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Five drivers of the digital business

Simnikiwe Mzekandaba
By Simnikiwe Mzekandaba, IT in government editor
Cape Town, 27 Sept 2016
The digital world is in a permanent state of upgrade and CIOs need to drive this change, says Gartner's Peter Sondergaard.
The digital world is in a permanent state of upgrade and CIOs need to drive this change, says Gartner's Peter Sondergaard.

There are five main domains CIOs must consider to determine the future digital business, according to Peter Sondergaard, global head of research at Gartner.

Sondergaard delivered his keynote address at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Cape Town yesterday. Senior IT executives and CIOs are gathered for the annual conference, to determine how to make a digital business real, and how to cope with the implications of what the shift entails.

According to Sondergaard, the domains are IT systems, customer experience, the Internet of things (IOT), intelligence and the ecosystem foundation. "These domains are intra-connected and intra-dependent; all have a role and all are required."

The technologies that make up the digital platforms of the future will provide essential capabilities to reach customers, things and ecosystems intelligently, he said.

"Your future digital platform will allow you to participate in a world of business, government and consumer ecosystems that continuously evolve because ecosystems are the next evolutions of digital."

Sondergaard further explained that the level of investment in customer experience will show how serious the business is. "The relationship you have with your customer is the relationship that your systems have with your customers.

"CIOs need to understand the customer intent through advanced algorithms to create new experiences to surprise them," he stated.

Commenting on how IOT is one of the domains to consider for future digital business, Sondergaard said connected things are moving quickly and are heavily influenced by popular culture. "IOT blends traditional engineering with computer engineering."

Billions of devices from consumers and institutions are nothing without a system or a platform on which to capture value, he said. "All of these devices create an influx of data. With IOT, traditional operations meet advanced technologies and industrial architects meet enterprise architects.

"Integration is a top priority; however, IOT integration is not a single thing. It has many dimensions... Early adopters find they face hard realities with IOT and can't just build on top of existing systems. Two-thirds of organisations have had to rework their existing systems to accommodate IOT.

"The largest challenge for IOT adopters is integration because the platforms are immature. The IOT systems need to be protected more than traditional systems."

He encouraged CIOs to participate in the building of digital business platforms. "We [CIOs] are builders again. No one is in a better position to lead than the CIO. CIOs are still in control, leading not by control but by influence and driving digital to the core."

Sondergaard concluded: "CIOs are builders of infrastructure of our age. Civilisation infrastructure will change the way people engage socially and digitally."

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