What's Next For The IT-To-BT Transformation: The Contractualization Trend

The combination of the current economic climate and business globalization is accelerating the evolution of business models toward a networked model, where businesses focus on their core competencies to add value and engage with other external and internal sources to build out their value chain. Examples of this range from Innovation Networks for product and service development to the growth of shared services within organizations. This means that the relationships between business areas, external partners, and the IT organization become both more critical to manage and more complex. This is driving the need for "contractualization," where relationships are embodied in a flexible yet formal contract. IT organizations, as they evolve from builders and operators of business systems to orchestrators of business services, are first in line to adopt and benefit from this trend. This will require enterprise architecture (EA) organizations to make collecting, organizing, and rationalizing both explicit and implicit contracts part of the scope of EA efforts.