GSI Architecture Strategy Part 1: Basics (Project Lifestyle)

To start to my series on Global Single Instances let’s deal with some basics first.

Not Literally “Global” or “Single”

We may not literally be talking about a single instance of a system supporting global operations for a corporation.

A true GSI may only be a realistic goal for few enterprises right now.

As a provocation or target, however, it can work well for anyone. So the less sexy, non-soundbite version might be something like:

Consolidate your business systems and business information to as few places and platforms as possible.

What are GSI’s About?

Having your business systems and information in as few places, on as few different platforms as possible.

This means that GSI’s are about:

Business information
Cost reduction
Business (process) agility

Clearly then a GSI discussion is more than just an IT/technology discussion. It is really about how you want to support your business architecture.

Information

Quality, consistency and timeliness of your business information is easier to achieve when you have fewer versions of it all to work with.

Seems common sense, but as enterprises evolve and grow their business systems proliferate and by default you get many tens (in some cases hundreds) of versions of your customer, vendor, inventory or employee master data.

Oracle’s journey to GSI’ness started with Larry Ellison posing the simple question “How many people work for Oracle?". We could not answer that simple question without manually combining data from several tens of separate systems.

Costs and Business Agility

Reducing the number of separate systems and datacenters helps reduce your direct IT costs. Duh!

This may not end up being a strong argument though, when many world class companies’ IT costs are trending to 2% – 5% of revenue.

The key to to be able show how IT consolidation contributes to reducing other costs of business operations. Some examples:

Facilitation of Shared Service Centers
Facilitation of tax efficient sales and legal entity structures
Rapid onboarding of acquisitions
Price and discount management on both revenue and procurement sides through better customer and vendor visibility. This can also contribute to better cash management.
Global planning and manufacturing capacity optimization
And the list of good things could go on and on…

Many of these benefits are not just about cost reduction and efficiency. They also support enhanced business agility. As we know, the more an enterprise knows about it’s ever-changing business environment and the speed with which it can respond to those changes increases it’s chances of survival and growth on it’s own terms in that environment.

Comments (1)

Andrew Sparks :

Received a tweet from an old colleague/friend

"Would like to hear your view on how cloud computing may impact GSI"

My considered reply was...
"well...cloud = infrastructure = kind of the easy part compared to the people & business process bit"

Posted by Andrew Sparks | March 5, 2009 2:31 PM

Posted on March 5, 2009 14:31

Project Lifestyle