Build An IT Strategy Roadmap
Corporate America spends hundreds of billions of dollars on IT project each year, and a great many of these project will fail*. When Artech first saw this report put out by the Standish Group in the mid 90’s and then again in 2000, we were surprised to see that the success rate of IT projects had only reached about 26%. To address this unfortunate report card, early on in the development of our methodologies we made sure to concentrate on the common pitfalls of IT projects, and maintain a focus on customer satisfaction. By doing this we have been able to boast a success rate of 100%. Every IT project undertaken by Artech is a reference. I would like to thank you for considering Artech as your IT service provider. The following article discuss an "applications and data roadmap" imitative we call an Information Technology Strategy Planning project. It is our hope that the following article effectively communicates Artech's intent and ability to assist you with you IT strategy projects.
We believe all organizations large enough to maintain an IT staff should complete an IT Strategic plan, and update it every few years. Our core belief for Information Technology stems from two basic principles:
Too often organizations allow the development of IT for the sake of technology. Unless you are a software company, IT is there to support your business, not drive it. You may know Artech as the host of the South Florida Oracle User Group. We have presented at local and national user conferences on topics such as J2EE Internet application architectures, Microsoft COM+ Application Architectures, database and application server management, and related topics.
Within the past five years Artech has completed Enterprise IT Strategic plans for several companies including a Large Fresh Produce Company, an Eye Care Corporation, and an E-commerce Company. I would like to reference these three very different companies with unique needs, to illustrate why Artech is very well prepared to assist you with your IT Strategy, while outlining some of our unique attributes and methods. Large Fresh Produce Company (Produce Company) At the Produce Company, concerns were growing as the touted year 2000 global IT catastrophe was bearing down upon them. The time had come for an Information Technology Strategic plan. Artech had established a relationship with the Produce Company years earlier by successfully implementing their first Client/Server solutions. Artech proposed to partner with the Produce Company to develop an IT Strategic plan. The plan would outline an applications and data roadmap, which would take the Produce Company through the Year 2000 challenges and beyond. The Produce Company is a Fortune 500 company. They have several international departments supporting their IT needs around the world. Previous projects with them had allowed Artech to demonstrate the firm’s ability to deliver, using very capable organization and facilitation skill, group-workshop meetings, as well as unique methods of real-time information gathering. With notebook computers, flip charts and projectors, Artech captures information right when it is presented, during the workshop meetings. The Produce Company and Artech decided the best use of time and resources would be to bring IT heads and business managers from around the world to their headquarters in Florida, and have Artech organize and facilitate a three-week MIS Conference. These meetings began the creation of a common General Ledger for the company, with systems integration and real-time global information access. Over the following weeks the team outlined recommendations and delivered the IT Strategy. Future systems based on this initial IT Strategy, designed and implemented with the assistance of Artech, allow IT to support business processes such as: Order processing, inventory tracking, claims management, grower accounting and liquidations, data warehousing and product code classification and integration. Eye Care Corporation (Optical Company) The Optical Company is a national retail company with over 130 stores nationwide. Founded in 1972, the company has successfully positioned itself as a provider of quality eyewear and optometry services. This success is largely due to their philosophy of providing high quality vision care at affordable prices. The Optical Company's regular retail prices are 30% to 50% less than most retail optical companies for identical products and service. The Optical Company is able to compete very effectively on price, because they streamline product processes with a central lab that produces all of the eyewear. This allows retail stores to maintain a lower on-hand inventory. But as the Optical Company grew, the system's infrastructure and application needs followed. The Optical Company was outgrowing several of their current systems and unknowingly implementing many departmental manual processes to support the business. They were losing corporate access to their information and their ability to make decisions based on current and accurate information about the business. The company realized the need to formalize their approach to technology The Optical Company partnered with Artech in an Enterprise IT Strategy process to discuss and analyze the current status and future needs for their systems. This study was conducted over an eight-week period at the Optical Companies headquarters. The objectives were to identify and document the state of the technical architecture, applications and data, and to plan for a standard approach and methodology for all future systems. Based on this initial IT Strategy, The Optical Company was able to: immediately identify steps to reduce operations costs by over 2.5 million, identify and design the communications infrastructure for order processing and tracking; outline specifications for three projects with immediate need, each having a return-on-investment of less than one year. E-commerce Company (E-commerce Company) The E-commerce Company was established in 1999 and maintains the largest on-line product database on the Internet. The Company facilitates the e-commerce process through the use of barcodes. Users are able to shop and find information using SKU, UPC and other barcode number formats. The E-commerce Company maintains approximately eighty million products on-line. The E-commerce Company partner with Artech in an Enterprise IT Strategy. Unlike other established corporation, The E-commerce Company was a dot-com just starting out. They had no current systems to review or measure. The IT Strategy was based purely on business need and anticipated use of their systems. The objectives were to identify the goals and business drivers of the E-commerce Company and outline the needed technical architecture and applications roadmap for providing structure and direction to IT initiatives. Artech completed the IT Strategy over a six-week period, and continued its partnership with the E-commerce Company completing over ten projects. From the IT Strategy, Artech outlined a roadmap which guided the development of a transactional Internet site capable of accessing detail information and price comparison options for over 100 million products, and scaleable to accept over one million hits per day. The Internet application handled site searches, account information, secure logins, shopping cart, checkout, order receipt, barcode reading, reports, and B2B partners (other sellers using the portal to sell their items). These three corporations partnered with Artech to develop their Information Technology Strategy. If you would like to know more about Artech's methodologies and past projects, contact us at sales@artechgroup.com * Standish Group Report 2000 |