Capabilities

IT Strategy plays the crucial and long-term role of ensuring organisations make the most of their IT investments by marrying the right technologies to meet the goals of the corporate strategy. But seamlessly coupling information and technology with continuously evolving business processes is hard to do, and very hard to do well.

Sadly, too many organisations develop a range of individual IT solutions in response to localised needs and more often than not, they are independent of the organisation’s overall corporate strategy: processes are uncharted, information is unreliable, and vertical information systems are created rather than integrated platforms for business execution.

This is where Enterprise Architecture plays the vital role of assessing existing IT assets, architecture standards, the desired business strategy to create a unified enterprise-wide environment, where the core hardware and software systems are standardised and integrated across the entire organisation’s business processes to greatly enhance competitive advantage and innovation.

Importantly, the synergies of these two disciplines is about thinking of the organisation as a complete entity and not individual operating units: it’s about properly defining the operating model, the IT and the company-wide processes that differentiate the organisation competitively before integrating and standardising on those as the foundation for successful execution.

Put simply, the IT Strategy details the technologies, application and the data foundation needed to deliver the goals of the corporate strategy, while Enterprise Architecture is the bridge between strategy and execution, providing the organising logic to ensure the integration and standardisation of key processes that drive greater agility, higher profitability, faster time to market, lower IT costs, improved access to shared customer data and lower risk of mission-critical systems failures.

Success depends on intimately understanding business models, industry sectors and the trends of different technologies, expertise we’ve been building for over 20 years now. To find out more about Oakton’s work in this capability area please contact Shaji Sethu, Brendon Trezise or James Watson.