Johannesburg, 17 Oct 2016
IT practitioners, purveyors and leaders are caught between a virtual rock and a hard place. With unprecedented levels of technology disruption being the order of the day, and escalating expectations from digitally savvy stakeholders a practical, pragmatic path forward means navigating the thin line between optimising core IT systems and innovation within the business.
Chris Miller, Avanade's Chief Technology Innovation Officer, says there is a way for IT to increase its value to the business and become more efficient, agile and innovative in today's digital world - a dual approach. ''Avanade refers to these approaches as Predictable and Exploratory IT. The predictable approach optimises the core IT systems with an emphasis on reliability, cost efficiency and IT-centric culture. The exploratory approach innovates the business and emphasises agility, revenue, brand, customer and a business centric culture."
''Central to both approaches is cloud, which enables predictable IT through more efficient and dynamic use of core IT systems as well as exploratory IT through faster innovation and time to market."
Historically, disruption came from cloud, big data, mobile and then social. Today, they continue, but have far more facets including smart devices, the Internet of things, cognitive agents and bots, to name but a few.
"The pace at which these technologies are evolving continues to accelerate. And each time a new element hits, IT is expected to make the newest technology work smoothly and securely with everything that has come before. Additionally, expectations from stakeholders are growing and the C-suite is losing confidence in IT teams to handle these challenges. In fact, 79% of C-level execs believe they can make better and faster decisions than IT.''
Cloud: The foundation for the digital world
The question therefore is, how does the enterprise implement a cloud strategy to achieve all this? ''Many enterprises are looking to move applications and workloads to the cloud by adopting Microsoft Azure and Office 365," says Miller. "Some enterprises try to make this move via a 'forklift' approach to the cloud. But without a holistic perspective, this approach can fail."
The cloud is, however, a robust environment that, when used in the right way, can enable the digital workplace. "Many applications and workloads are interrelated and dependent on one another, but their integration isn't automatic when moved to the cloud, especially not with an enterprise's existing backend systems," says Miller. "Companies that address the integration challenge incorrectly or incompletely risk business disruptions. A cloud transformation strategy should take legacy applications into account. And it should continue with a strategy for continuing maintenance and management."
The challenge is that this is a lot for most IT departments to manage, especially as they face their first cloud projects while simultaneously juggling all of their other responsibilities. And they know it. "This is the reason why enterprises are increasingly turning to partners with cloud experience to help them," says Miller. "Companies that engage partners for their cloud transformations and managed services are doing so to gain the benefits of the cloud more quickly, mitigate risk and support critical operations."
The fact is forward-thinking companies are relying on partners to help them deliver enablers like liquid applications, intelligent platforms and connected ecosystems, Miller says. They are reshaping the value of IT by evolving to an IT services broker model. "With this approach, they shift from being the provider of IT services to being a services broker or enabler of cloud and managed services. That is, they're engaging partners to implement the two distinct approaches to IT," concludes Miller.
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