Between Aspiration and Action
by Joe Burton, chief technology officer, Cisco Unified Communications
Forrester coined an interesting term not too long ago: IT-To-BT Transformation. According to Alexander Peters of Forrester, ubiquitous computing and business technology (BT) are the two forces coming together that will transform the way CIOs organize and operate. Innovative organizations will move toward BT and reap the rewards of business efficiency, time to market, competitiveness and workforce productivity. In other words, they’ll fill the gap between aspiration and action. I believe a significant step toward becoming a BT-focused organization is the ability to design and build an architectural framework that will drive your business now and prepare you for what you may not know today that you need to deploy in the future.
With 7 out of 10 firms investing in collaboration these days, enterprise architectural design decisions are being made now to support today’s and tomorrow’s collaboration tools: wikis, text messaging, IM, presence, IP telephony, web conferencing, telepresence, social networking, virtual worlds and more. Cisco’s approach is an "any to any" framework that will enable us to rapidly adopt any device, any application, for anyone on any network, anytime. The focus on BT enablement, and services rather than features, led us to the development and deployment of open Web 2.0 architecture that supports the speed and flexibility of cloud based services with the "ilities" that come from enterprise networks such as reliability and scalability. We’re using this "any to any" model, ourselves, to accelerate the rollout of new collaboration tools from Cisco’s product portfolio with home grown solutions from our IT organization and third party products. How are you "filling the gaps between aspiration and action"?
Posted by Joe Burton at 10:58AM PST
Mike Maynard Jun 17, 2009
Very interesting Joe.
An architectural framework combined with IT Planning processes and governance to deliver what will be needed in the future to meet changing business needs is a huge challenge.
Consider this webinar:
"Driving Productive IT Investment with Business Capability Management” featuring independent research analyst, Bobby Cameron of Forrester Research
http://www.alfabet.com/news/events/webinar_driving_productive_it_investment