The basics of the Adaptive Enterprise strategy

'It is an enticing vision: The living company, one that creates and brings to market new products overnight, one that changes business processes or practices in a proverbial heartbeat to meet new market demands or ward off competitive challenges.

The sad truth, though, is that IT infrastructure networks, servers, applications are the real roadblocks keeping such daydreams from becoming reality at most companies. The way they are hardwired together often makes business flexibility much, much harder.' That was Derek Slater writing in CIO magazine way back in 1998. Fortunately, a lot has happened in five years.

Today, the adaptive enterprise, as refined and developed by HP, starts with robust systems, applications and architectures engineered to be easy to adapt, use, connect, manage and modify. After simplification, look for extensive standardization meaning industry-standard interfaces, platforms and software development techniques.

Ask the IT team if off-the-shelf applications and technologies are being used. The same idea also extends to security procedures, version controls, capacities and performance management: Standardization is the key.

At the same time, all the system components, including servers and storage, should be modular as well as integrated. This means sections of the IT asset can be changed or worked on without impacting the rest of the system, yet all parts can work together as needed. That's the foundation stuff.

The next level of refinement leading to the adaptive enterprise follows three general rules. First, the IT resources must be delivered in the form of services. In other words, applications, storage, computing power, and so on, can be delivered and paid for where and when necessary.

Second, these resources should be virtualized. This concept is often misunderstood outside IT circles. It simply means aggregating servers, applications, storage and networks from one data center or from several data centers, for that matter and sharing them, on the fly, to accommodate changing workloads or to support a new line of business.

As a company's IT resource approaches higher levels of agility, more and more of these 'on-the-fly' changes should occur without human intervention.

The third general rule says the IT infrastructure must continuously take its lead from a companys business processes. Easier said than done perhaps, but this idea goes to the very heart of how the adaptive enterprise actually pays off in helping companies adapt to change.