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Managing digital business applications infrastructure

Management of the 

digital business applications infrastructure

 concerns delivering the 

right applications to all users of digital business services. The issue involved is one that has 

long been a concern of IS managers, namely to deliver access to integrated applications and 

data that are available across the whole company. Traditionally businesses have developed 

applications silos or islands of information, as depicted in Figure 3.5(a). These silos may 

develop at three different levels: (1) there may be different technology architectures used in 

different functional areas, (2) there will also be different applications and separate databases 

in different areas, and (3) processes or activities followed in the different functional areas 

may also be different.

Applications silos are often a result of decentralisation or poorly controlled investment 

in information systems, with different departmental managers selecting different systems 

from different vendors. This is inefficient in that it will often cost more to purchase appli-

cations from separate vendors, and also it will be more costly to support and upgrade. 

Such a fragmented approach stifles  decision-  making and leads to isolation between func-

tional units. For example, if customers phone a B2B company for the status of a bespoke 

item they have ordered, the person in customer support may have access to their personal 

details but not the status of their job, which is stored on a separate information system 

in the manufacturing unit. Problems can also occur at tactical and strategic levels. For 

example, if a company is trying to analyse the financial contribution of customers, perhaps 

to calculate lifetime values, some information about customers’ purchases may be stored 

in a marketing information system, while the payments data will be stored in a separate 

system within the finance department. It may prove difficult or impossible to reconcile 

these different data sets.

To avoid the problems of a fragmented applications infrastructure, companies attempted 

throughout the 1990s to achieve the more integrated position shown in Figure 3.5(b). Many 

companies turned to