‘Come writers and critics Who
prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide The chance
won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon For the
wheel’s still in spin And there’s no
tellin’ who That it’s namin’
For the loser now Will be
later to win
For the times they are a-changin’’
This is the Bob Dylan poem that Steve Jobs started his speech with at Apple’s annual shareholder’s meeting of 1984, where he unveiled the Macintosh. One legend quoting another-Steve Jobs the father of the digital revolution quoting Nobel laureate singer, songwriter Bob Dylan to describe the times ahead. Jobs has been one of my biggest inspirations. What I find amusing is that he prophesied and summed up the future of our industry so aptly with this poem.
The last time there was this much technological innovation hitting the business world, it was called the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Today, innovation in digital technologies is bringing our world into that space with the Digital Revolution’. For the business world, it is time to brace up for a complete —
‘Business Transformation’.
The real impact of this digital revolution is how it is changing the way we operate, live and work. Today organizations and people can do things that would have been impossible a decade ago.
The New Age of IT
What we’re witnessing now is a complete transition from the old kind of IT that mostly faced inwards to a completely new kind of IT, one that faces outwards. Today the new IT deals with the realities of the outside world, the world in which the company’s customers and business partners live. Any business today has moved from being product-centric or service-centric to being customer-centric.
For every industry big or small, there is a complete shift in how business is being shaped by IT. The phrase “going digital” is today relevant to every industry. Mobile, analytics, social media, sensors, and cloud computing are changing the entire business landscape as we know it. Innovative technologies such as the IoT, AR/VR, Robotics, Blockchain Technology, and 3D printing are opening new doors, to infinite possibilities.
These new technologies have a bigger, larger, and direct impact on the enterprise. Technology has enhanced its role from being a mere facilitator to being a business enabler, removing constraints and creating exciting new possibilities that affect the day-to-day working of enterprises.
A World of Infinite Possibilities
New technology lets you do a lot of novel things. Let’s say you want to hear what customers want, without the traditional narrow lenses of polls, surveys, and focus groups. Well, social media lets you do that. If you want the world at your fingertips; Mobile computing is the answer. With mobile, you have retail, education, healthcare, finance, payments, traveling, eating, and everything else just a click away. If you want intelligent forecasts and insights for a better decision making. You have the promise of big data, and analytics. If you want to have a faster go-to-market strategy. There are solutions that can reduce your development cycle, automate your quality assurance processes and simplify the rollout processes; all this at a reduced cost of ownership.
Alongside these innovations, cloud computing has taken things at a new level. Cloud computing offers a paradigm shift using which businesses can pursue new levels of efficiency in service delivery, infrastructure provisioning, and dynamic scale-out. The stand-alone on-premise data stores have been totally disrupted. In its place has come the Big Data. Big Data can aggregate data from multiple sources like smart sensors, enterprise applications, social networks, and other smart devices. This data is no longer painful but vital as it can now be turned into an asset. The progress we have made in AI and ML allows us to clean, curate and mine impactful insights and actions from this data. These insights, when used effectively, can bring accelerated growth and complete business transformation. In fact, the information gleaned from this data can become a game-changer; driving the entire business towards productivity and higher efficiency. All these technologies have transformed the way we buy, the way we commute, the way we consume content and the way we pay for all these through secure digital payments.
Apart from the above, there are other innovations like AR/VR that lets you remotely visit your favorite destinations, cars that drive themselves, and a host of other novel innovations that fundamentally challenge our thinking about business structure, the way organizations operate, and the relationship between business and customers.
Carrying ‘IT’ Out
Another interesting thing that has impacted businesses is the way IT is carried out itself. Today, enterprises are steadily adopting IT metrics as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Factors such as Performance and Availability matrices, continuous Integration & Deployments and technology choices make it to the top of an organization’s KPIs. This cultural shift has given rise to new architectural patterns like Microservices Architecture, DevOps practices, and modern software development using Agile frameworks. These new ways focus on the need to quickly respond to market and business changes and blur the traditional line between business and technology domains. ‘Enterprise IT’ has now become ‘Real-time IT’.
Enabling Business Strategy
Real-time IT has opened doors to a world of new possibilities. What it requires is for businesses to understand where to invest and which technology to commit. Adapting to change is simply not enough. The need is for businesses to come up with an assessment of the “ideal state” and then plan what IT assets will help strengthen the same. This modern-day IT also needs to future proof itself with audits that maintain a scorecard to determine which technologies are ‘just right ‘ vs ‘redundant’ and which offer ‘competitive advantage’ vs ‘competitive disadvantage’.
To conclude, for any business today, IT can prove to be a game- changer. The key lies in the pragmatic adoption of emerging technologies to build a competitive moat around your business.
About the Author:
Chandra Talluri is the CEO of OTSI – APAC & MENA. Chandra is one of the youngest CEOs in the industry who believes in making ideas happen. Under his leadership, OTSI has emerged as a leading IT company, offering novel solutions to clients across the globe.
