Businesses must put upgrading infrastructure ahead of short-term profit, argues Talend

Talend's Tim Harris urges firms to properly update IT architecture, rather than just patching it up

Ensuring the business is built upon a "nice, clean architecture" is the best way for an organisation to ensure that it's ready to deal with any change in circumstances caused by growth or reorganisation - but the need to make short-term profits often means these changes aren't made.

That's what Tim Harris, business development manager for open source integration solutions firm Talend, told a panel of representatives from the insurance industry during Computing and Talend's recent "Big data and analytics challenges in the insurance sector" roundtable event.

"My experience is when you go in and see a lot of these organisations, there's the business creating silos without even knowing it by buying other businesses and similar things," said Harris.

"Then you look at the architecture and go ‘Oh big data, my God, they're never going to get any sense out of that' and the truth is they're not," he explained.

Harris described how he's spoken to CIOs who believe they're "never going to get to the goal of having a nice clean architecture", because instead of being given a proper opportunity to completely rebuild the system, often they're forced to deal with compliance issues or "the lowest hanging fruit that's going to offer the most money".

"They tend to architecture the bits that they can in an ever-changing world where they don't know what companies will be bought or what teams will change," he said.

The solution with the best long-term benefit, he argued, is to ensure the business is running on infrastructure that can adapt to any changes that might come its way, rather than getting the IT function to constantly patch things up.

"The best way to think about is if you put in an architecture, you can give the business what it wants, give it the flexibility," Harris explained. "If they do want to buy another company, start a new team, adhere to a new compliance, it's quite easy to access the data to plug new systems into an architecture, to have a chance at keeping up with the business' ever-growing demands.

Nonetheless, Harris did concede that ensuring operation of a perfect architecture infrastructure could prove a difficult task, especially for larger firms.

"Most of the organisations that I go to, they would love to have nice clean architecture. I don't think it'll ever happen, certainly not in the big ones, but we can help somewhere along the way," he said, before going on to describe how many firms don't rebuild architecture, because there's too much else for IT to deal with.

"The projects we really try to instigate - putting in some nice architecture foundation into what you're trying to do - they always get knocked back because there are always more burning problems," said Harris, who argued that many of these problems wouldn't exist if the architecture had been built properly in the first place.

"And if they were actually to tackle the bigger architecture issue, they wouldn't be chasing their tail because they'd be one step ahead as opposed to one step behind."

The reason for this, said Harris, is that organisations are responsible for pleasing shareholders, who want quick returns rather than a focus on long-term investment.

"They're totally visionary, but very often they've got funding, they've got their goals for the shareholders and if they can take over a company, make some big organisational changes, that's going to bring a bigger return than putting loads of focus on the IT architecture," he told the panel.

Harris said ensuring a proper storage infrastructure is the best way to boost performance in a company.

"If you have a great architecture, you can say do whatever you want because we can still connect and put all the data in a golden record. We can still put in some BPM [business process management] or some compliance, but we can enable you to do whatever you want," he said.

However, ‎Billy Ferguson, head of enterprise architecture at Allianz Insurance, pointed out how it's difficult for insurance firms to sacrifice short-term profits in order to make adjustments to IT architecture.

"From an IT KPI [key performance indicators] perspective, they're not measured on benefits they'll deliver in a five- to 10-year window, a lot of it is measured by how much money they've made this year," he said.

"So the sell of enterprise architecture to deliver a much better future is always tough, because you've always got to balance it against the fact that I can't deliver you the KPIs I'm being measured against now, I need a different set of KPIs that are more strategic," Ferguson added.