Fred Mapp, former AMD CIO
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Move toward an optimized IT architecture
In Initiative 1, we created the vision and gathered the business requirements.
In Initiative 2, we made sure we had the tools—the business processes—to
make this vision come to life. Now, in Initiative 3, we’re putting
these first two initiatives to work, creating the specific plans and roadmaps
that will transform IT and your business, as a whole. We’re rolling
up our sleeves, studying business activities, business processes, and the
applications required to support them. This is the beginning of systems
integration, or, as I call it, the many to the few.
First, determine specific points of arrival. To create detailed roadmaps
and measure progress you must know your destination. At AMD, we’re
aiming for a “single access enterprise portal” – this
will allow complete access to finance, service, support, sales, marketing,
and other data from a desktop, laptop, or PDA. This will make it easier
to align IT with changing business requirements and strategies, support
accurate, real-time reporting and analysis, and streamline integration of
our business processes, to give a few examples. Also, our people in the
field will have the information they need at their fingertips. Imagine the
advantages of instant access to up-to-date shipping deadlines, quantities
available, and the other information customers require. When we can support
all these specific business objectives, we’ll know we’ve arrived.
The bottom line is to turn data into useful information to run the business.
Shaped by the corporate and IT vision, our point-of-arrival plans help us
create specific plans and roadmaps for the optimization of our infrastructure. See Chart.
Establish standards. You should establish and document detailed standards for each component
of your architecture. In this way, you can prevent the adoption of hardware
and software that doesn’t support your corporate vision –
and prevent a lot of compatibility problems down the road. I am not stating
that there cannot be applications that may not be standard but could be
best of breed. There always needs to be some flexibility.
"To create detailed roadmaps and
measure progress you must know your destination."
- Fred Mapp, former AMD CIO
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Know thy infrastructure. Next, you will need to list every function, everything you do as an organization: sales, procurement, finance, shipping, human resources, etc. Then list
the applications you use to support those functions. The reasoning behind
this is simple; you have to know your current business applications, the
infrastructure and its possibilities and its limitations before you can
go about optimizing the infrastructure.
Disparate systems, multitudes of applications. Typically
in large organizations you will find a truckload of applications and disparate
systems from a variety of vendors. You will identify irksome incompatibilities
of software applications and the small armies of programmers needed to create
and maintain the interfaces that link these applications together. You’ll
also discover the redundant hardware and the dozens of servers required
to make it all run.
The many to the few. Now it’s time to ask the tough
questions about your business activities and the applications you use to
support them. How many ERP applications do you really need? How many financial
applications? And how can you make the case for consolidation and standardization?
The easiest way is to document the ways that these disparate applications
affect business processes. How long does it take you to close a sale? How
long to give a quote? Could you get by with fewer servers and support personnel
if you consolidated? How much could you save? There are dozens of these
types of questions you can ask for every business function. And asking them
gives you the leverage to simplify and standardize your architecture. As
we discussed in Initiative 1, many of these applications and servers will
be defended as parts of fiefdoms within the company. Having concrete numbers
on your side can help you bring them down.
You might try creating a chart like the AMD activities and applications
chart accompanying this column. At AMD, our goal was to move from multiple
colors to best-of-breed applications and just a few colors. We’ve
come a long way. See chart.
From here to your points of arrival. Now look at your
list or chart of applications and activities. Ask if the applications
you’re supporting can take you to your points of arrival. If not,
start evaluating new applications and creating road maps for getting from
here to there. At the same time, you’ll have to begin to consider
personnel. Who can you count on to execute these plans? It is not by coincidence
that this line of questioning leads us directly into our next discussion,
Initiative 4.
Initiative 4
Recruit, develop, and retain “world-class people.”
Fred brings over 30 years of experience in the area of information technology having held key executive IT positions at AMD, IBM, InfoSpan Corporation, American Express, Honeywell and his own company, Quality Service Solutions.
Immediately prior to joining AMD, Fred served as Vice President and CIO
of Information Technology at Honeywell Corporation for its Industrial Automation
Controls Division. Before Honeywell, Fred's IT leadership at American Express
was instrumental in the development and implementation of new applications
and services and in the re-engineering of the information technology organization.
FredIt's perspectives have been published in Optimize, Fortune, InformationWeek,
and CIO Magazine. |
创新的微处理器、闪存和低功耗处理器解决方案
