Enterprise Technology Landscape Overview

Before we start discussing the enterprise technology landscape, it is important to define what an enterprise is as it could mean different things to different people. An enterprise is a business or organization that is engaged in commercial, industrial, or service segments. Enterprises come in different shapes and sizes, from five-member startups to large multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed globally. They also operate in a variety of industries, such as manufacturing, retail, finance, technology, and healthcare. The main goal of a typical enterprise is to generate profits (apart from non-profits). Most enterprises also have other auxiliary goals, such as growth, innovation, social responsibility, and environmental impact. There are many different types of enterprises and corporations. Each type has its own legal and financial structure, and the type of enterprise that a business chooses will depend...

Categorizing the enterprise technology landscape

To better understand and manage the IT assets in the enterprise, a well-defined classification is required. There are many different ways to categorize applications; however, most organizations across industries follow Gartner’s pace layered architecture to categorize their applications. We will be following Gartner’s pace layered architecture as our application categorization framework in this book as well. A typical enterprise’s application landscape consists of three different types of applications, as represented by Gartner’s pace layered architecture approach, as shown here:

Figure 2.1 – Gartner’s pace layered architecture and application distribution

As you can see, along with innovative next-generation applications under Systems of Innovation, there are a lot more applications under the Systems of Record (core business apps) and Systems of Differentiation...

The diversity and complexity involved

The enterprise landscape involves different types of applications with variable characteristics across the Systems of Innovation, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Record layers, as categorized in Gartner’s pace layered architecture. These variations can be classified under two categories:

• Application architecture
• Infrastructure architecture

Let’s take a look.

Application architecture

The application architecture differs from monolithic applications in Systems of Record to the cloud-native microservices architecture and functions in the Systems of Innovation layers. We’ll look at the application architecture’s characteristics and goals across these layers in this section.

Systems of Record

Systems of Record acts as the single source of truth for an organization’s core business data and processes. Applications in the Systems of Record layer are typically built with traditional...

Difficulties in adopting a standard operating model

As explained earlier in this chapter, organizations have a diverse application and infrastructure landscape with unique characteristics based on their architecture and the business requirements they serve. Therefore, it is difficult to adopt a standardized operating model across the layers since emerging technologies such as edge computing and AI will further increase this complexity. Focusing on just the infrastructure layer alone, the Systems of Innovation layer delivers the most value with faster and safer experimentation capabilities to test new ideas, end-to-end automation, self-service, and horizontal scalability. But for enterprises that deliver most of their business services with traditional Systems of Record applications, moving to a modern infrastructure may not be feasible. Two opposing viewpoints are in play:

• Resist change to reduce risk and improve stability
• Embrace change to improve innovation velocity and...

Summary

In this chapter, we explained how Gartner’s pace layered architecture classifies enterprise applications across the Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Innovation layers. We also walked through how the application characteristics differ across these layers and how they impact the infrastructure layer that supports them. This results in a diverse environment with different priorities and change resistance, which makes it difficult to adopt a standardized operating model across the organization.

In the next chapter, we will explore how enterprise IT departments adopted a bimodal approach to address these conflicting priorities, and the resulting learnings to be taken into consideration as we adopt new emerging technologies.

Further reading

The following links provide more information about the topics covered in this chapter and allow you to further deep dive into any topics of interest:

• Accelerating Innovation by Adopting a Pace-Layered Application Strategy: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/1890915
• What is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)?: https://www.ibm.com/sg-en/topics/it-infrastructure-library