Products, Vendors and Category Trees

by Jeff Tash

Technology architecture's building blocks are products, vendors and category trees. Large enterprises invest huge sums of money purchasing IT products. Yet, questions exist such as:

• how often does the purchase of a new product result in the acquisition of something that delivers redundant overlapping functionality with some other product(s) that the organization already owns?
• how can an IT organization avoid different project teams from buying multiple different database managers, or multiple different business process managers, or multiple different application servers, or multiple different ESBs, and so on and so on?
• How do companies communicate which products have been selected as corporate standards?
• How does IT reach out to the diverse constituency of people who use, develop, operate, manage, evaluate, or purchase technology offerings?

Alphabetical lists organized by product name or vendor name don’t provide much assistance. Instead, a classification hierarchy (i.e., taxonomy) is required so that products providing similar functionality cluster together. Through consolidation and standardization, most organizations can reduce technology portfolio costs by at least 10%.

In this presentation, Jeff Tash will discuss his unique three-layer/four model technology architecture. The bottom foundation layer represents IT infrastructure. While enormously complex and expensive, by itself, IT infrastructure doesn’t really do very much. Value is derived only after layering applications on top of the infrastructure. Applications, represented by the middle layer, can either be developed or purchased. Regardless of whether they’re built or bought, applications generate data which corresponds to the top layer. Enterprises use many kinds of tools to mine data for business intelligence.

Using Jeff’s three-layer/four-model technology architecture, this presentation shows you how your organization can benefit by organizing, visualizing and communicating information about your own internal technology architecture.