Making cultural changes in the technology organization is a prerequisite to the technology progress. IT has to renovate while maintaining a business-as-usual posture — the current operations need to be supported and run uninterrupted. The renovation is to move from technology silos, to layers, then to move from application thinking to shared services thinking. Shared services are another name for cloud computing in a consolidated data center.
Hard things are hard to do, and implementing integration activities in a silo environment is one of the hardest. At this large company, as well as most major organizations, the solutions in place are designed, developed, and implemented in silos. These silos are organized by business units (such as employees benefit insurance order entry, employee benefit insurance billing). Each business unit is its own silo. Then within each silo (within each business unit) is a collection of technology silos (such as IBM...