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Traditional IT retreats, finite projects disappear

In the new digital economy, the IT department is being replaced by innovation teams and fixed product cycles are moving to continuous innovation models, says CA Technologies.

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 15 Dec 2015

CA IT Management Symposium 2016

South Africa's premier event for IT professionals and businesses aiming to thrive in the application economy.
25 Feb 2016 at Vodacom World, Midrand.

Today all interactions - work, commerce or play - have a digital dimension; relying on digital technology and platforms. User expectations continue to rise business models need to change with strategies to keep apace with this and sustain competitive advantage.

Speaking ahead of the CA IT Management Symposium Africa, Justin Vaughan-Brown, Global Digital Transformation Lead, Corporate Marketing at CA Technologies, says digital transformation has become a top of mind issue in a rapidly changing environment. Having just attended the annual CA World conference, Vaughan-Brown says the application economy, digital transformation and the changes organisations must make to be more competitive emerged as key issues at the international event.

"Organisations need to change to be more agile, more responsive to business and more innovative," he says. Why change? Vaughan-Brown notes that since 2000, 52% of the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or simply ceased to exist. According to Richard Foster, lecturer at the Yale School of Management, the average lifespan of an S&P company has dropped from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today, and 75% of the S&P 500 firms will be replaced by new firms by 2027. On average an S&P company is now being replaced every two weeks.

"Companies have a shorter longevity and the velocity of change has increased. So companies must change," he says.

Vaughan-Brown says the changing environment is driving a shift by enterprises towards building their own software-driven innovation houses, a move from fixed product cycles to more continuous innovation, and an overall swing to agile development.

"A classic five-year project term is simply too long for enterprise application development today," he says. You don't know what the world will be like that far ahead. Now, what is needed is a continuous, iterative release model. You need a production line moving the apps along and delivering them quickly, instead of investing a huge amount of money and blindly continuing along the path for years, to deliver against outdated specs," he says.

As application development and enterprise operational models change, so does the role of IT in the business. Vaughan-Brown says even the term 'IT department' is slowly being replaced with terms such "innovation", "digital", and "technology". "Some might make light of just a word change, but to me this is significant. "IT" conjures up inward-looking, infrastructure maintenance and old world dark offices where only the brave, curious, needy or annoyed business colleagues ventured. The future looks very different to this, one which is outward looking, yet pilots new approaches and industry-leading apps with a hotbed of internal developer talent, utilizing Agile methodologies to deliver value to the business better, at greater velocity and more cost-effectively."

"These are very interesting times," he says. He concedes that it may be difficult to pin down exactly what 'being innovative' means for the enterprise striving to be more competitive in an application economy. "If people work smarter and challenge the way in which they've always done things, innovation will follow." He suggests people be incentivised to innovate within organisations, noting that the democratisation of opinion as seen in social media could follow through to the enterprise. "Traditionally, the only views expressed in the enterprise came from top management, or the relevant department heads. Now, enterprises can use crowdsourcing tools to encourage all employees to submit good ideas for apps. When an app goes live, instead of just moving on to the next big thing, enterprises can use the right forums for people to quickly share feedback on what should change, and how the app can evolve."

Vaughan-Brown will address the CA IT Management Symposium 2016 on adapting to digital change and remaining competitive in the application economy. For more information about this event, click here.

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