How significant is the IT Architecture for your business

Every organization, SMBs to Enterprises, relies upon their IT architecture for running the business, its workflows, planning, processes, policies, principles, operations, services, projects and to fulfill their obligation towards value proposition. It is not merely the data storage and management system, as existed till the late 80’s but incorporates the complete domain of business management as of now. Right from the aim, planning, policies and principles, the IT architecture starts to play a significant and profound role in the organization’s existence, operations and development.

Your IT architecture coordinates and interlinks the organization and its management functions by providing the platform, tools and interface for organizational foundation, functioning, administration, and development. It enforces the standards and regulations upon the processes and workflows to produce the desired outcome. It controls and regulates the functioning by providing tools and interface for monitoring, analyzing and decision making. It provides historical and statistical data with analytical tools for planning and implementation and at the same time providing resources for the expansion and development of the organization.

What is needed in the IT Architecture?

The below elements or components are crucial for the IT architecture:

Back office Operations Project execution Public interface Data management Infrastructure

There are many architecture implementation models adopted by various organizations. Some select a particular architecture after detailed studies and research while some architecture will evolve with time and experience. In any case, since IT architecture is the backbone and powering factor of the organizational realm, any discrepancies in the selection, configuration, implementation and management of the IT architecture will produce negative signs and side effects to the smooth functioning of the organization.

An IT architecture can be bad or the domain related synonyms as applicable to it, like non-scalable, outdated, redundant, inconsistent, unreliable, etc. depending upon the environment that demands from it. Whatever the technology be, if your IT architecture is just not suitable for your needs, it will start producing warning signs for your business.

What are the symptoms of a bad IT Architecture?

Frequent Malfunctioning and Increased Downtime

Is your IT staff busy running around departments responding to case reports and troubleshooting? Are there frequent system crashes and your staff is stuck with an abrupt system shutdown or crash? Or are they not getting the data and functionality they need for their duties? Obviously this is a clear and concise indication of an outdated or mis-configured IT architecture.

Redundant Interfaces

If the number of interfaces is not proportionate to data view and management requirements, it means you are forced to do the same action across different screens on the same data. You are wasting the operational time as well as computing resources. A poorly designed CRM or Finance Software can create this issue and it may be on a certain point of time that you have detected it. It indicates either lack of horizontal scalability or poor design patterns.

Data Redundancy

It depends upon the data and entity relationship design of your IT architecture that decides how much data redundancy you are experiencing either visible or invisible. Copying databases or data tables across departmental databases create extreme amount of data duplication and redundancy. If you HR could not find an interface to review the salary hike pattern of an employee through the synchronized but logically separated data views of the HR and Finance departments, it indicates that a data copy mechanism is in use to provide this data to the HR. This is a clear case of Data Redundancy and associated overheads in data synchronization, storage issues etc.

Data Inconsistency