Diminishing boundaries of conventional IT structure: Why CIOs need to be ready with strategy for future systems

The breakneck pace of technology disruption continues to cause challenges to enterprises, particularly for those which are held back by patchwork ways of working and applications built for another era. Even those who have embraced the need to make their core systems future ready face a fundamental challenge of bridging them with the new systems that allow innovation at scale.

According to experts, companies aiming for growth and leadership should plan to connect core systems seamlessly with the new technology, as applications, data, and infrastructure are merging into systems, which is diminishing the boundaries of conventional IT structure.

Therefore, the IT leaders including CIOs, CTOs and technology heads have to imaginative to create a new levels of agility with adaptable systems, exploiting trusted data and breakneck advances in AI to eliminate business friction.

According to Mohan Sekhar, Senior Managing Director – Accenture Technology and Lead – Accenture Advanced Technology Centers in India, enterprises need to elevate human–machine interactions with radically human systems, by combining high-end technology and human-centric design to create simple and relevant solutions. He said, “This will ensure that the organization continues to invest in the talent strength of the organization, while creating thriving future systems.”

Technology is now more a constant, than a trend. What is changing is the realization of the scale, speed, breadth and depth of the impact of digital transformation and disruption.

“As innovation increases, having the next generation building blocks in place and available to navigate this new paradigm will be critical for future success,” explained Sankalp Saxena, SVP and Managing Director of Nutanix India Operations, adding that this will result in smarter, more flexible businesses which are data driven, technology agnostic, software based, and self-learning digital enterprises, capable of acting, reacting and anticipating any hardware or technology, operating or market condition.

Many reports establish that organizations with efficient data management and redefined business models along with a data-driven approach for exceptional customer experience and improved operational processes are able to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

“This is true because data within organizations is growing exponentially. Along with structured data –business data – there is a significant annual growth of unstructured data – human and machine data. With this rise, several CIO’s are struggling to cost effectively manage it – especially with very limited or no insights into unstructured data – often called as “Dark Data” This inhibits the organizational ability to transform at a faster pace,” said Sanjay Agrawal, Technology Head, Hitachi Vantara.

Citing an IDC survey, Agrawal said that enterprises need to adopt new solutions and strategy to deal with the drastic growth of both structured and unstructured data, while also optimizing data quality, ease of use, flexibility to scale capacity and performance metrics to address workload management issues. “This will provide businesses with the ability to gain more relevant insights to support data governance and conquer the data challenge to deliver better business outcomes,” he said.

Agreeing with the views of Agrawal, Nishikant Nigam, EVP and Chief Delivery Officer, CSS Corp said that mass adoption of AI-driven algorithms and their contextual application in business processes has potential to be the next big thing and CIOs need to be ready with right strategy.

Fortunately, today, there are several algorithm libraries available from where engineers and data analysts can easily extract and contextually apply ready algorithms to business cases, without having to develop new algorithms from scratch.

For example, AI-driven algorithms can be used in a broad spectrum of business cases, ranging from IT operations management, data center, and cloud management, contact center operations, service helpdesks, among others.

Meanwhile, among all the technology innovation, the cyber security piece must be in place. This is something that has become boardroom priorities. And, in the struggling time of trust deficit in large technology companies, countries after countries are mulling to bring stringent data privacy law, so the role of CIOs has become critical – they need to think out of the box to ramp up defenses and mitigate cyber-attacks.

“A combination of awareness, caution, tools and commonsense can go a long way in bringing down the risks businesses and government entities are exposed to,” Vinod Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Subex said, adding that organizations need to ramp up defenses and take on these sophisticated attacks with an equivalent measure of sophistication and diligence.

Agreeing with Kumar, Samir Mody, Vice President, Threat Lab, K7 Computing said that cyber security challenge needs lot of attention of enterprises in designing and developing new technologies to provide comprehensive ecosystem security across various targeted platforms such as those in the Internet of Things, AI, machine learning, among others.

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