They do not create a well integrated set of techniques; vice-versa, this set is very eclectic and contains techniques very old and still applicable, like the System Development Life Cycle, and new ones, like Web technologies. These trends are extended into issues of an IT vision for the 21st century, IT skills, and computer controversies that may influence IT developers’ awareness about how to pursue IT developmental projects.

Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII)

The American business in the Information Wave in the 21st century increasingly relies on computer and information networks for the conduct of vital operations. The computerized telecommunications networks, customer interfaces, services, applications, and related technologies create the Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII). The industry which supports the development of EII and other information infrastructures (NII – National Information Infrastructure, GII – Global Information Infrastructure, and Local Information Infrastructure) is valued domestically at about $1 trillion in 2000. Not surprisingly, with this kind of money at stake, the emerging technologies that will define information infrastructures in the future have become the subject of much discussion and many grand schemes. But suppliers are not the only ones anticipating benefits from the new information infrastructure. Business users also hope to increase their productivity and quality of life through the application of technologies and services in a wide variety of contexts. But despite all the great expectations of industry insiders and technology users, the general business practitioners remain largely unaware of exactly what is taking place because the majority of these services are invisible to the naked eye.

Enterprise Configuration

The new economy requires a new enterprise organization. It obligates most companies to redefine their mission, goals, and strategy. The emerging 21st century enterprise is a more complex organization than the 20th century industrial enterprise. Since the enterprise consists of small teams running their affairs from a single office, the lean organization is also a subject of the emerging trend of outsourcing and creating partnerships. Managing those relationships will be the key strategy of the IT support. Enterprises that once handled everything internally now find they must concentrate on their core competencies, so they outsource much more than they once did. Moreover, many of the new relationships are international and global. In 1995, the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California, found that the number of international joint ventures has grown 25% a year since 1990. Time to reach market is critical when products have a competitive life span of one year, one month, one week, or one afternoon, as in the case of some products in financial services. Innovation, rather than access to resources, plant, and capital, is what counts most.

The Internet Applications and Business

The Internet Economy is an ecosystem of producing, distributing, and consuming wealth. This ecosystem is made up of companies directly generating all or some part of their revenues from Internet or Internet-related products and services. The economy includes not only “high-tech” companies but any company that generates revenue from the Internet.

Enterprise Electronization and Integration

The goal of the electronic enterprise is to implement all major applications to build the extended enterprise that functions as a paperless organization, whose units and workers process information and communicate via all layers of the Enterprise Information Infrastructure (look at Chapter 3). The strategy of the e-enterprise development is the integration of all business and application components via the Internet or intranet/extranet environment (“electronization”). The e-enterprise evolves from the net-commerce, based on EDI (1980’s/1990’s), the e-commerce stage (1997) and its follower - the e-business stage (1999), as a result of the electronization and integration of all enterprise applications.