A GFA is the intersection of any set of technologies which have a specific goal or set of goals to fulfill within an organization. It is the complex web of technologies that companies erect over a period of time to fulfill specific organizational goals.

Companies implement technology driven solutions, more often than not, in order to meet some organization-wide goal or set of goals - e.g. increase sales, decrease costs, increase customer insight.

However, most solutions - by themselves - are not enough to fully satisfy these organizational goals. So the typical scenarios that often follow in order to overcome the shortcomings are:

• Purchase more commercially available solutions
• Procure consulting services to custom-build solutions
• Both purchase and custom-build solutions
• Do nothing - work with what we have until it becomes a real problem

For every option above, companies go through intensive evaluation/assessment periods. And if a company does decide to inject more solutions into their current mix, iterative integration and improvement efforts almost certainly follow.

Here's a more palpable example of how a GFA might evolve:

XYZ Corp. has a goal to increase customer responsiveness. In order to fulfill this goal, over the years they have:

• Decided to build a support site to accelerate targeted information exchange between service representatives and customers
• Purchased a commercial BPM application to streamline and automate their request for information processes
• Decided to implement a more robust data warehouse that stores more information gathered at the point-of-sale
• Implemented a BI solution that interfaces with all of the above in order to generate useful reports and graphs

Now, not all companies may implement GFA as complex as the one described above. But the reality is that today, the best solutions do cut across multiple technology tiers. Finding people with the right mix of technical aptitude across different applications, and experience in dealing with a GFA's development lifecycle and realistic growing pains is key.