Financial management is no longer an afterthought in IT. Most IT shops do not make full use of the financial tools and techniques available, leading to difficult conversations with CFOs. Unfortunately, most IT organizations manage their financial planning, management and control using an assortment of "silo-specific" solutions, usually a collection of spreadsheets tied to different tools. This approach cannot convincingly and consistently defend the connection between business value and IT spending. Without the tools to clearly link IT investment to creating organizational value, the IT group is viewed by senior management as a cost center that costs too much.

Underlying Marty Hermsen ability to help our clients is our deep experience with complex and large-scale systems integration projects. Marty has many years of experience delivering successful implementations. Even with standards-based SOA as the de facto enterprise integration pattern and vendors' tools—such as those from IBM, CA, Oracle, BMC, HP and others—becoming increasingly powerful, successful enterprise integration is still one of the most difficult things to get right in IT. Understanding the complex and critical interconnections between the IT applications, processes, systems and tools within any enterprise is a difficult task in itself. Yet this understanding is essential for successful integration, automation and cross-product orchestration. Additionally, back-end systems must serve ever-evolving customer-facing systems. Integration architectures based on SOA, ESBs, Registries and Repositories, drop-in appliances, rules engines and process servers promote and support business agility. Implementing system integrations to create orchestrated processes—without negatively impacting existing operational effectiveness—has become even more difficult in this complex environment, but is critical to delivering business value and operational efficiency. Marty Hermsen has the broad range of business, technical, program and financial expertise necessary to assist large IT shops succeed with their complex enterprise integration projects.

Enterprise architecture is often dismissed as presentations made by super-geeks that no one understands (or needs to pay attention to). However, just as architectural blueprints are essential to build a house, enterprise architecture is a set of essential blueprints for realizing business strategy through IT, not just a bunch of pretty pictures drawn by a high-priced consultant. The Open Group defines architecture framework as a "formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation…the structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time." As SOA matures as the de facto architectural style and almost everyone's top-level architectural slides all look the same, it becomes even more important to explicitly drive from business requirements. Without an enterprise architecture that clearly links to the business strategy, it is virtually impossible to insure that IT systems and solutions will be financially and functionally effective in order to enable tactical and strategic execution. The enterprise architecture must provide the context and linkages to define the key parameters for managing IT investments, systems, technologies and processes to support changing business needs. Key business components of the architecture include: defining the strategic business drivers and processes that enable execution of the business strategy, linking these enablers to corporate financials and investment decisions, and determining key decision-makers. Technical components include: creating application architectures, applying technology standards, and determining relationships of the technical components to each other. At this point, with the deployment architectural and design patterns well defined for the technical components of most commercial IT systems, the enterprise architecture must specifically show how the technical components provide functional support for the critical business functions of the company. As most companies are moving to the SOA deployment architecture and building SOA-specific deployment infrastructures, the Enterprise Architect must clearly define how the common SOA patterns (e.g. ESB, service container, declarative policies, etc.) and standards (e.g. secure interaction for non public data with external entities) will be implemented to maximize business value as well as apply governance across the entire architectural stack.

DO NOT embark on a large IT project unless you can clearly commit to creating stakeholder-recognized business value. In most large enterprises, the total number of hardware devices, software instances, network connections and associated traffic continues to explode. While efforts such as SOA, virtualization, product consolidation and other simplification initiatives are common, the fact is that most IT infrastructures still struggle to support multiple platforms and products that, at some technical level, still require proprietary management and support. In fact, SOA initiatives can easily disrupt a carefully managed infrastructure unless SOA governance is an integral part of your infrastructure management processes and tooling. As enterprises move towards the integrated IT Service Management goal, there are no easy answers to the need for integration. IT process automation, based on orchestrating tools to improve infrastructure management, becomes a survival imperative to control IT costs and ensure availability.

Create an enterprise-wide, real-time Security View of the information from existing security tools, systems, network, applications and business management tools (integrating your existing tools, combined with real-time Business Service Views) to quickly correlate and identify potential realtime security threats. At the same time, insure that internal processes (like provisioning, identity & access management, secure development, sensitive data protection, infrastructure scanning, discovery and configuration management) can provide consistent and automated security services across your enterprise to secure your infrastructure from the individual data fields in messages, to data-at-rest, on up to your entire IT infrastructure, to prevent security breaches while enabling secure connections to your customers and partners as well as preventing the introduction of security threats from inside the organization.

IT infrastructure comprises all the hardware and software that support delivering the enterprise's business services (both customer-facing and internally facing).