Standardized Technology Architecture Stage

The value proposition of IT to business organizations are enormous, but to benefits from IT an organization has to succeed in integrating IT with the business strategic objectives. To do this, the organizations have to develop its IT architecture capabilities which will serve as an enhancer to the enterprise IT architecture before the firm can realize this value from IT.

Yes, the company should have risk mitigation strategies for the standardized technology architecture stage because while firms move from the application silo stage, they carries along some of the problem that they were facing to the technology standardization stage. The application of specific-data is one problem facing the standardized stage which has to be managed with care.

This stage is commonly used by many companies in their IT architectures, used to classify IT infrastructures in companies as they are moving their resources from one stage to another. For example, firms moving from the application silo stage which is, the development of application to a stage where they can now be able to share infrastructure that is the standardized technology architecture stage. This shift in technology is as a result of the changes taking place in the business environment and organizations are trying to meet up with their rapid changing environment. Each of the architectural stages has its own specific competencies different from the others such as in terms of designing their applications, infrastructure and data; the strategic opportunities they offer; the governance processes they demand, the IT capabilities they provide; and the management of IT (Ross,2003). The four stages presented by Ross, (2003) are in numeric order as follows: _1) Application silo architecture stage: Is involved with the IT architectures of separate applications._ 2) Standardized technology architecture stage: It is concerned about the IT architecture that provides efficiencies to the whole enterprise through technology standardization._ 3) Rationalized data architecture stage: This is an extension of the enterprise-wide IT standards

Majority of the IT organizations that have moved from the application silo stage to the standardized technology stage are creating an infrastructure that can be shared by all departments in the organization using the organization’s architecture. Worth noting also is that, company's managers are only in favour of standardization because they can use it to limit their choices of technology and cut down the number of platforms to manage which will consequently save them some money. In addition, standardization helps in reducing the amount of vendor packages for those who were performing similar functions. For instance, an organization can use standardization to reduce its order quantity of management systems from 30 to 6 (Ross, 2003).

From the above explanation, one can understand that, senior business managers are supporting standardized architecture in their organization because of the benefits they can gain when standardizing their organization such as; consolidating technology platforms that can increase cost savings on IT investments, reduce complexity, and also increase IT maintainability, reliability, and security (Ross,