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Strategic Flexibility

Using IT to strategically benefit the company is one way to both survive and strive in today's business climate. You must look at system architecture strategically. A strategic architecture enables flexibility, agility, and growth. It anticipates changes, and it does all of this in a cost-conscious way. In the late 1990s, the speed at which IT infrastructures were changing, and often logarithmic growth factors, negated some of the concern over overall cost. This is no longer true. Strategic architecture must take the overall cost into account.

The heart of strategic architecture is adaptability and responsiveness to changes, both internally and externally to the system. In the Internet explosion, systems were over-provisioned ...