This project will create a practical approach to simplifying and standardizing IT in the typical firm.

Many firms are labouring under the burden of an installed IT base that is overly complex, as a result of successive waves of IT development (for example, ERP, eBusiness,) as well as a history of acquisitions and restructuring. The typical IT organization is spending 60-70 per cent of its entire budget on maintenance of this legacy code, including software upgrades and security patches. Though many are threatening to be overwhelmed by this burden, they have usually not mentioned this problem to business management. It is time to change this and tell the truth about a situation that could have serious consequences for the business.

While many of the applications in these legacy bases are custom developments or bespoke configurations of standard package suites, many, if not most, of these applications are no longer sources of distinctiveness or competitive advantage. All competitors now have similar systems and processes, and most ERP applications are at best ‘table stakes’ that one must have to be in the game at all. No one, least of all the customer, would care if competitors all used the same process or system. Indeed, they might prefer it.

It is time to prune the weeds and go to standard solutions for many, if not all, of these generic services and applications, thereby improving control of IT and reducing the share of budget devoted to the low value tasks of maintenance and upgrades. IT can then devote more of its time and budget to advanced developments in new areas (for example, business intelligence, advanced portals) where the solutions are not generic and where more value can be added.

This project will produce a step by step approach to identifying areas of generic IT and replacing it with simpler standard solutions that provide more functionality and reduce cost. The approach will consider both in-house standards as well as those available from third parties in the form of ASP services and consumer services on public infrastructure. It will also look at other areas of potential standardization such as utility services, middleware, and interface protocols.

The project will be a development of our recent report, Standard Infrastructure – Freeing IT to add more value, which identified the opportunity for replacing in-house IT with third party services in generic areas.

The workbook will be based on prototyping a specific approach with half a dozen firms in the US and Europe. It will be designed to be applied in a two-day workshop, producing high level results that can be used with business management to gain agreement on the simplification plan.