Better Modeling to Manage Risk and Reward

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

Why do we need a new and better model for assessing providers and their offerings?

The move to the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and its enabling Master Architecture is a major transformation, affecting both the rapidly-evolving way that business will be done going forward, and the technologies now required to make that happen. In this process enterprises are increasingly acquiring these Cloud solutions, many of which present new challenges and potential value for the acquiring organizations. On both sides of the proposition – risk and reward – there are management issues to be addressed, yet few enterprises have marshaled the resources or the approaches to manage the acquisition of this transformative technology.

Challenges in managing both risks and rewards will continue to present themselves to business enterprises implementing this emerging Master Architecture, as follows:

On the Risk side, the challenges include managing functionality in the present and into the future; security privacy and regulatory compliance; performance, outages and service levels; platform compatibilities and integration; and managing provider relations.
On the Reward side, the challenges are managing financial returns and work productivity; pro-active competitive positioning; synergies across the solution portfolio; agile responses to competitive initiatives; and managing partnerships.

We will further explore these challenges of the emerging Master Architecture in an upcoming Saugatuck Strategic Report on managing risk and reward in the Boundary-free Enterprise^™, to be published later this month.

Note: Ongoing Saugatuck subscription clients can access this premium research piece (1073MKT) by clicking here, and inputting your ID and password. Non-clients can purchase and download this premium research piece by clicking here.

Mike West

Michael West is Vice President with Saugatuck Technology. His areas of research and consulting expertise include Cloud Computing, “Enterprise Ready” SaaS, ISVs in transition to SaaS, Cloud Development platforms, SaaS Integration, Social Computing platforms, and GRC. In 2000, Mr. West joined Saugatuck as an early co-founder after leaving Gartner, Inc., where he served as Vice President and Research Director. In 2004-5, Mr. West spent a year in Washington, D.C. at the Corporate Executive Board as Practice Manager of the Information Risk Executive Council, before returning to work at Saugatuck and re-focusing his interests on Software-as-a-Service and Cloud platforms. Mr. West has over twenty years experience in Information Technology at John Hancock, Fidelity Investments, Apple Computer, and Gartner. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and other industry events on a wide range of topics concerning technology and business strategy. He has written and presented research on information management, data administration, applications development, application integration, object technology, client/server architectures, graphical user interface and usability strategies, web site development and Internet applications, network computing, electronic commerce, portals, hubs and communities. Mr. West has an A.B. from Williams College , M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and M.B.A. from the Boston College Graduate School of Management. He has taught IT Strategies in M.B.A. programs at the Boston College Graduate School of Management and at the Haas School of the University of California at Berkeley.

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