Zhake Man in 1982, BICS two kinds of BSP and planning ways to do a comparative analysis, "Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison". The article mentions several reasons for the need for overall information systems planning, analysis of these causes very deep, and now it does not seem out of date.
- Companies need to identify the overall potential benefits from a variety of relatively largest IT investment schemes. Therefore, we must first determine the overall levels of the organization need to use information technology to achieve strategic objectives, which is the basis for all subsequent work. If this can not be determined, then all the work behind it impossible to carry out.
- In any business, the long-term IT system planning are required to provide initial results, which means the need to design, develop a large number of small systems. In order to avoid future because these smaller systems to integrate and costly secondary development, these small systems should always have good compatibility and consistency (such as data standards), so that when these systems are developed, you can smooth the integration together. With enterprise-class overall architecture, you can clearly associate, dependence logical relationship between the small systems, the constraints of its design and development process to ensure the implementation of the overall architecture.
- Due to various constraints of resources, technology, desired system, a viable system, between the real implementation of the system in general will be some gaps. In this case, companies are always a compromise between the need to continue to make short-term investments and long-term investments (for example, immediately developed a small tool to solve critical business problems, or to build out a comprehensive framework? Former only a month, but certainly not take too long, and will have a bunch of legacy issues. the latter requires six months, but it can support the needs of the future three to five years). Short-term investments tend to result-oriented, low cost and high efficiency, fast and sloppy, cheap and practical. Long-term investments tend to take precedence quality, flexible, long time, the best efficiency. When companies need to choose between short-term and long-term investments, enterprise-class architecture can provide the basis for decision making. Also, if a short-term program is selected, the future will inevitably require various modifications of the software, then you need an enterprise architecture as a baseline for modification work.
These issues have become increasingly prominent, because although technically enterprise-level, top-down large-scale information system construction can be achieved, but the reality of resource constraints, the scale can be effective management of R & D projects, effective short-term requirements, so that from up, the way the gradual implementation of the inevitable choice. Therefore, with the advancement of technology, enterprise-level information systems planning will become more common.
