Technology architecture choices for enterprise financial systems.

• Author: Chan, Susy S.

This article presents basic concepts and issues related to information technology choices facing finance officers during system acquisitions.

The impending year 2000 crisis has prompted many private and public organizations to examine the adequacy of their current financial systems and the opportunities that new systems offer. High on many CFOs' agenda is the challenging endeavor of selecting a new enterprise resource planning system (ERP). Leading public-sector ERP packages are built on the advanced client/server architecture and require a robust network infrastructure. An understanding of the underlying technical architecture facilitates the package selection process.

This article discusses four sets of technology architecture issues pertaining to ERP packages on the market:

* What are information technology architecture and infrastructure?

* What are the underlying technology requirements for these packages?

* What criteria should be considered when comparing the technology requirements of competing ERP packages?

* What are the implications of technical architecture choices?

Architecture and Infrastructure

Information Technology Architecture. IT architecture refers to a technical blueprint for defining the range and relationship among three categories of resources: information systems, communication networks, and data. When implemented, these resources form the information and technology infrastructure to support many users and services thereby determining the capacity and options in servicing its many constituencies.

A technology blueprint should integrate these separate components:

* system architecture defines the portfolio of information systems that support an organization's core functions and the standards that ensures hardware, interface, and procedures of different systems to work together;

* network architecture defines the communication of data, voice, and images through local, wide, and metropolitan area networks; and

* data architecture defines the organization of corporate data and associated information policies.

These three separate architectures may fit together in the IT blueprint. However, it is quite difficult, politically, organizationally, and financially, to implement all three components in a coordinated manner. These components need to exist in order to share data, but stand-alone systems may be implemented across several government units without an integrated corporate database. Nevertheless, standards for network architecture must be enforced government-wide in order to achieve cost efficiency and satisfactory data reliability and transmission.

Infrastructure. Infrastructure is the implementation of a proposed architecture. It includes hardware, software, databases, networks and systemwide standards. Similar to the public infrastructures, like schools, highways, and hospitals, the technology infrastructure provides necessary support upon which a government builds its functions and services.

Because of the difficulty in achieving consensus on a collection of information systems and governmentwide data needs, many equate infrastructure as network infrastructure. In this sense, infrastructure typically refers to the backbone network of an organization, that is, the Wide Area Networks (WAN) and the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). Departmental networks, or Local Area Networks (LAN), are connected to one another via devices such as bridges, routers, and gateways. The Internet is a network of networks. Because of the availability of the public Internet infrastructure and the widespread use of the World Wide Web, it has become a crucial part of the network infrastructure.

Governments should adopt a broad definition of IT infrastructure to include:

* a robust and high-speed...