Addressing business, technology, systems reliability and cultural fundamentals can help organizations better capitalize on today's opportunities.

You must address technology fundamentals such as unlocking the wealth of function buried in siloed mainframe-based systems so that you can reuse that information across the organization. You must address reliability fundamentals such as ensuring that an always-on connectivity infrastructure is in place to support the mission-critical systems that would paralyze the business if they failed. And you must address cultural fundamentals such as recognizing the recurring gap between charting the right course for the business and actually bringing the business to that desired destination.

The established, proven resources to lay this fundamental groundwork are here today and have shown their value innumerable times. For example, when manufacturers assemble a car, they do not plug each individual electrical system into all the other electrical systems; rather, they connect each system to an electrical "bus" that enables any-to-any connectivity among the systems. The same concept holds for connectivity among IT systems. Using an Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) is the most flexible, cost-effective and — most importantly — reliable way to design IT connectivity.