Classification:  Business Principle

Statement: Solutions that can be applied across the enterprise are preferred to the development of solutions which are only provided to a particular organisation unit.

Rationale: Duplicative capability is expensive and can result in the proliferation of conflicting data.

Implications:

• Organisation units which depend on a capability which does not serve the entire enterprise must change over to the replacement enterprise-wide capability. This will require establishment of and adherence to a policy requiring this.
• Organisation units will not be allowed to develop capabilities for their own use which duplicate enterprise-wide capabilities. In this way, expenditures of scarce resources to develop essentially the same capability in marginally different ways will be reduced.
• Data and information used to support enterprise decision-making will be standardised. This is because the smaller, organisational capabilities which produced different data (which was not shared among other organisation units) will be replaced by enterprise-wide capabilities. The impetus for adding to the set of enterprise-wide capabilities may well come from an organisation unit making a convincing case for the value of the data/information previously produced by its organisational capability, but the resulting capability will become part of the enterprise-wide system, and the data it produces will be shared across the enterprise.
• Ambiguities resulting from multiple insular definitions of data must give way to accepted enterprise-wide definitions and understanding.
• Multiple data standardisation initiatives need to be coordinated.
• Functional data administration responsibilities must be assigned.
• Where appropriate an enterprise single sign-on should be utilised alongside role based access control to maintain data security.