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Strategic Decision Support

The World Wide Web is based on architectural design principles that allow it to grow without creating technological or coordination nightmares. These principles (Web architecture) can be leveraged in an enterprise IT context to reduce integration complexity and ubiquitous vendor- and tool lock-in.

While the problem space of enterprise IT in today's often geographically and organizationally dispersed enterprises is very similar to the problem space of the World Wide Web it is evident that enterprise IT and 'Web IT' are different in at least the following aspects:

• Planning and Budgeting: the enterprise is not an open space of independent parties where activities and failure of one party do not directly affect the others. An enterprise needs to coordinate the IT activities of its departments, assign budgets and follow a plan.
• Impact of Failures: on the Web, the best, most interesting or simply most adopted services prevail and others just disappear; this is the Web's natural path of evolution. Inside the enterprise however, failure of projects wastes budget and resources and negatively impacts the whole. IT management cannot simply wait for the best ideas to emerge but must coordinate activities and have reasonable expectations of project success.
• Development Organization: on the Web, services are typically created first, before any software is written that accesses these services. Service consumers are often written on the basis of inspecting the deployed service. Enterprise IT, on the other hand, usually requires parallel development of services and consumers. This significantly affects the amount of activity that is required for designing service types.

We provide consulting services to enable you to put these issues into a broader IT governance context and to develop an informed strategy how to fit Web architecture into your enterprise IT landscape. Topics covered are potential risks, short term costs vs. long term benefits, capability issues of the existing application portfolio and the definition of performance indicators for quality and success control.