Role of infrastructure in Digital Transformation
The early narrative about enterprise digital transformation was framed in very ambitious terms. The conversation was about how enterprises could adopt new (at the time!) digital frameworks to innovate completely new business models and dramatically change long-held ways of working. Over time, those ambitions were scaled down just a little. Not because they were invalid, but more because enterprises figured out that even without making such fundamental changes, they could adopt digital technology to augment business processes, embrace automation, and improve customer experiences. These changes in themselves proved capable of delivering substantial improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and financial outcomes. And enterprises found that these solutions could keep on evolving and the approach has proven extremely successful. But technology has accelerated its evolution and it’s now time (again) to look at more ambitious goals. Enterprises are looking at what some in the industry are calling the coming of Digital Transformation 2.0. This approach revisits the transformation agenda. The massive developments in technology elements like AI, Cloud, IoT and robotics are bringing these aspirations to the forefront again, and especially among organizations that have seen benefits from Digital Transformation 1.0 are eager to jump aboard. When I meet business leaders or talk to enterprises with this vision, I always urge them to look at their enterprise digital ecosystem carefully, including their IT infrastructure. Extreme digitization demands extreme performance, availability, and scalability from the underlying IT ecosystem. The entire enterprise IT ecosystem needs to be hyper-aligned and highly tuned. The enterprise applications and the supporting data and computing infrastructure need to be similarly “improved”. Digital transformation at this scale will place massive demands on the enabling infrastructure. If that ecosystem is unable to keep up, the whole initiative could run aground.