When IT systems grow over many years, after a while it is often no longer really comprehensible how exactly business processes and workflows interact with the hardware and software used and whether they still fit together at all. Employees are used to working with sometimes cumbersome architectures and know what they have to do, but their actual understanding of the applications is shrinking. Companies often waste resources here, but this is usually only noticed when the corresponding processes start to snag. It is therefore worth taking a holistic look at apparently well-functioning systems in order to uncover possible weak points at an early stage.

In order for a company to be able to survive in the market in the long term, modernization of the IT architecture is necessary in some cases. While the idea of ​​modernization is one of the most obvious reasons for a structured analysis, it is not the only one. All employees who work with the respective applications not only have to be able to cope with them, but at best have to be offered a platform for effective and creative work.

To ensure this, company and project managers must first ask themselves the following questions:

In order to be able to answer these questions meaningfully, regulated, open communication must take place with those who work with the system – the employees. At this point, project management experts for IT and organizational projects can gain valuable insights and offer the necessary objective perspective, which those responsible are often denied due to their closeness to the company. Targeted questions about wishes, needs and requirements for the work and the ideal system can lead to guidelines for a detailed analysis and problems can be identified quickly.

A joint definition of the target IT architecture can then follow. The principle should always apply: “We won’t get everything we want, but we won’t get everything we don’t say.” As a result, only a suitable system with sensible tools can be introduced in a joint vote.

However, it may seem like a waste of time or a tedious mammoth task to turn the entire IT architecture upside down. But how long can it go well to keep changing only individual aspects of an application based on individual decisions? How long can it work to only adapt systems to current circumstances from day-to-day business without looking at them as a whole and changing them if necessary?

Once a system has been greatly expanded and modified, but at the same time is firmly rooted in all work processes, it is difficult to quickly analyze the IT landscape with regard to structural problems, redundancies and potential for optimization. It seems even more utopian to carry out a system renewal.

But if you don’t create the space for a detailed architecture analysis here, you will suffer in the long term from the individuality and complexity of the IT systems, also because the data volumes to be processed are constantly increasing. Such organically grown and thus uncoordinated expanded systems can no longer be maintained properly after a certain point. They require an enormous amount of time and money in their administration and can no longer meet modern demands for high speed.

So if the IT contains oversized solutions and superfluous functions, the work becomes more tedious and exhausting for long-established employees as well as new colleagues. Employees put their resources such as time, creativity and motivation into mastering the applications instead of completing the actual tasks with their help.

Such a complex, confusing and therefore difficult to maintain system will sooner or later represent a security gap. Software developments and their nature can no longer be specifically controlled due to the lack of a detailed overview of the IT architecture. This increases the risk of problems in deploying and operating an efficient system.

However, an IT architecture analysis offers the opportunity to determine both strengths and weaknesses of the existing system. Potentially serious vulnerabilities include neglecting data protection regulations, insufficient email archiving and backup creation, exhausted server resources, outdated hardware and software, or insufficient protection against cybercrime. In order to protect company data from loss or external interference, an assessment of the systems is definitely worthwhile. IT often provides the foundation for the work and the performance of the employees, because the degree of digitization of a company is undisputedly one of the most important success factors.

It is therefore important to establish security as a holistic concept that not only includes the entire value chain, but also acts beyond it. Here, security-as-a-service offers are gaining in popularity because they offer permanent availability of the latest security functions on demand.

More about “IT architecture”:
Flat hierarchies
architect of change
Zero-Trust-Ansatz
This is how IT and OT differ
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) as an alternative to the 3-tier model

Order the CP newsletter free of charge