The vertical or horizontal perspective

The vertical perspective
In today's enterprises the majority of the IT-investment budgets are allocated vertically in the organization, for example to economy/finance, sales & marketing, production, purchase, logistics, etc. However, it is the IT-departments that are responsible for the administration of the installed solutions and, consequently, the budget for administration of the IT application is an IT-department matter. Research from IDG says that during 2007, the IT budget funds in the vertical organizations increased with more than 30%, whereas the IT-department budget increased with only 3%.

For enterprises, this probably means that there is an increased amount of new applications to administer in various IT environments - on a proportionally lower budget. Applications are likely to be integrated ad-hoc and in a proprietary way.

The horizontal perspective
Instead of working from the vertical perspective, overloading the IT-department, you should optimize the resources and coordinate the IT projects in a better way - that is horizontally and cross-vertically. By doing so, you will end suboptimization, increase the output in the verticals and get better IT-projects as a prompt result.

A horizontal perspective leads to better profitability and an IT environment in line with the business processes of the organization. The SOA way!