If enterprise architecture developed a bad reputation in the past couple of years among business users, it was well deserved at least some of the time, according to Peter Weill, director of the MIT Centre for Information Systems Research. "Architecture was presented as a standards issue at a very technical level. [CIOs] took a one-size-fits-all approach that was driven by best practices in IT, which was the worst approach," Weill says. Architecture should indeed be driven by best practices, he notes - but in business, not technology. For Watson, that means focusing attention and spending resources on the task-specific, sometimes customised applications that drive particular business units, including best-of-business front ends, Web enablement and custom XML development. "The application decision should always be predicated on business requirements," Watson says, "but if someone's proposing a solution that requires a different level of support, you should have the ability to do it."
Underneath that level, Watson feels it makes sense to try to standardise the basic communications tools to be used throughout the enterprise - e-mail, voice mail, group communications software, office productivity packages, OSs and browsers. At the very bottom, the company's infrastructure should be set in something pretty close to stone. "This is where you want to drive the bulk of your efficiencies. This is where it pays to be consistent across the enterprise," Watson says. Andrew Winer, CIO at Myers Industries, a rubber and plastics manufacturer in Ohio, agrees that it makes sense to lavish attention on high-end applications and be willing to give and take in that arena. "We're much more concerned about applications than the lower-level architecture," he says. Overall, Winer characterises Myers Industries' list of approved products as perhaps looser than a traditional standardised list. "We try to pick and choose things where we already have some level of expertise, but our list is broad. The nature of open architecture allows you to be somewhat flexible."
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