Rather than pursue architecture development by project, IS organizations must buy into the need to plan architectures designed to accommodate swift change. Old architecture development methodologies that had an IS shop that sequentially defined the business need, developed the appropriate application architecture and then implemented the supporting infrastructure will not work in today's business environment. Instead, IS must follow an adaptive architecture methodology that stipulates simultaneous definition, development and implementation. Because of the need for swift flexibility, an adaptive architecture methodology actually increases standardization at the lower levels of infrastructure, such as communications and databases, and encourages increased responsiveness to changing business needs at the higher levels. A common language enables the articulation of solid, value-added ROI links among information requirements, business goals and the technology necessary to achieve them.
Information is a corporate asset to be planned, budgeted, acquired, used and retired.
Although Meta Group believes that most IS and business executives do not consciously ignore the value of information, we also believe there have been no decent tools for determining its value and its role in the strategic planning process. IS has failed in the past by trying to place a value on something most businesspeople don't understand-technology. Although the information ecosystem model is not presented as a panacea, we believe it helps project prioritization by placing the business value emphasis where it is easiest to understand-on the business information. While organizations continue to encounter difficulty putting an absolute dollar figure on a specific piece of information, they can easily rank information needs and make choices based on a hierarchy. Rather than suggest the solution, IS must present a variety of ways to provide the necessary business information, each with a separate price tag, and insist that business executives choose.