Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the ease in initial implementation and later additions of functional-
ity. Selecting a standard or vendor with a large body of third-party
offerings allows an organization to readily adopt newly emergent
technology offerings as they reach viability.
• Users and technical support staff can be more efficient throughout
the enterprise, as they can gain a greater working knowledge of a
smaller number of disparate solutions. This can reduce both staff-
ing and training requirements, and allow greater mobility within an
extended organization to meet marketplace agility needs. When all
applications are standardized, a user trained in the standard suite of
productivity applications will require very little training if he or she
is transferred to another department.
• Selecting widely used platform architectures provides a greater body
of community support when issues arise or when new technologies
are being implemented. W hen problems or questions arise, it is easier
to find effective solutions if the platform architecture is in common
use and enjoys strong community involvement in implementation
and development.
• Future control is simplified because only the initial selection pro-
cess must include all possible competing alternatives. After the
platform architecture has been identified and detailed, future
selection needs only to evaluate alternatives within the identified
platform's offerings.
Enterprise architecture would be greatly simplified if platform selec-
tion was its only feature. Within small, well-funded organizations, many
of these “low-hanging fruit” may be plucked readily as value-for-effort.
However, selection of a single platform specification to be implemented
across a medium-to-large organization will rapidly encounter many stum-
bling blocks, often including the following:
• Many packaged applications rely on a particular set of technologies
for operation. Legacy equipment such as automation and equipment
control systems may rely on an embedded control technology, while
other applications may only operate against a particular type of rela-
tional database management system (DBMS) such as an Oracle or
MySQL instance. Changing these solutions to meet newly-identified
platform architectural guidelines can be problematic, requiring time,
