The IT roadmap to a digital business

UPDATED 11/9/18

In our previous installments on the digital business imperative, we discussed why the roadmap for a digital business is at the top of business agendas. And what digital business transformation entails. In this post, we’ll highlight how. How IT can deliver the infrastructure that enables a digital business model.

We know that traditional IT architectures that organizations have relied on for decades are no longer capable of meeting the needs of the digital present by themselves. From driving internal operational excellence to satisfying customer expectations, business is now reliant on digital enablement technologies. So how does IT manage the transition from traditional, siloed enterprise architecture? This was focused on protecting the four walls of the enterprise to an agile, collaborative, data-driven environment.

Roadmap for digital business

The introduction of social, cloud, mobile, and Internet of Things technologies has a foundational common denominator: data. Digital technologies create new data flows consisting of various sources, applications, sizes, and types. First and foremost, to enable the digital business transformation, IT must be able to govern the flow of this data.

To accomplish this goal, organizations should look to integrate and comprehensive offerings that provide end-to-end infrastructure. The primary goal here is for organizations to simultaneously leverage existing integration investments while they embrace the new digital integration patterns.

With the ability to integrate, secure, manage and measure all data flows, organizations can drive digital business interactions both within the enterprise and also externally to an evolving ecosystem of customers and partners. This also enables businesses to embrace more agile IT by moving away from old, inflexible middleware technology to more responsive architectures designed to easily connect to a variety of applications.

Vital IT gains

Additionally, it is vital IT gains complete visibility into its data flows to ensure comprehensive governance, security, and privacy. As the use of digital technologies drives a more open environment, the exposure to governance and security issues increases.

By maintaining complete control over digital data flows, organizations can safely leverage that data in new ways, from understanding how to optimize business operations to gain new insight into customer interactions.

Employing an integrated architecture that seamlessly integrates digital technologies is the first step to becoming a digital business. By building on that foundation, organizations can capitalize on the technologies that deliver meaningful customer experiences, and ultimately drive revenue.

Final posts

In our final post in this series, we will examine how organizations can leverage the IT infrastructure they’ve built to enable the digital business, and put that work into action — in order to achieve all the advantages delivered by a true digital business.