Face it: your future competitiveness depends on your ability to respond to changing conditions. To be agile, companies need technology solutions that open up their information and processes to employees, customers and partners. The challenge is to develop an enterprise architecture that allows unrelated systems to work together and that is designed to accommodate change.

The problem an organization has when developing new or reengineering existing business systems is analgous to the problem it faces when it builds a new factory, warehouse, or corporate headquarters. Before the professional architect came along, building construction was a gamble: varying quality standards, flawed designs, unpredictable costs and schedules. Catastrophic failures were not uncommon.

The same is true today in information technology. Too often organizations implement hardware and software without thinking through the implications. They end up with a mish mash of un....

As the marketplace get more and more competitive, as products and services get increasingly commoditized, your ability to react quickly with the right information and the right solution for your customers is becoming a dominant factor that differentiates you from your competition. If you don't begin today to develop technology strategies and architectures with these capabilities, you can be assured your competitors will.