Time to Market

Introduction

Competitive advantage is everything and more in today’s global economy. Service and software providers across the world, like manufacturers before them, have seen fantastic growth in revenue arising from their ability to deliver comparable quality at considerably reduced costs.   Their competitive advantage has been clear.   In situations where cost and quality fail to differentiate, an organization’s ability to bring products to market quicker than the competition can make the difference between success and failure in capturing and retaining market share.

Gartner’s advice to CIOs at the start of 2006, in its priority resolutions for the year, was that they must “determine how to reduce product development and launch-cycle times, create better strategic and operational decision making, support increased productivity, and improve customer service.”

In addition, the analyst firm has also highlighted the fundamental role of SOA in helping organizations realise greater levels of flexibility, stating that “such an architecture would enable not only fast development but also capability for easy modification to meet changing business demands.” 

CIO / Executive

In addition to the more obvious effects of failing to bring new products or services to market in good time, such as failing to capture new opportunities or loss of share price through poor revenue, senior executives of publicly-listed companies have more recently become aware of additional incentives to optimise IT responsiveness; increasingly stringent corporate compliance requirements now being imposed across the world carry with them extreme penalties, including possible imprisonment for senior level employees of public companies.   Enterprise-wide change programs targeted with introducing appropriate levels of governance are highly complex projects requiring careful management throughout the entire application portfolio. Failure to manage such change programs can in turn mean failure to meet legislative deadlines, which can result in severe repercussions.

Architect

Managing change effectively, such that business requirements are satisfied and projects delivered on time, requires a thorough understanding of the scope of those changes; the applications impacted, their level of complexity, the resources required. Industry analysts currently believe that the most effective method to ensure IT responsiveness and faster delivery is through the creation of a service-oriented architecture. In creating such an infrastructure, IT Architects will need both the high-level view, across the entire enterprise, but also the deeper introspection of each valuable application from which business components are to be extracted. The documentation produced from such a project will deliver value from the very beginning. 

Technical

Fundamentally, an organization’s ‘time to market’ depends on IT technicians being able to produce quality code quickly and in line with user requirements. If technicians do not possess the tools, or the processes are not in place, to help them in this task, higher level initiatives, such as the introduction of contemporary architectures, will fall on stony ground and fail to deliver the efficiency gains they are capable of. Application Portfolio Management brings with it system knowledge, helping to map out the impact and full scope of system changes, even before they have been made, and accelerate the understanding of the unfamiliar. It supports the production of application documentation, building value down the line – not least through its ability to identify and remove unused areas of code.

Conclusion

Good time to market is the result of a thorough understanding of the application changes to be made and the implications of making them, coupled with the production of quality code. As organizations continue to embrace SOA as their route to greater IT responsiveness, APM will increasingly deliver value to the IT department in driving its ability to bring changes to completion in good time.