Use information to make sense of today’s disruptive turbulence

Shakeel Jhazbhay, Datacentrix General Manager: Digital Business Solutions.

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The past 12 months have been a time, globally, of polycrisis. Not only has the world gone through Delta, Omicron, the Great Attrition, brutal inflation rises, trillions of dollars lost on US markets, and Russia’s war on Ukraine, in South Africa, we’ve experienced the added socioeconomic challenges of energy security, infrastructure development and maintenance, job creation and more.

Add to this the deeply personal journeys of individuals and it is fair to say that this has been a time of massive, permanent change.

At a technology level, too, we’ve seen information become a disruptive force, leveraging extreme automation, extreme computing and extreme network connectivity. Information is abundant. It is everything and everywhere, at all times, originating from both humans and machines.

Organisations are facing an unprecedented set of business, market, technology and talent disruptions, all at once. In the midst of this sweeping acceleration – whether it is cloud, 5G, IOT, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) or the new dawn of quantum – the question should be asked: what is the disruptive force? It all points back towards information.

The domain explosion of information is real – across business, wearables, cars, transportation, logistics, shipping, agriculture, medicine and health, sports, communications, behaviour – and everything else. Machines generate far more data on a daily basis than humans and it is only accelerating. There is zero friction with information and zero marginal cost in its growth.

Information has a life cycle and it needs to be managed: stored, exchanged, enhanced and transformed. It can be unleashed via business applications to drive information-led transformations, but needs to be properly architected with modelling, simulations, insights and learning. And where information and global processes meet, compliance and risk management strategies play a pivotal role.

So, how do organisations turn rapidly accelerating disruption into exponential opportunities and sustained business value? The answer is optimised information.

Information provides a competitive lift that comes from using it to its full potential. This differentiation is what happens when a business transforms the way it manages, leverages and applies information. Today, this information edge happens in the cloud: a new digital fabric, underpinning every business and empowering organisational intelligence, connectedness and responsibility. How is this possible?

Intelligent organisations drive business processes with simplicity and security, by removing friction and generating crucial insights for better, faster decisions.

Connected organisations ensure customers, partners, talent and machines are linked at the core as well as at the edge via sophisticated trading grids.

Responsible organisations safeguard their information and use it to solve the next big problems – from climate and sustainability goals, to diversity and inclusion objectives, as well as governance and trust aims.

With this information-driven advantage, businesses are able to tackle exponential problems and to do so at speed. This will be critical in moving forward, as – with the correct partners and solutions – the future is not something to predict, but rather something to build.

Datacentrix is OpenText’s largest partner in Africa, as well as being one of two Platinum Partners and the first Cloud Reseller Partner in the region. For more information, please contact Shakeel Jhazbhay on sjhazbhay@datacentrix.co.za.