As Stewart Brand wrote in How Buildings Learn, only buildings that are loved and maintained will last for centuries. Brand theorizied that a building is actually a collection of layers which change and adapt at various layers. While all buildings will change, the only ones that will improve are the ones that are cared for and continuously allow the various layers to change at different speeds (or paces). Similarly, while highly doubtful your business will disappear in the middle of the night, failure to adequately maintain or improve IT will only allow the business to crumble away with time.
Do your IT strategies support change? Do your solutions enable greater innovation and collaboration with the business?
If your organization is like most, the answer is probably not enough. It’s time to consider adopting the pace-layered application strategy developed by Gartner. This approach takes into account what processes and data applications support—from those you rely on every day, and those that set you apart from your competitors, to those that support the development of new business ideas. By aligning your systems and processes into three distinct areas, Common Idea, Different Ideas, and New Ideas, organizations can focus on creating value and differentiating themselves in the market without the restrictions of being tied to the underlying systems that support them.
Using this approach will enable you to change and maintain different pieces of your technology puzzle at the appropriate times. With today’s middleware solutions and open, standards-based integration, adopting a true pace-layered approach has never been more achievable.
Read our recent newsletter article, Adapt to New Business Demands with a Pace-Layered Application Strategy, to learn the basics of the pace layered approach. Then take advantage of Gartner’s free research preview, Accelerating Innovation by Adopting a Pace-Layered Application Strategy.