Digital Transformation

GigaOM – The enterprise CIO is moving to a consumption-first paradigm

Take yourself back a couple of decades and the IT industry looked very different than it does today. Back then the number of solution choices was relatively limited and only available to those with the finances to afford it. Many of the core services had to be built from the ground up. Why? There simply wasn’t the volume or maturity of the IT marketplace for core services. Today, that picture is very different!

For example, consider email. Back in 1995, Microsoft Exchange was just a fledgling product that was less than two years old. The dominant email solutions were cc:Mail (acquired by Lotus in 1991), Lotus Notes (acquired by IBM in 1995) along with a myriad of mainframe, mini and UNIX-based mail servers.

Every enterprise had to setup and manage their individual email environment. Solutions like Google Apps and Microsoft 365 simply did not exist. There was no real alternative…except for outsourcing.

More of the GigaOM post from Tim Crawford

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29
Dec 16

Information Age – IT can make or break the success of a deal

This article is a couple of years old, but the topic of IT agility is more important than ever in the merger and acquisition space.

Businesses are increasingly under pressure to deliver value to stakeholders, particularly when undertaking bold initiatives such as mergers, acquisitions or asset disposals. This is the case not only for corporate acquirers but also for private equity (PE) firms, whose strategy is leaning toward add on acquisitions as a means of growing their portfolio companies.

Among the fundamental change brought on by mergers and acquisitions (M&A), management teams often require significant effort in restructuring or streamlining operations of acquired businesses to deliver success in the absence of financial engineering. But given the challenging success rate of M&A activity delivering realised value to organisations in the short and medium term how can those parties involve in M&A actually deliver realised value?

More of the Information Age article from Tony Qui

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21
Dec 16

ZDNet – Gartner’s digital transformation, IT crystal ball for 2017: Reading between the lines

ugmented reality will become a shopping paradise, webpages will start to give way to screen-less voice interactions, blockchain technology will create a business worth $10 billion, and the Internet of Things will save $1 trillion a year by 2022.

Those items reflect Gartner’s crystal ball predictions for 2017 and beyond. The predictions were outlined at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. The theme for the conference is digital transformation, experiences, and engagement.

Jason Hiner at TechRepublic is looking at the implications for IT as these trends play out, but it’s worth looking here at the business takeaways amid the tech shifts.

In a slide, here’s a look at the technologies companies will have to put together and navigate. At the very least, the slide provides a starter set for a tech buzzword drinking game.

Here’s a between-the-lines reading of Gartner’s prognostications.

By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality. Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and David Cearley argued that AR will go mainstream. Retailers will use AR to boost the shopping experience as digital information blends with the physical.

More of the ZDNet post form Larry Dignan

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16
Dec 16

Arthur Cole – What’s Up with Digital Transformation?

Practical article from Arthur Cole on how digital transformation is different than what we’ve been doing for 40 years in IT.

Some enterprise executives may rightly be confused by the whole concept of “digital transformation.” Digital technology has been a common facet of the enterprise for decades, so what exactly is being transformed?

In a nutshell, the difference this time is that rather than using digital technology to support and streamline existing business processes like sales, support and customer relations, the processes themselves are becoming digitized into services. So instead of using data infrastructure to make it easier to sell, say, cars, a digitally transformed business incorporates service-level functionality into the car itself, along with all the support systems that contribute to the manufacture, sale and ongoing support of the car.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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15
Dec 16

ComputerWeekly – IT Priorities 2017: What will IT decision-makers be focusing on?

Each year, TechTarget looks at how CIOs and senior IT decision-makers will be investing in IT in the 12 months ahead

Budgets for staff and on-premise servers are falling as CIOs focus on cloud computing, according to the TechTarget’s IT Priorities 2017 survey.

Most of the 353 people surveyed said their IT budgets would remain the same. Only 17% said their budget would increase by more than 10%, 16% said their budget would increase by 5% to 10%, and 9% said their budget would decrease.

The survey found that most of the budget increases would be invested in cloud services (43%), software (43%) and disaster recover (30%).

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Cliff Saran

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13
Dec 16

Harvard Business Review – How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change

To achieve true transformational change, CEOs must have more than a strategic plan. To effect actual change, they need to understand how biases — their own, and their employees’ — can shape behaviors and decisions, and prevent them from achieving what they set out to achieve.

CEOs need to be especially aware of how the subtle forces of bias can operate in our subconscious and influence our choices. Let’s take a look at the two I see most often: loss aversion and conformity.

Loss Aversion
Picture a management team, composed of highly accomplished individuals with long tenures at the company, gathering at the annual planning meeting. The CEO has been in place for five years, business performance has been strong and Wall Street has rewarded shareholders handsomely.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Sean Ryan

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08
Dec 16

ComputerWeekly – Future of the server operating system

We look at the evolution of the server operating system, and how the next generation is moving into the cloud

Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2016 operating system (OS) is just being launched. Linux is celebrating its 25th birthday. IBM has its mainframe operating system and its Power operating system, Oracle has Solaris – and that is just a few of the OSs that still abound in the market. But what is the role of an OS in the modern world?

Going back to the early days of servers, the stack required to get a computer up and running was pretty simple – a basic input/output system (BIOS) to get the hardware started, followed by an operating system to provision basic services, followed by an application to carry out the actual work.

More of the Computerweekly article from Clive Longbottom

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05
Dec 16

Harvard Business Review – Digital Leadership Is Not an Optional Part of Being a CEO

Being a CEO is harder than ever. The rapid pace of change in business and technology means that more and more companies will find themselves being disrupted. In fact, our latest research with MIT, in which we interviewed more than 1,000 CEOs (from 131 countries and 27 industries, in organizations of varying sizes), shows that 90% of executives believe their businesses are being disrupted or reinvented by digital business models, and 70% believe they do not have the right skills, leader, or operating structure to adapt. It’s not a good position to be in.

What’s a CEO to do? Should you hire a chief digital officer? Should you replace your executives with leaders from internet companies? Should you force everyone to learn about mobile computing and digital business models?

While these are all sound ideas, our research shows that something more fundamental is at play. Companies that rapidly adapt to digital business models don’t just “do digital”; they “act digital.” In other words, they practice an entirely new model of management. And their CEOs are leading the charge.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Josh Bersin

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29
Nov 16

CIO Insight – Why Companies Are Overhauling IT Infrastructure

Organizations are carefully examining the state of their IT infrastructure as they dedicate themselves to a digital transformation, according to a recent survey from SignalFx. With this transition considered a primary strategic goal for many businesses, CEOs are often taking the lead in preparing for this major change. However, both CIOs and their teams are also playing critical roles. To ensure success, companies are adopting virtualization and containerization solutions, hosting infrastructure in the cloud and deploying automation solutions, among other steps. With these steps, survey respondents feel very confident about what lies ahead. “Digital transformation is very much a business objective,” said Karthik Rau, CEO of SignalFx.

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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17
Nov 16

IT Business Edge – The Cloud Market Is Growing, in Complexity

Enterprise cloud deployments are on the upswing with little or no sign of slowing down in the coming year, but inside all the market projections are some key trends that indicate exactly what form this new infrastructure will take and what services it will support.

Across the board, reports are calling for a continuation of last year’s double-digit growth for 2017 and beyond, but it is fair to say that some earlier assumptions about cloud computing have not panned out, at least not yet.

For one thing, says Forrester’s Dave Bartoletti, big enterprises are turning toward big cloud providers for increased application support, which was expected. But at the same time, regional providers are also still in play due to the highly specialized nature of their service offerings.