ENABLE BUSINESS STRATEGY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

How is it possible for a local company to defeat global giants like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Watsons in your market segment and establish market leadership for more than a decade? The answer is given by Nongfu Spring, a Chinese company in manufacturing and retail industries. In my recent report “Case Study: Technology Innovation Enables Nongfu Spring To Strengthen Market Leadership”, I analyzed the key factors behind their success, and provide related best practice from enterprise architecture perspective. These factors include

• Business strategy is enterprise architecture's top priority. EA pros often need to be involved in project-level IT activities to resolve issues and help IT teams put out fires. But it's much more important that architects have a vision, clearly understand the business strategy, and thoroughly consider the appropriate road map that will support it in order to be able to address the root causes of challenges.
• Agile infrastructure sets up the foundation for scalable business growth. Infrastructure scalability is the basis of business scalability. Infrastructure experts should consider not only the agility that virtualization and IaaS solutions will provide next-generation infrastructure, but also network-level load balancing among multiple telecom carriers. They should also refine the network topology for enterprise security.
• SOA and BPM unify information silos for business visibility. Well-designed service-oriented architecture helps application experts address business challenges. Infrastructure, application, and business services designed around tech and/or business requirements establish the enterprise app backbone, and a business process management solution will enable end-to-end business visibility for the organization.
• Integrated converged infrastructure is an effective solution for BI on big data. Business intelligence is the key to strategic decisions. Traditional solutions on the database and application layers will encounter critical challenges in the age of big data. Converged infrastructure such as HANA, integrated with cloud-enabled solutions like Hadoop, would be an effective way to provide composite business insights to business execs.
• Organize IT to effectively address a variety of business needs. Companies should thoroughly identify internal stakeholders and prioritize their business requirements, and then organize their IT arm to effectively support the business change. Clear responsibilities and standardized processes are essential not only essential for operational excellence, but also for IT executives to balance strategic, tactical, and operational requests.

If you still have the doubt in how to leverage related technology, please take a deep dive into the report and reference from their success; however if you have other insights on using technology to advance business objectives, you are mostly welcome to provide your comments to this blog post.