Michael,
Interesting. Do you really see many examples of Division A having the agility and authority to ditch Division B for an alternative?
I saw a presentation from Amazon where they certainly want to avoid one-off contracts unless the contracting organization is large enough to make special conditions financially viable. And, if I remember correctly, the strategy was to decide the one-of was a bad idea and work to convince the large consumer it wasn’t needed, or to decide it was a good idea and incorporate it into the standard offering.
Both approaches sound like winners.
Ken
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Kenneth Laskey MITRE Corporation, M/S F510 phone: 703-983-7934 7515 Colshire Drive fax: 703-983-1379 McLean VA 22102-7508
Interesting thoughts, Martin.
It is possible that IBM exercised something like "enterprise architecture" but the turm was coined by Dr Jenne W. Ross in her famous book "Enterprise Architrecture as a Strategy" published in 2006.
Now, about internal services and contracts. Current market is divided into two streams - the first is traditional and relates to heavy stuff and chnages slow; another stream has already demonstrated a high pace of changes. One of the effects of this dynamic economic environmnet is in that companies working in it do not have time for fixing errors or improving internal sources longer that the market chnages again. This means that in such organisations Division A will not wait till Division B improves delivery of its internal service and, instead, will hire an outsourcing service. If Division B with its service cannot compete with the external provider of the similar services, the Division B has to pass away. Period. Any other manipulations with the Division B are possible, but they constitute a risk of wasting funds and time. Described is a principle of SOE - service-oriented enterprise. We are not there yet, but more and more industry sectors shift toward dynamic market, as global trends show.
Regarding piblic/private. In my terminology , private does n ot mean owned by consumer, but allowing private conditions and contract SLA negotiation. This is the only way for modrn serious big businesses to use outsourcing. However, becuase of such consumers, there are much less nois about private outsourcing. A number of consumers of puvlic offerings is huge, while every one contract is very small. Just a few private contracts can easily outperform thoudands of public ones (I know this for sure becuasse this was the only one survived model used by UK Government for estimating of Government regulated pension for the low income people).
In the dynamic markets, a "relative market power" is huge for services competing across corporate boundaries.
- Michael
Mike--I always understood that "enterprise architecture" was invented by John Zachman, then at IBM working on business systems planning, in the 1980s.
Regarding evidence and SLA's -- where there is a contract (or a "public offering" of a product or services with associated claims of functionality and performance) there is, in principle, legal enforceability. But most business buyers take account of whether or not the offeror is a "responsible source", which means a track record of some sort and enough net worth to allow the buyer to actually collect something via the legal system,
I believe Ken and I have similar experiences with services offered "internally" (within some organizational boundary) where formal contracts don't apply (Division A can't sue Division B). In that case, Division A would like to have some assurances that Division B will perform, or some more ad-hoc recourse (like the Manager of Div B's head, for example.)
I think most commercial IT services will be offered on a "public offer" basis--same terms for all or most customers, which would be public. In fact, we often also see offerors of all types citing their own or a third-party's statistics on performance, etc. So certainly there is evidence available to buyers in most cases.
Regarding Ken's story of an individual trying to get resources from a large company: that's an interesting observations. Maybe we ought to formally recognize the role of "relative market power" in modeling shared services.
Martin
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