Technology is critical to all businesses

Today all businesses, large and small rely upon technology. Increasingly consumers expect interactions with companies to be a simple, hassle free, delivered through a smart phone with minimal interaction. How well you implement and manage technology directly impacts how well you do business and how well you serve your customers. Your technology is now more than ever directly exposed out to your Customers.

Understand what’s important

So how do we make sure that we are in control of our technology, aware of all the risks, aware of where our spend is going and importantly aware of which elements of our estate are critical to the running of our business?

The first step is to build up a view of the current environment, from a technology perspective, a business capability perspective and importantly how the two relate. This isn’t about drafting up libraries of low level blueprints of your whole network, the applications, components and all of the integration points. In the first instance what we’re looking for is a couple of simple documents which can describe or answer the following questions:

• What are the key systems which make your business tick?
• Where is you technology budget being spent?
• What are your biggest areas of technical risk?
• Which systems talk to which other systems?
• What business purpose does each system enable?

There are lots of great examples across the various architecture frameworks that can help to build up these views, but for me it all starts with a good old fashioned spreadsheet. Really all we’re doing at this stage is building up a catalogue or inventory of the important systems. Then against each item in the inventory we capture the important attributes. There’s no limit to how far you can end up going with the attributes, but as a starting point focus on those initial questions above

• System Name – what is the common name within your organisation for the system?
• Business use – what is the system used for?
• Vendor/Supplier – who is the vendor or supplier of the system. If its an in-house developed solution who is the technology vendor
• Current version – what version of the software is your system on
• License/Cost model – what are you paying, and what is the arrangement. For example is it annual subscription for a SAAS product, or have you purchased a set number of licenses
• Support status – who and how is the system supported. Do you have a support and maintenance agreement with the vendor or a third party supplier, if so include the point of contact
• Renewal date – when is the current license and/or support agreement up for renewal
• Integrations – what other systems, or third party services does this system talk to

Even with just that information captured you can already see a powerful view of your technology estate. You can start to answer the questions above, and moreover start to use this information to proactively plan and roadmap supporting technology investments to keep you systems in-support and under control.