From Random Acts of Digital to Transformation at Scale

On June 5, I presented at the Gartner IT Symposium in Toronto where IT leaders gathered to hear about the latest technology and trends impacting their industries.

I talked about how businesses are moving from AI experimentation into Chapter 2 of their digital reinvention journeys - transformation at scale with AI and hybrid cloud. I also reinforced the importance of trust and the responsible stewardship of data.

Below are a few excerpts from my remarks, including some take-aways.

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A new era of digital reinvention is dawning.

For the past several years, businesses have been driving their digital journeys to take advantage of data, their most powerful source of competitive advantage.

The first chapter of this journey has been defined largely by leveraging this data to experiment with narrow and disparate AI applications and moving simple workloads -typically consumer and customer-facing applications - to the cloud.

This was all about random acts of digital.

But while business leaders tell us they want to do more, they are wrestling with how to merge and leverage the value of existing assets – like infrastructure, applications, workloads, and data, to enable greater speed to innovation and scalable competitive advantage. This doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why we call it a journey…

Which brings us to Chapter 2.

Now, we are beginning to see the emergence of the next phase of the digital journey – moving from experimentation to true transformation at scale with AI and hybrid cloud.

This next chapter will be enterprise driven and these three core areas will be critical:

Digital and AI

• Scaling emerging technologies like AI and embedding it everywhere in the business
• Check out how Hydro One is doing this, using The Weather Company and IBM Watson to better predict and manage the ongoing challenges of ice, snow, wind and thunderstorms.

Hybrid Cloud

• Moving applications and data seamlessly between different clouds to support the breadth of business workloads – a hybrid approach using a combination of public clouds, private clouds and on-premises IT capabilities…with consistent management and security protocols, using open source technology.

Responsible Stewardship

• Underpinning it all is the growing importance of trust. Companies want to work with technology partners they can trust to protect their data and handle it responsibly. At IBM, we have long followed a core set of Principles of Trust and Transparency.

It’s important to reinforce that every digital reinvention journey looks different and all companies are at different stages.

I invited our client, Gary Semplonius, SVP - Business Markets at Bell Mobility, to join me on stage to talk about where Bell is on their journey with its Smart City platform. He shared how the City of Markham is leveraging connected technology to enable more effective, data-driven decision-making to improve the efficiency of municipal operations and meaningfully enhance services for residents.

While they are well on their way in their journey, some companies are just beginning. No matter what stage you are at, keep these three things in mind to help set your company up for success:

Architect your business for change

• Start by making your data ready for AI - and do this in a way that provides trust and transparency for the people who will rely on it. Simply put - there can’t be AI without IA (information architecture).
• There are two distinct approaches to digital transformation: outside-in and inside-out. While the first is largely driven by the market and demand for new digital services, an inside-out approach is about modernizing core systems – more focus must be placed here.

Secure an executive sponsor (outside of IT)

• We’ve all heard this before and it remains true today…for a commitment to innovation to permeate an organization, it needs to be business-led, vs IT-led, and supported by a leader in the business to ensure innovation is linked to business outcomes and prioritized throughout the company.

 Start small and get agile

• One approach we take with clients is through our IBM Garage where we co-create to drive purposeful innovation and transformational change with the speed of a startup at the scale of an enterprise. It’s about bringing the right people together to brainstorm new ideas, build minimum viable products, test prototypes, iterate, and scale when ready.

Good luck on your digital reinvention journeys!