Overview

The use of automation to compete has matured immensely. Your Business, Inc. has formalized, and aggressively manages, an information systems architecture. The architecture provides a blueprint for the types of information, systems, and technologies needed to support the business.

The philosophy of the Best Practices Enterprise requires that organizations learn to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace and streamline operations so that workflow changes can be made on the fly. Businesses can no longer expect that their customers will be willing to wait for them. Rather, consumers and trading partners alike are ready and able to move on if their needs are not met expeditiously.

This puts tremendous pressure on firms to fully automate business operations designing systems in such a way that the underlying business processes and workflows can be adjusted dynamically without any business disruption.

The fact that companies are doing business from the far corners of the globe introduces additional challenges as well. Automated applications, as such, must be designed to be highly durable and able to be instantly reconfigured as business needs dictate.

For instance, imagine that an earthquake has struck the San Fernando Valley and your firm s West Coast operations computing capabilities are wiped out. What do you do? With a resilient IT architecture (RITA) in place, a firm can reroute its processing capabilities to its Boston branch and it will not miss a beat.

Obviously, the ability to respond in this way is no accident. Work must be done to design a...