Aligning IT to improve enterprise culture
While it’s broadly understood that organizations need to stay one step ahead of digital disruption in their marketplace, not enough organizations are taking advantage of their own digital transformation when it occurs. Inherent within these transformations is the opportunity to develop an enterprise culture. In this sense, enterprise culture refers to the information, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of those who form and run their business in a way that encourages innovation, risk and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Unfortunately for IT leaders, it can be difficult to continuously align their initiatives to the core competency of their business while they’re tied down with their own “business as usual”. While fixing severs, improving network connectivity and generally keeping the computers running are important tasks, these aren’t the core competency of the business. Core competencies for IT within an enterprise culture include the speed of time-to-market, transformation of customer service and identifying opportunities for new and improved business models.
So how do you ensure that your IT strategies are aligned to business strategy in a way that enables an enterprise culture? Organizations in every industry, whether its healthcare, financial services or the automotive industry are now transforming into software-based businesses in order to compete in quickly changing markets.
These organizations are adopting agile practices as well as new technologies with a focus on delivering more software at a faster rate than ever before. So why is this happening and how does this new focus on software development as a competency build the enterprise culture we’re talking about?
In his often quoted article “Why Software is Eating The World”, HPE Board Member Marc Andreessen said “Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”
To illustrate this new world and what it means for businesses, he pointed out that the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application in the year 2000 was approximately $150,000 a month and that running that same application today in the cloud costs less than $1,500 a month.
As organizations undergo their own unique digital transformation journeys, they’re now increasingly using containers as an instrumental tool for establishing continuous delivery practices. Containers are a category of cloud computing services that enable developers to build, ship, and run distributed applications efficiently by packaging applications with into a standardized unit. Containers now allow IT leaders to develop a repeatable and reliable process for application releases which is a key principle for continuously delivering software.
Cloud Foundry recently undertook a first-of-its-kind, multi-national study with 711 respondents across seven geographies in five languages looking into qualitative and quantitative research about the container phenomenon. It revealed that a majority of companies (53%) had either deployed (22%) or were in the process of evaluating (31%) containers. Of the 53% who have deployed or are evaluating containers, 16% have “already mainstreamed” their use and another 64% expect to mainstream the use of containers in the next year.
Moving to the cloud isn’t just about adopting new technologies, it’s a cultural change that all enterprises have to recognize and address with intent if they’re going to keep pace with their competitors. The move to cloud based technologies is enabling enterprises to free themselves from the scale which has traditionally weighed them down so they can behave like the start-ups and disruptors that keep CEOs awake at night. Marrying the possibilities that these technologies create to the overall business strategy will enable organisations to identify new opportunities to create competitive advantages as they arise in the new digital world.
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About the Author:
Kevin Stoll is the Cloud Solution Architect with HPE and an expert in all things Cloud Foundry. His role is to empower organizations by leveraging reusable Cloud and Automation solutions and/or architect custom solutions to best meet organizational needs. Kevin has had the luxury of assisting many other big enterprises successfully implement new tools such as HPE Helion Stackato and HPE Helion Eucalyptus.