Article at a glance:
With business leaders calling the shots, some leading companies are transforming their IT architecture by grouping increasingly complex systems into “domains”—sets of applications and databases that have a business rationale for being managed together. The goal is to turn what often resembles a plate of cooked spaghetti, with thousands of applications and databases dispersed across the architecture, into logical blocks with a minimum of interconnecting wires.
The take-away
Companies where business and technology people jointly overhaul IT systems achieve a dual objective. They not only simplify their IT architecture, making it more flexible and cost-effective, but also bridge the gulf between IT and business—the problem that lies at the heart of the poor returns from the technology binge of the 1990s.