Tag: Digital Transformation

Huge Digital Talent Deficit Constrains IT Modernization and Digital Transformation | Blog

The IT modernization movement is moving beyond the initial euphoria around the potential of digital technologies. Companies taking steps to modernize their IT are recognizing that it’s a very substantial endeavor and will take years to accomplish. In committing to the long haul of the modernization journey, several situations are becoming apparent, causing companies to take a more mature, measured approach in how they evolve their technology.

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85% of Enterprises Report That Modern IT Infrastructure Is the Bedrock of Digital Transformation—Everest Group | Press Release

Most enterprises believe their IT infrastructure isn’t future-ready. Everest Group says enterprises need ‘invisible’ Infrastructure 3.0, underpinned by AI, analytics and automation, to drive digital transformation.

According to Everest Group, nearly 85% of enterprises believe that IT infrastructure is the bedrock of business transformation initiatives; however, most enterprises believe that their current IT infrastructure services model is not ready to cater to their digital needs.

Everest Group asserts that digital enterprises need to consider a new model for IT infrastructure – Infrastructure 3.0, where the focus of IT infrastructure management is on improving business metrics instead of pre-defined IT SLAs and TCO management. Infrastructure services need to be underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and automation to drive self-healing, self-configuring systems that can dynamically and autonomously adapt to changing business needs, thus creating an “invisible” infrastructure model that is highly secure and requires minimal oversight.

“With the concept of ‘invisible infrastructure,’ we’re suggesting that IT infrastructure must evolve to become a proactive enabler of business innovation with minimal human intervention,” said Chirajeet Sengupta, partner, Information Technology Services, at Everest Group. “To achieve Infrastructure 3.0, enterprises must focus their IT investments on the three I’s—invincible, interoperable and intelligent. In other words, enterprise must build a resilient and secure infrastructure that protects the business, is seamlessly interoperable across stacks, and uses intelligent tools to continuously evolve with business needs.”

Detailed recommendations for achieving Infrastructure 3.0 are offered in Everest Group’s recently published report, “Exploring the Enterprise Journey Towards ‘Invisible IT Infrastructure’: Cloud and Infrastructure Annual Report 2019.” This annual research also deep dives into the cloud and infrastructure services (IS) landscape. It provides data-driven facts and perspectives on the overall market. The research covers cloud and IS adoption trends, demand drivers, and buyer expectations. The research analyses buyer challenges, trends shaping the market, and provides an outlook for 2019-2020 for the broader IT as well as cloud and IS market.

Highlights of the Cloud and IS market analysis:

  • Enterprises’ need for business transformation has increased the number of consulting-led IS engagements: 68% of IS engagements in 2018 had consulting services in their scope.
  • Change management initiatives will be crucial for service providers going forward, as adoption rates are a crucial metric for buyers.
  • The cloud and infrastructure market in the telecommunication industry in North America is booming primarily due to focus on 5G implementation. Adoption within the retail industry is driven by buyers focusing on enhancing customer experience with digital initiatives.
  • Going forward, enterprises expect infrastructure services to enhance business metrics in addition to reducing costs through outsourcing.
  • Vendor-agnostic behavior will continue as buyers expect agile and continuous innovation and higher value from outsourcing contracts.
  • Cloud adoption is rising, with hybrid cloud becoming the preferred model for enterprises. Service providers are best placed for solutions that will enable hybrid cloud as well as multi-cloud adoption amongst enterprises.
  • Service providers need to provide interoperable infrastructure capabilities to enable enterprises in their digital journeys.

***Download a complimentary 12-page abstract of the report here***

About Everest Group
Everest Group is a consulting and research firm focused on strategic IT, business services, engineering services, and sourcing. We are trusted advisors to senior executives of leading enterprises, providers, and investors. Our firm helps clients improve operational and financial performance through a hands-on process that supports them in making well-informed decisions that deliver high-impact results and achieve sustained value. Our insight and guidance empowers clients to improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness, agility and responsiveness. What sets Everest Group apart is the integration of deep sourcing knowledge, problem-solving skills and original research. Details and in-depth content are available at http://www.everestgrp.com.

Change Management Programs Often Ineffective In Digital Transformation | Blog

Businesses have conducted change management programs for 20-30 years. Even so, change management programs are systematically ineffective in delivering results. Unfortunately, the ineffectiveness is much worse today.

That’s because companies are engaged in digital transformation, where the degree of change is much greater than in the past. What causes the ineffectiveness, and what is the remedy?

