The way forward for businesses today

I spend a good part of my time talking with business executives and CIOs about their business and IT challenges.

Over the past few years, when we have talked about how companies gauge the effectiveness of IT, our conversations centered mostly on three measures: managing cost, increasing quality, and mitigating risk. Now, though, there's another key measure of IT's effectiveness, and that's agility - or the ability to manage and capitalize on change.

We all know that this kind of agility doesn't just fall out of the sky, and I think that a number of our customers have first-hand experience with some of the barriers to agility.

For example, it's no secret that too many enterprise application architectures commonly used today are monolithic, hard to modify, difficult to connect, and impossible to integrate in Internet-based business processes.

A couple of years ago, HP began working on the basic elements of a strategy to help companies overcome these obstacles, link their IT environment with the rest of the business, and bring their processes, their organizations and even their people into a much closer, more productive synchronization. This work has matured as our Adaptive Enterprise strategy.

This strategy has much substance and investment behind it. Among its most important elements is a set of four design principles - simplification, standardization, modularity, and integration - that we consistently use with customers to help them evolve to an Adaptive Enterprise.

We began using these design principles with businesses that wanted to make their infrastructure more adaptive. Then we realized that these principles apply when customers are thinking about their business processes, their applications, or their underlying IT infrastructure.

Even more importantly, we saw that when customers want to keep all these elements aligned and lower the cost of change, it's important to use the same design principles at the business process level and at the IT level.

Our Adaptive Enterprise strategy also includes metrics that assess a company's agility and the ability of its IT environment to respond to business change. These tools gauge agility based on:

Time - how long it takes to make a change.

Range - how broadly a change can take place across an organization.

Ease - the cost and effort it takes to make a change.

When we perform this Agility Assessment for customers, we can give them a profile showing their strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to prioritize the projects that will deliver the biggest payback.

Just about every company I've seen is at a different stage in becoming an Adaptive Enterprise. Our aim is to help businesses make continued progress toward more agility regardless of where they are now.

For example, a company wanting to focus first on its corporate network layer would be interested in our Adaptive Network Architecture, which helps CIOs create a logical architecture based on information needs, not on physical layout.

Other CIOs find that their maze of applications is a barrier to greater business agility and come to us because of our Adaptive Application Architecture.

This lets organizations develop a 360-degree view of their application architecture, so that everything from data migration to supply chain aggregation can work together to improve agility.

Those CIOs focused on the management layer will want to know that we're expanding OpenView, the centerpiece of HP's Adaptive Management software, up from the IT level to the business process level.

Everything we do for our enterprise customers centers on adaptability - helping businesses thrive in the face of change. All of our investments are focused on this goal - and a tremendous number of our services offerings support it.

Based on our own experience integrating HP and Compaq, we know that an Adaptive Enterprise is not a destination, but a journey. It's the way forward for business and IT working in synch.