Summary:

During the leadership meeting Barton questioned about a new technology which Barton was not fully aware of. While Barton was trying to make himself familiar with Web 2.0 technology he noticed that one of the customer service staff has published a blog page about IVK attack on June. Barton and his team were wondering how to deal with new technologies and how they should prepare the company policies to prevent company internal information find their way on the public media such as world wide web.

Analysis:

Because of the June attack, Barton has lost his credit among other managers. During the management meetings other managers are complaining more about IT projects. Since Barton had taken the full control of the IT budget, he has lost other managers collaborations. Also CEO doesn’t look like to be interested in IT technology meetings and Barton is worried how to tell William about the threats and also the benefits of the new Web 2.0 technology.

Every organization needs an enterprise architecture or EA which is a tool to give everyone a coordinated view of what’s happening in each section of the organization. EA must allow a non-technical audience to understand the impact of technology as well as let technologists understand the realities of business. EA has multiple layers (Exhibit 1) acting as a communication tool for variety of people with different technical and business background. The technology layer represents the specific pieces of technology and various sources for them. As a living document, EA should regularly be consulted, updated and reviewed. Now a day, the emerging technologies are changing the IT world faster than ever. Every few months we see a new innovative technology appears which may have great effect on people’s life as well as changing the business interactions. So what important issues does the unplanned adoption of emerging technologies raise for companies like IVK? New emerging technologies can change the company future. They can have great impact of peoples life as well as how company can achieve its business values. The other issue is that if company doesn’t take those new technologies seriously its possible that other competitors make use of them and by creating a differentiation gain bigger share of the market. Also every technology can bring some risks, which company should be aware of and take the right action. For example, IVK should keep their internal regulations and policy up-to-date considering the new technologies. It can help company to keep its internal information safe from being published on different public medias. We can give this advice to IVK managers, to prepare the Enterprise Architect using the latest available technologies, then assign a working group to keep this EA up-to-date. Then they can meet every few months to consider the new emerging technologies and do analysis whether company should take advantage of those technologies or not. Or if its necessary update the company policies and regulations.

Considering the relentless pace of technological evolution, what questions should senior managers be prepared to ask and answer regarding how to effectively harness the value of emerging technologies while mitigating potential business risk? Managers should ask how a new technology can improve or degrade the way company achieve and harvest its business value and what is its impact on the business processes that deliver that value. Switching from one technology to other technology is always time consuming and it needs capital investment. Company should not change its infrastructure more frequently, because each technology needs its adaptation phase and it can bring cost burden as well as customer service degradation. On other hand being ready for new technology can bring more values in future. So as trade of, company should change its technology when its really necessary with considering all those burdens and possible gains in future.

Recommendation:

We would recommend Barton, to create working group to check the new technologies and updating EA every quarter. This team should consist of other business managers to bring their collaboration. The team should review the company business architecture every few months considering the new opportunities provided by emerging technologies as well as considering the possible threats. For example, regarding the Web 2.0 they should update their internal information policy also they should consider new benefits of web 2.0 such as Wiki media for providing a better customer service.

Expected Outcome:

By building an EA review team, we expect that it will result in a better collaboration from other business managers. It will keep the IVK EA up-to-date with market technologies and it will better position the company among it competitors by bringing more business values from using emerging technologies as well as protecting company’s information and assets by updating the policies.

Conclusion:

World of technology is changing more than ever and organization can stop its fast paste. They should actively adopt themselves with these new changes and take advantages of some those technologies and prepare themselves for threats of other technologies. IVK should consider an special budget and resources to adopt its EA with emerging technologies to improve its business processes and also to protect better the company against unseen threats.