CIOs Must MAP A Strategic Application Plan

The duties performed by CIOs are analogous to those of big-city mayors — neither executive has the chance to build a community from scratch, and most inherit a series of problems from predecessors: dated infrastructures, more demand than they can meet, a flurry of community development work-in-progress, and a host of constituents with conflicting social and political agendas. Like city neighborhoods spawned from unbridled growth, today's IT organizations need to implement a more strategic approach to application planning that will refocus IT efforts on the most important needs of community leaders. Model-based application planning (MAP) triangulates an approach from three key perspectives: 1) a rolling five-year vision of the community; 2) a context to serve as a common business/IT lexicon; and 3) orchestration across application, project, and infrastructure improvement efforts.