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Welcome to the Executive Corner, a new segment in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Newsletter that we’ve adopted from BEA and its “Exec2Exec” newsletter. Executive Corner delivers news for IT executives—strategy-focused, thought-provoking articles on market trends, best practices for working within the IT department and with the business, and more. We hope you like what you see—and we welcome your feedback.
Executive Corner: Making the Case for Middleware: Efficiency or Expansion?
In the course of working with more than 80,000 Oracle Fusion Middleware customers, we’ve seen a broad spectrum of challenges and goals across business and IT. Whether they’re part of a multinational company managing costs, a government agency rolling out new services with static budgets, or an emerging company with a “differentiate and expand” agenda—customers are identifying two seemingly different goals.
Macro-level factors such as rising transportation and material costs and uncertainty in capital markets are causing budget cutbacks and increased need for operational efficiency.
At the same time, many customers—from industry giants and emerging leaders to scrappy upstarts and government agencies—are driving into new markets, lines of business, and geographies, mastering the art of business expansion.
Where does IT fit in? The common denominator for successful organizations is an application infrastructure foundation with built-in flexibility. This foundation keeps IT successful in times of cost cutting and consolidation and during periods of business expansion. A strategic approach to your middleware foundation can be key to differentiating a business, regardless of the strategy, industry, or company size, and is further proof that IT does matter.
However, explaining the value of middleware to business can be challenging. For IT executives working with line-of-business counterparts, understanding the strategic agenda can go a long way in securing agreement and explaining the value-add that IT can contribute.
The table below offers a few examples of how select categories of middleware can impact your bottom line. Note that most organizations are seeking both efficiency and expansion in many cases.
| |
Business Focus |
| |
Efficiency-Driven Strategy: IT Value-Add |
Expansion-Driven Strategy: IT Value-Add |
| SOA |
Mainframe extensions…reduced coding and cost of change |
Flexibility and reuse that originates within IT but has a bottom-line impact on business strategies |
| Business Intelligence and Business Activity Monitoring |
Identify exception hotspots…reduce BI drag on IT by empowering users to design and run reports |
Strategic budgeting and planning…operational planning…measure daily, hourly, and real-time execution metrics |
| Business Process Management |
Enhanced visibility into cross-application processes and additional automation of manual, exception-prone steps |
A holistic view of organizational processes, subprocesses, and variations by region or line of business |
| Enterprise 2.0 and Content Management |
Improved access and flow of enterprise information, more productive and collaborative interactions |
Differentiation online: more timely, relevant, and intimate engagements with customers and constituents |
| Identity Management |
Increased automation and repeatability of compliance efforts, more effective information access |
Reduced risk and IT maintenance overhead as new employees, systems, and regional operation centers are added |
If you’d like more information on this topic, Oracle is taking its observations, case studies, and updates on the road. Beginning in October 2008, look for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum: Driving Business Efficiency and Expansion in a city near you.
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