CSI: Your Company

The unreadable image above is a snapshot of the Computing Scene Investigation we undertook at one company. Company and site names (which appeared down the left hand side of the spreadsheet) have been removed to protect the innocent.

We actually printed out the spreadsheet on a very large scale color plotter and it covered an entire wall of my office.

What you're looking at is an Application Map. The sites (were) listed down the left side and all the business processes are listed across the top of the spreadsheet. Each cell within the spreadsheet identified the application that supported each business process at a specific site.

Different applications are identified by different colors. The "application color legend" appears at the bottom of the chart.

At first glance, it looks as if someone threw confetti at a wall. And this version shows the application landscape AFTER a substantial ERP implementation (the light blue color).

Think about this for a second.. 34 different applications requiring, maintenance, support, training, interoperability, data mining, security, backup and recovery planning over a mix of centralized and distributed computing platforms.

Now let me give you one more piece of information. Each plant performed essentially the same function.

If you were to do some psychological forensics by staring at this diagram for a while, what would you determine?

1. Clearly, each site's I.T. solutions were historically chosen and managed locally.
2. The variety of applications - even within the same function might lead you to believe that the sites didn't talk to one another.
3. You might expect that business processes, system security and segregation of duties would be varied and difficult to enforce, both within a site and across the enterprise.
4. Reporting to Head office would be done with a myriad of different reports, which would need to be collated and re-summarized at the Corporate offices.
5. The reporting processes would be cumbersome, slow and likely not entirely accurate (apples to apples).
6. The entire infrastructure would be expensive to maintain and slow to change.
7. No shared services.
8. The company would not likely be positioned to compete in the 21st Century.
9. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance would be a challenge.
10. Autonomy and site performance trumps overall corporate performance.
11. Very little information (customer, vendor, business processes) shared across sites.

Since I was new to the company, I had asked for an application map. None existed. It took us several weeks to put the pieces of the puzzle together. No one had ever looked at the business process support systems in this way before.

But when you do, it can tell you an awful lot about the company.

Just for fun, why not ask your I.T. folks if thay have an application map of your business processes. If they don't, you may not be able to easily understand I.T. consolidation opportunities and achieve potential cost reductions, flexibility and the ability to improve the speed of change.

If they have one, take a look at it and perform your own CSI forensics.

It'll tell you a lot about how your company operates and where your big I.T. opportunities are.