Digital transformation has obliged IT teams to work much more closely with their business users, as the latter increasingly become the driving force behind new IT projects in companies. IT departments have accordingly started to make major changes, leading them to now position themselves as IT service centres, with the services provided requiring continuous improvement in quality and availability.
The IT department as a company’s IT service centre
IT departments are responsible for successfully running the computer processes and data streams used every day by functional business departments. Nowadays, if IT crashes, the entire business is unfortunately likely to grind to a halt, or at least slow down.
This responsibility is sometimes made more complicated by a lack of uniformity in the information system with a plethora of technological silos comprising systems old and new, various packages such as ERP, CRM, WMS, and LIMS, and some custom-built applications.
Hence, to improve the quality of this IT service centre, IT departments need to get to grips with the different aspects of the information system including internal and external data traffic, data quality, etc., but without feeling restricted by the applications comprising the overall system.
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An IT service centre, yes, but with a business and strategy view
To keep control over information system data flows and refine the benefits gained, an IT service centre needs to broaden its view of data interchanges and processes, away from the purely technical aspects, so as to better serve the business and human aspects.
In so doing, IT departments will benefit from adopting a global, business-centric view of interchanges, and not restricting themselves solely to the technical implementation. By moving up a level in their role, the IT service centre can become the foundation on which corporate strategy is built, interacting more readily with business users and management. It ceases to be viewed as restrictive, but rather as a driver contributing to business processes and transformation.
The quality of IT services as perceived by other departments in the company alters radically, being no longer purely a matter of technological provision. The company’s information system consequently reflects business processes and the company’s organisation.
De-siloing and process/data interoperability – the IT department’s key contributions
To play a wider role than a mere operator, and drive transformation, a view combining data governance and internal and external processes should be promoted, with point-to-point interfaces between applications being abandoned.
The solution is to link the various dimensions of data streams within a single platform;
- ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)
- BPM (Business Process Management)
- MDM (Master Data Management)
- API Management
In so doing, you can leave burdensome projects and application constraints behind and take up your role as the conductor of the corporate orchestra.
This consistent and harmonised approach to data flows is one of our core beliefs, and lies at the heart of the Blueway integrated platform.
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The Blueway solution to help IT departments deliver quality IT services
With Blueway, IT departments keep control over the existing information system while making it more coherent, reliable and efficient, without necessarily always calling the architecture into question.
With the wide range of standard connectors to the main ERP and CRM packages on the market that Blueway offers, data interchanges between applications, both internally and externally with partners, are under complete control. IT departments become more agile and can roll out service-oriented architectures (SOA) more easily.
When orchestrating the different processes, standards compliance is automated and data quality is assured by means of a single master data repository implemented by Blueway.
In this way, Blueway enables you to quickly optimise the existing information system’s performance.
Blueway facilitates cooperation between the functional business staff and IT teams
Beyond the technology the Blueway platform provides, your IT and business people all benefit from improved collaboration.
Functional managers can work on process modelling in a straightforward and intuitive way using Blueway’s graphical interface.
IT teams can then complete these models and generate the corresponding technical specifications automatically. Collaboration of this kind means the process definition is both accurate and complete, which considerably reduces errors and delivers genuine time-savings in optimisation projects.
Lastly, the provision of a collaboration platform allows anyone to monitor processes and data streams linked to other users.
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