In order to achieve its corporate objectives, Dell needed to rationalize its IT infrastructure. This transformative process involved consolidating multi-national systems to improve efficiency, reduce costs and enforce common standards.
The rationalization exercise helps an organization identify what standards to move towards as they eliminate the complexities and silos they have built up over the years, along with the specific technologies that will help them get there.
Depending on the company, rationalization could start with a technical discussion and be IT- driven; or it could start at a business level. For example, a company might have distributed operations across the globe and desire to consolidate and standardize its business processes. That could drive change in the IT portfolio. Or a company that has gone through mergers and acquisitions might have redundant business processes to rationalize.
Rationalizing involves understanding the current state of an organization’s IT portfolio and business processes, and then mapping business capabilities to IT capabilities. This is done by developing scoring criteria to analyze the current portfolio, and ultimately by deciding on the standards that will propel the organization forward. Standards are the outcome of a rationalization exercise.