Technology Alignment with Enterprise Architecture
A critical component in your Enterprise Architecture program is assuring your organization is leveraging the best technology to achieve alignment of business objectives. This includes reviewing the current technologies in place as well as understanding how new technology, if used would impact the organization. The total cost of ownership should be calculated when evaluating technologies. For Instance, Open Source software can have low cost of licensing. However, it may require additional staff to maintain and administer the software over other solutions.
When reviewing technology keep in mind why you need it in your business. As with all decisions, technology should help in one of these three areas:
- increasing revenue
- decreasing expenses
- improving performance
It may be helpful to create a standard template for your organization to complete for all new technology decisions.
Technology Evaluation Criteria
Included below are some items to consider when looking for Technology Alignment and evaluation of tools in your organization.
- Initial cost – Purchase and Maintenance
- 3,5,7 year cost
- Implementation Cost – Hardware
- Implementation Cost – Consulting
- Knowledge of existing staff of technology
- Does this technology replace another technology to reduce complexity of the environment
- What are the cost of adding complexity to the environment
- Integration Cost to existing applications or infrastructure
- Security Model
- Patch and Upgrade Cycles
- Cost to Upgrade
- Ease of Upgrades
- Training – IT Staff
- Training – User Community
- Scalability
- Availability of Consultants – Are they difficult to find?
- Performance Logging – How can you monitor performance?
- How does the technology improve the business
The post Technology Alignment appeared first on Derek Wilson - Blog .
