John, to your point about the table implying that “centralized” is the right answer, I have two thoughts. First, if you buy MIT’s model, only some organizations would be a fit for the Unification model. In one study they did, only 57% of the firms responded that Unification was their target. Second, based on my experience, a firm’s culture and bureaucracy often gets in the way of a “pure” centralized service or function, so this is really meant as a discussion model rather than one that is perfect in practice.

Thanks again,

-Chris

Another interesting topic on the CIO’s doorstep. We are faced with this connundrum as a SSC on where to draw the line in supporting the business versus helping them truly transform. The concepts you discuss are more complicated when trying to serve the needs of 100’s of brand customers. We are tackling this piece by piece with an eye on business drivers in a Coordinated fashion. But as I stated, the real challenge is drawing a line on what services the SSC should provide vs. IT in the businesses since our mission is to be more than a back office shop.

Another interesting topic on the CIO’s doorstep. We are faced with this connundrum as a SSC on where to draw the line in supporting the business versus helping them truly transform. The concepts you discuss are more complicated when trying to serve the needs of 100’s of brand customers. We are tackling this piece by piece with an eye on business drivers in a Coordinated fashion. But as I stated, the real challenge is drawing a line on what services the SSC should provide vs. IT in the businesses since our mission is to be more than a back office shop.

I’m working on an enterprise-level ‘theory of everything’ model that has been very successful adressing some of the issues you address here, and while I think the representation (especially the matrix) is OK on one level it misses a huge short-coming in most current organizations.

First off, getting the business to hammer out what it wants before engaging IT is absolutely the right way to go. Unfortunately, I think the matrix used to describe IT’s response has a built-in bias by suggesting that ‘centralized’ is the ultimate answer.

Like many emerging issues in Enterprise Architecture, this one is related to one very elementary issue in computer-based (as opposed to human-based) information processing: identity.

While the pendulum has historically swung from centralized to distributed (or diversified) the fundamental fact that the word ‘Service’ for example looks identical to a computer whether it refers to church, tennis, customer or animal husbandry. This rigidity in digital systems – and the countervailing requirement for the business to be diametrically opposed to that limitation – is amplified a thousand-fold when companies attempt to rigidly control processes and applications.

This is especially and almost tragically evident when companies go global, or acquire or merge with another ‘centrally controlled’ entity. Each entity has its own rules and/or architecture and is unwilling to let it be ”centralized’ by another.

The answer is to centralize the abstraction that glues all business and IT together then allow diversification based on the rules that created the abstraction in the first place.