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What’s Your Company’s Digital Ethics Score? | Blog

I marvelled at the passion demonstrated by the London Extinction Rebellion activists while I attempted to make my way to the Digital Agenda Power & Responsibility Summit at the British Library on 9 October.

During the Summit itself – while listening to presentations delivered by eminent speakers including Matt Warman MP, Minister for Digital and Broadband at DCMS; Sana Khareghani, Head of UK Government Office for AI; Russell Haworth, CEO, Nominet; Cheryl Stevens MBE, Deputy Director for Trust & Identity at DWP; Jacqueline de Rojas CBE, President, techUK; and Caroline Criado Perez OBE, award-winning author of Invisible Woman and activist – it struck me that consumer disillusionment with unethical applications of technology could lead to its own type of activism in the form of product and service boycotts.

Read my blog on Digital Agenda

Digital Experience Platforms: An Idea Whose Time Has Come | Blog

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, enterprises need to package their offerings with superior and memorable experiences to remain relevant. They need to streamline their efforts to deliver a unified and seamless digital experience to stakeholders. While they’ve attempted to achieve this with point solutions such as CRM platforms, campaign management tools, and other experience management solutions, their disjointed and incompatible portfolios have often created more problems than solutions.

Enter the Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

In response to an obvious need, vendors including Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce have created a digital experience platform or DXP. We define a DXP as a comprehensive suite of solutions enabling enterprises to deliver a content-rich, stakeholder-driven digital experience (DX), encompassing all digital touchpoints.

Its main function is to digitally enable the three pillars or modules of DX – content management, brand engagement, and digital e-commerce – so enterprises can create business value through a well-structured and unified experience.

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

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  • Content management: A DXP offers various services across the content management lifecycle, such as dynamic templates for designers, a library of frequently used content, and widgets and tools for reviewing and publishing content to multiple platforms, which help enterprises effectively and centrally manage the content they publish.
  • Brand engagement: A DXP unlocks numerous aspects of brand engagement across functions including marketing, advertising, sales, and experience management. With capabilities like end-to-end campaign automation and drag-and-drop tools to design customer journey maps, a DXP enables experience-as-a-service for enterprises.
  • Digital e-commerce: A DXP activates different facets of digital e-commerce with solutions like AI-enabled merchandising, visual merchandising, automated management and maintenance of product data, and central dashboards to manage all websites.

In addition, a DXP has tools to help deliver a data-driven experience across the customer experience value chain by enabling functions such as sales, marketing, merchandising, and content publishing via different modules.

Beyond the basics

Most of the DXPs in today’s market provide the same basic services. But the leading DXP providers also provide ancillary, value-add services on top. Some of the most popular are omnichannel services, API-integration, and tools for improved developer experience.

Per our recently released research report, BigTech Battle: Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) Assessment – Rise of the Digital Experience Platform, the leading players are adding more functionality to the DXP to enhance its features and functionality. For instance, they are helping make the development process less technical with the help of services such as What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) interfaces, drag and drop functionality, and templates to create new experiences. This significantly reduces the creative team’s dependency on the technical team and improves the overall efficiency of the experience delivered. The top providers also have tools for end-to-end omnichannel customer journey mapping and enable the use of “win scores” to prioritize sales opportunities and probability metrics to measure the experience delivered.

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These players are also using technology to enhance the functionality of the different solutions they offer, such as AI for content creation, event-based automation (cart abandonment), and advanced analytics solutions.

Simply put, a DXP is a more efficient way for an enterprise to manage its DX. In today’s increasingly competitive market, enterprises need to leverage a platform-based approach to deliver a compelling and sticky experience.

For more insight on the DXP market and a detailed analysis of current vendors, please read our report: BigTech Battle: Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) Assessment – Rise of the Digital Experience Platform.

Please share your experiences with the digital experience platform and the overall experience ecosystem with us at [email protected] and [email protected].

Innovation And Agility: How To Resolve Why Companies Are Not Getting What They Need | Blog

It’s getting harder and harder to do business with third parties because of complications arising from security, data privacy, GDPR, and other regulations. The complications are running headlong into the need to be agile and operate at high velocity. To do that, companies need to be able to move quickly and make things simple. But these regulatory requirements are making that complicated; they take time, thus creating real friction in trying to conduct transactions. This is particularly the case with trying to do business with third-party services. The consequences create a formidable barrier in trying to select the best providers/vendors.

Read my blog in Forbes

How To Ensure Your Organization’s Decisions Have Broad Acceptance And Change Will Be Supported | Blog

The story we tell ourselves as executives is that we make decisions based on facts, on data. We want our organizations to be data-driven organizations with decisions based on “institutional conviction.” In reality, making well-informed decisions and getting others to support those decisions is a factor of how deep and well supported the convictions are and leaders’ ability to persuade others of those convictions. However, without data and facts, people typically believe the executives’ underlying assumptions are wrong or incomplete.

