Industry Wrap № 3.
Strategic Insights from the Week
And that’s a wrap! Next Dimension curates the most practical and useful tools and strategic IT insights from the web.
This week we shared articles across our social media covering the following topics: IT Strategy to Enable Business Strategy, Simplify Your Infrastructure
Looking for details? continue reading to see more.
IT Strategy to Enable Business Strategy
What does it take to be Agile? 4 ways your agile IT strategy enables business strategy.
Agility is the ability to adapt and succeed in a rapidly changing, dubious, and even turbulent environment. One thing businesses need in order to succeed right now is agility. The secret, according to Archana Ramamoorthy, Chief Technology Officer for North America at Workday, is to have a single system – like the bridge on a ship – with full view of all the components and moving parts in the company. A cloud-based system that combines HR, Finance, and Planning makes it possible for executives to have a global view of how the company is doing. “It makes it very easy to adapt and change”.
As organizations plan for the new normal, Rob Sidey, Chief Technology Officer, IMCO Investments cautioned against a strategy of extremes. “I don’t know if it will be as extreme as everyone (permanently) working from home. Our focus is on a hybrid state to make sure the tools will support (an agile) environment.” Ramamoorthy agreed that this is a good time to rethink strategy. She advised organizations to think about their plans to communicate, to become more scalable with cloud solutions and to make better use of data for informed decision-making.
4 Steps to Agility and Success can be found below:
Digital transformation requires a close understanding of usage-to-control cost. How will you assess your cloud strategy?
In a recent survey, 99% of respondents reported an impact to business due to COVID-19, with 84% expecting effects to continue into the next year. In anticipation of a second wave 51% plan to move more applications to the cloud to prepare.
Four out of ten respondents expect to be 100% migrated to the cloud. Some companies are in the position to accelerate transformation, using digital technologies as a defense against business interruption. The pandemic has accelerated modernization plans, and business leaders expect a long-term benefit from this tech agility and new ways of working.
Moving to the cloud requires more than a finger snap or a heel click. Companies have to contend with the underlying, and often nested, architecture that requires unraveling to yield progress.
Through the pandemic, organizations plan increase investments into their digital transformation.
70% of businesses plan to sustain or increase their 2020 investments in digital transformation, according to a survey of 3,000 global executives, published by IFS. The survey was conducted between April and May, 2020. 58% of IT and 55% of manufacturing companies intend to maintain or increase their projected investments. The difference between industry sectors will determine how companies change course. For tech companies enabling digital processes, it’s boom times. For travel and entertainment industries, survival is the short-term focus.
Growth is the key factor pushing forward tech investments in the next 12 months, according to one-third of finance leaders surveyed by PwC. But the swift, unforeseen pivot to working remotely also played a role in rising tech spend.
Simplify Your Infrastructure
With a 200% increase in 12mo, infrastructure backbone design must evolve. Is yours ready? Cisco recommends this design:
From software as service (SaaS) to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), most organization today take advantage of cloud services. These cost-effective solutions help accelerate business and offer new opportunities for innovation.
Cisco IT is deploying a new global backbone. This highly scalable and programmable platform provides a strong foundation for the new backbone and will allow us to operate more like a service provider for our internal clients. IT needs to assure the enterprise backbone evolves to support internal business users. Cisco IT has started this transformation. Our users expect IT network services to be as simple as shopping online. This new backbone will enable Next Dimension to more efficiently connect our clients to Internet and SaaS applications, extend security zones globally, and interconnect sites, private clouds, and public clouds.
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