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What is Information Friction?
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Inside an automobile engine, an excess amount of friction creates resistance that results in overheating, expansion, locking together of moving parts and the ultimate mechanical breakdown of the engine. For the moving parts of a business – people, processes and information – friction can also bring about undesirable results. Symptoms of business friction and the prelude to a breakdown can appear in many forms, including: |
- Disparate information systems cannot talk and people and applications cannot get the information they need to be productive
- Business data and processes are locked inside monolithic legacy systems built with antiquated development languages
- Existing systems must be reused rather than replaced, due to constrained IT budgets, risk of failure and potential for business disruption
- IT development and ownership costs are increasing and there is a shortage of qualified IT resources for maintaining ‘old technologies’
- The business cannot move as fast as the market demands due to IT architectures and applications that resist change
- There is no consistent architectural framework within which applications can be rapidly developed, integrated and reused
- Supply chain, customer service and other key business processes are hindered by lack of online connectivity, poor Web-enabling and automation or no automation at all
- Work teams are unable to effectively collaborate on documents and other unstructured information
- Regulatory compliance and audit-readiness efforts are costly and inefficient
Better technology integration is an obvious solution, yet countless attempts by companies to integrate across technology boundaries have fallen short due to complexity, cost, disruption and unworkable implementation schedules. Organizations need an enhanced IT environment that will reduce the friction inhibiting ongoing business optimization and progress. Without IT transformation, the business enterprise will be only as agile and as flexible as the information systems and business applications that support it. Enterprise speed of change will always be limited by IT speed of change. |