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You Need to Rethink Your Mainframe Strategy in Today’s Digital World | Blog

The demise of the mainframe has been predicted every year over the past decade. With digital and cloud transformation becoming the enterprise norm, the death-knell has been getting louder. But, for multiple reasons, mainframes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

For example, they are designed for efficiency and allow enterprises to run complex computations in a compact infrastructure with high utilization levels. They receive regular updates that can be applied without any business disruption, making them easily expandable and upgradable. The latest mainframes work well with mobile applications, which are becoming the norm across industries. And the fact that mainframes host some of enterprises’ most critical production data has created somewhat of a lock-in situation.

Despite mainframes’ staying power, a variety of factors – including 1) difficulty integrating mainframe-housed data with the rest throughout the enterprise; 2) the shrinking number of IT professionals who understand mainframes’ architectural complexities; and 3) mainframes’ lack of agility – can prevent enterprises from excelling in today’s digital environment.

Levers Enterprises Can Pull to Maximize Their Mainframe Value

With these issues in mind, some enterprises think they should eliminate mainframes completely from their technology environment. But that’s not the best route to take in the short- to medium-term. Rather, by embracing the best of mainframes and digital technologies, they can gain on operational costs and capital invested and realize business flexibility and agility without a loss of continuity or high mainframe efficiency levels.

Our Recommendations on How You Can Achieve Maximum Value from Your Mainframes

Mainframe upgrades – The latest mainframe releases mimic the benefits offered by the cloud. If you haven’t upgraded to the newest release, you should consider doing so now.

Phased retiring of applications – For applications that can work as effectively on the cloud as on mainframes, you should develop new ones on the cloud and slowly phase out the old ones from your mainframe. This approach will avoid business disruptions and help you quickly build new services while still being able to access real-time mainframe data.

Mainframe-as-a-Service (MaaS) –If you’re looking to go asset light, you can adopt MaaS, wherein your existing mainframe assets are transferred to a services provider. In these arrangements, you’ll be charged on an actual consumption basis if you meet a minimum volume commitment. You’ll gain the most value from MaaS when you use it in conjunction with phased retiring of applications, because it will allow you to gain the benefits of a consumption model while preparing your cloud environment in parallel.

Automated migration to modern tech stacks – Multiple tools and services are available to migrate a legacy stack (such as COBOL-based) to a newer stack (such as Java-based or .Net-based,) in an automated fashion. Given the variety of mainframe languages, databases, and infrastructure technologies going into the migration, you should always adopt a custom migration approach.

Wrapper approaches – In the short-term, instead of migrating away from your mainframe, you can augment it with agile data services that enable data interoperability with the rest of your infrastructure. You can also run emulators on the cloud and host legacy application code with minimum changes.

Mainframes are far from dead and will continue to form the backbone of many large enterprises in the near future. However, to excel in today’s digital world, you need to reconsider your mainframe strategy to get the best of all emerging digital technologies. Of course, there is no one size fits all solution. So, you’ll need to take a customized approach, combining the various transformation levers that are most applicable to your enterprise’s unique situation.

How do you think mainframes will fare in the digital world? Please share your thoughts with me at [email protected].

Digital Transformation: 3 Change Management Mistakes to Avoid | Blog

Change can be painful for companies and individuals. But if you are undergoing a digital transformation, there’s simply no getting around it. In fact, the degree of change is greater, and there is a cascading set of consequences for these deep changes, which each require their own change management.

At Everest Group, executives often ask us, “What is the most effective change-management tool or method for driving the necessary change in transformation?” Answering that question, I first point out two hard truths:
Executives cause their own problems with change management – often in three key areas – that make their efforts to drive change ineffective. As a result, they encounter big, expensive problems and passive-aggressive behaviors that delay achieving the objectives or even cause the transformation initiative to fail.

People don’t change unless they want to.

Read my article in The Enterprisers Project

DXC Technology Changes CEO | Blog

There is a “changing of the guard” at DXC Technology. Mike Salvino is now President and Chief Executive Officer and succeeds Mike Lawrie, who served as DXC’s Chairman, President and CEO. The change in leadership is happening at one of the last US national champions of the services industry. This move will be viewed with interest in many of the largest US and global firms, as DXC is a strategic partner to many of the Fortune Global 500 companies. Here’s what you need to know about the challenges and opportunities DXC and Salvino now face.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

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