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 that prepare the organization
to face future threats and to capitalize on 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 to
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 risk—in sales, manufacturing,
and other processes is a 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 we call this focus on optimizing
the current business “right-hand management,”
because most people are more dexterous with their
right hand. Also, the right side of the brain
is said to be more in control of the practical,
rather than creative, aspect of our daily lives.
Indeed, good right-hand managers are dispensers
of caution; they listen to and act upon what their
customers are saying. They generally respond to
these incremental requirements through the use
of current or risk-free technologies.
Meanwhile, as organizations look
further into the future, the world appears more
uncertain. 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, because they are diametrically opposite to the
safe, “right‑hand” operational objectives
of meeting existing customer demands through standard
technologies. Left‑hand ideas are not born out
of customer surveys, because customers typically
don’t know what they don’t know. Instead,
customers have to be led. Left-hand 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 more frequently by 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
can lead to complex, inflexible, and rigid IT
architectures. The results are increased costs
of IT, higher costs of maintaining these systems,
and underutilization of the resources.
This is where Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) comes into the picture. SOA is
an IT architectural approach that enables enterprises
to loosely couple their disperse data sources,
resulting in a real-time view of information that
enables an enterprise to become more agile and
prepared for challenges posed by the present scenarios
and/or opportunities of the future. Around the world, enterprises
are cutting down excess complex
IT infrastructures and architectures for these more
agile applications. CTE has developed innovative, unique SOA
frameworks that help enterprises plan and create
IT infrastructures and architectures that are
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 reduced cost of maintenance.
CTE’s A2IT framework provides the basis
for managing an entire organization's IT
needs, and offers a next-generation plan to revamp
technology infrastructure and enterprise architecture.
