Enterprises have traditionally separated their
Left Handed and Right Handed business strategies
– where Right Hand refers to the plain
Vanilla efforts of organizations to manage the
current business operations more efficiently,
and the Left Hand refers to the chocolate icing
of creative new strategies to prepare the organization
for the future threats and opportunities for
long term success. Businesses need to innovatively
bring together these seemingly contradictory
efforts in order to become agile and future
ready – to not only ‘predict’
the future but also ‘create’ it.
The key to this lies in Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA).
Typically, managing an enterprise’s current
business involves finding ways to add incremental
value to products and services. Reducing variability,
and hence risk, in sales, manufacturing, and
other processes is another key factor in the
prudent management of the current business.
Expanding geographically, acquiring competitors
and similar strategies are variations of this
theme at a higher level. These strategies come
more naturally to executives and therefore we
call this focus on optimizing the current business
“right-hand management,” as most
people are more dexterous with their right hand.
Also, the right side of the brain is said to
more in control of the practical, rather than
creative, aspect of our daily lives. Indeed,
good right-hand managers are dispensers of caution,
as they listen to and act upon what their customers
are saying. They generally go about meeting
these incremental requirements through the use
of current or risk-free technologies.
Meanwhile, the further into the future organizations
look, the more uncertain the world appears.
Regardless of their specific time frames, successful
organizations must plant the seeds today for
new opportunities in the future. We call these
customer-leading strategies “left-hand”
ideas, as they are diametrically opposite to
the safe, “right-hand” operational
objectives of meeting existing customer demands
through standard technologies. The left-hand
ideas are not born out of customer surveys,
as customers typically don’t know what
they don’t know. Instead, they have to
be led. These ideas are usually catalyzed by
radical new technology that has not yet gained
widespread acceptance. We have noticed, however,
that organizations come up with these ideas
best by meticulously thinking about ways to
utilize their existing “lazy” or
latent assets to benefit their customers and
their customers’ customers.
In many organizations, complicated IT-planning
and on-demand infrastructure acquisition lead
to complex and inflexible architecture, making
the IT architecture rigid. The result –
increased cost of IT, higher costs of maintaining
these systems, and under utilization of the
resources.
This is where Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) comes into picture. SOA is an architectural
style that enables enterprises to loosely couple
their disperse data sources and presents a real-time
view of information that enables an enterprise
become agile and prepared for future –
be it challenges posed by the present scenarios,
or the opportunities presented by the future.
Enterprises around the world are cutting down
excess complex IT infrastructure and architecture
for agile applications. CTE has innovated unique
SOA frameworks that help enterprises plan and
create IT infrastructure and architecture that
is simple, flexible and cost-efficient. Effective
planning makes it possible to group thousands
of applications and databases dispersed across
the architecture, into logical blocks with minimum
interconnections and reduce the cost of maintenance.
CTE’s A2IT framework provides the basis
for managing the entire organizations’
IT needs, and offers next generation plan to
revamp technology infrastructure and enterprise
architecture.
