InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Rate Of Change In Business Environment
The rate of change in the business environment determines the competitive climate of the companies. Businesses in markets characterized by high rates of change will gain significant competitive advantage through reducing time to market.

1. How often do business rules and/or processes change? (1 being seldom and 10 being often) __________

2. How often do you need to implement new business solutions? (1 being seldom and 10 being often) __________

3. How competitive is your business environment? (1 being a monopoly and 10 being highly competitive) _________

Adaptability Of Application Architecture
The ability to change business rules quickly, add functionality, or integrate applications across functional boundaries has a direct impact on time to reach the marketplace.

4. How difficult is it to change a business rule in an application? (1 being easy and 10 being difficult) ___________________________________

5. What percentage of business rules cross applications within your company? For example, are there changes in business rules or legislative rules that need to be implemented in multiple applications? (1 indicates low percentage, 10 indicates high percentage) ________________

6. How quickly can you implement new functionality, including purchased applications, into the company? (1 indicates it's easy to do,

10 indicates it would take months and significant resources) _________________

Adaptability Of Technical Architecture
Adaptability to technical change lets a company utilize technology for competitive advantage.

7. How difficult is it to integrate new technology in the current environment? (1 indicates it's easy, 10 indicates it's difficult) _________________

8. How heterogeneous is your technical infrastructure? (1 indicates a single-vendor environment, 10 indicates a multivendor environment) ___________________

9. How difficult is it to pass information from one application to another? (1 indicates it's easy, 10 indicates it's difficult and requires significant time or resources) _______________________

10. What is the rate of change in your technical infrastructure? (1 indicates a stable technical architecture with low rate of change, 10 indicates a technical architecture in a state of migration) __________________

Adaptability To Changing Business Processes
Enabling rapid implementation of business-process change lets a company adapt to rapidly changing business conditions. If the business processes change often, EAI solutions that include business-process modeling and can automate the implementation of the business process across disparate applications and platforms will help an organization better manage and more quickly implement business process change.

11. How difficult is it to implement changes in business processes? (1 indicates it's easy to do, 10 indicates it's very difficult to do) _________________

12. How quickly are your business processes changing? Companies involved in business process reengineering and mergers and acquisitions will experience a high rate of business-process change. (1 indicates infrequently, 10 indicates frequently) ___________________________________

13. How important is it to your business to provide direct links to suppliers and customers? (1 indicates not important, 10 indicates very important) ________________________

Leveraging Existing Resources

Companies cannot keep pace with a rapid rate of business change or gain competitive advantage by bringing products to market by starting from scratch with each new application. Capitalizing on opportunity requires leveraging existing people, applications, and technical resources.

People are the most expensive system resources. Maximizing people resources requires lowering the level of skill sets required for implementing new business solutions and reusing existing skill sets. An EAI tool can do this by abstracting complexity with high-level tools that focus on business logic.

14. Rate the level of difficulty your IT staff would have implementing a middleware connectivity solution. (1 indicates low level of difficulty, 10 indicates a high level of difficulty) ___________________________________

15. What percentage of your integration solution do you normally outsource? (1 indicates most of the work is done in-house, 10 indicates the work is outsourced) ________________________

16. What percentage of your IT budget is spent on integration? (1 for 1% or less, 3 for 10%, 5 for 15%, 7 for 20%, and 10 for 30% or more) ____________

Leveraging Existing Business
Logic/Application Resources
Code reuse and the ability to combine code from disparate resources has the potential to provide a powerful return on opportunity. It lets companies create new solutions from existing application resources, thereby maximizing this resource. Reusability ultimately reduces total cost of ownership and increases speed of implementation.

17. How difficult is it to extend existing functionality of your applications? (1 indicates it's easy, 10 indicates it's difficult) ________________________

18. How difficult would it be to migrate existing functionality to an E-business solution? (1 indicates it's easy, 10 indicates it's difficult)

___________________________________

19. What percentage of reuse do you obtain in software development? (1 for little or none, 5 for moderate amount, 10 for significant) ___________________________________

Leveraging Technical Infrastructure

Point-to-point custom solutions may require implementing the communications, security, management, and development infrastructures separately for each project. EAI solutions maximize infrastructure by providing common services for all applications. Most important, the common infrastructure enables a faster time to market.

20. What percentage of your application projects use a common infrastructure, such as messaging, transaction services, or publish and subscribe? (1 for little or none, 5 for moderate amount, 10 for all) ____________

21. What percentage of your software budget is spent on technical infrastructure for individual projects? (1 for 1% or less, 3 for 10%, 5 for 15%, 7 for 20%, and 10 for 30% or higher) ___________________________________

Scoring
Add up the numbers and divide by 21. Convert percentages to straight numbers (that is, 90% equals 9, 20% equals 2). For example, if your answers add up to 147, your score would be 7 (147 divided by 21 equals 7).

Score of 7 to 10: The best solution for your project is an enterprise application integration product. If you expect your rate of business change to accelerate or you are involved in a merger or acquisition, business pro-cess reengineering, or supply-chain integration, evaluate EAI solutions with a focus on business-process integration.

Score of 4 to 6: Your project falls in between the static-oriented traditional middleware and dynamic EAI solutions. Look more closely at your business requirements not only for this project, but during the next 18 months. If you need to integrate new functionality with existing legacy and package solutions, evaluate application servers. If your current and future requirements can benefit with reuse of package and legacy application code, assess application integration solutions or select a solution that can grow into an EAI infrastructure, such as MQSeries from IBM.

Score of 0-3: A traditional middleware solution will be best for your project. Typically, companies with limited connectivity requirements, unchanging IT or business requirements, or high technical skill sets are best fits for the more labor-intensive, hard-coded connectivity, data, or messaging-oriented middleware projects. --david kelly and beth gold-bernstein

David Kelly is a VP and Beth Gold-Bernstein is a senior analyst in the application strategies service at the Hurwitz Group Inc., an IT advisory firm.