Greek philosopher Heraclitus is noted as saying "The only constant is change." While IT may not have been the motivation for his statement it summed up the fluid nature of the IT industry today. Change is indeed the cornerstone upon which business thrives today.
Gartner continually highlights the importance of ensuring the business is capable of innovation and agility. Reliance on slower, traditional processes, however, radically affect the organisation's ability to compete in an ever changing market. It must be understood that traditional implementations of IT are rapidly becoming obsolete. That said, changing entrenched methodologies is not may be an uphill battle. The CIO faces a number of obstacles as digital disruption becomes the norm and creative ways need to be found to expand investment and implementation.
According to Yolanda Komen, Technology Services Market Unit Lead at Avanade, old IT perspectives are no longer sufficient for the cloud-first, digital-first world. "There are two main challenges facing IT leaders - managing and maintaining secure core IT systems better, and experimenting with new technologies to identify new processes, procedures and business methodologies."
This situation requires two approaches to IT.
The first is more conventional whereby the core IT systems are optimised with particular attention paid to reliability, cost-efficacy and the development of an IT-centric culture. The foundation of this approach lies on it being plan-driven and approval-based corporate governance with long cycle times which keeps the business running.
Conversely, the second approach explores new technology to innovate, focussing on agility, revenue, brand, and customer in a business-centric culture. As expected, cycle times in this phase are short, sometimes days, as they rapidly adapt to changes in market and need.
"These approaches have a vital place in the New Economics of IT," says Komen. "They define the creation of value through new ways of implementing IT that maximise efficiency, increase agility and speed up innovation. It creates a new vision of IT that includes liquid applications, intelligent platforms and connected ecosystems. These combine to deliver on the promise of the new IT economics and the ubiquity of the cloud."
Historically, many of the technology enablers that make innovation and change possible have taken years to develop. Today, however, they are freely available and are changing and evolving at an accelerated pace.
Komen says that the business has to not only find ways of harnessing this perfect storm, but of becoming the storm. "It is not enough just to adapt and keep up. There is a need to lead and invent. Fortunately, the technology that has triggered the disruption is the tool that can harness it. We are no longer confined by platform or location and have a numerous solutions to choose from as we cultivate the IT structure."
Philosophically, Avanade embraces this shift with true platform independence and strive to the goal of adopting the optimal solution for any given application or application portfolio. With an open, solution-driven approach the organisation can build a cloud strategy and investment that fits their long and short-term strategic goals.
True to its holistic approach, Komen says Avanade has on-premise, mobile, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid offerings. "We are also a Microsoft application managed services specialist. We were recently awarded the position of worldwide leader in Microsoft enterprise applications implementation services ecosystem in 2015 with the IDC MarketScape vendor assessments. We use these technologies across the spectrum of application, development, management, lifecycle management and more. We understand that no two enterprises are alike, so we gear our business toward offering bespoke application managed services offering. It is vital to work with the enterprise to determine their specific needs."
It is exactly this blend of cloud and capability, she says, that gives the organisation the flexibility it needs to adapt its traditional and innovative technology investment to map back to budget, strategy and market demand.
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