End of year predictions in December are as predictable as tomorrow's sunrise, but a recent video on 2017 Technology Trends helped me really understand how important a digital transformation strategy is to just about any business executive. The CSC Town Hall conversation actually identified some of the specific tasks that today's corporate executive really need to address in the coming year. To enhance your opportunity for 2017 business success, your action item list should include:

• Reconfiguring both corporate front and back office operations for digital execution which is expected to reshape organizational structures, employee compensation models and every business' partner community;
• Preparing for intelligent machines advisory services to the enterprise that will drastically increase productivity and business competition;
• Leveraging the industrial internet, aka the Internet of Things, that will use sensor cross connectivity to improve human safety and machine productivity
• Dealing with radically new and culturally driven business innovations that originate from the East Asian "Sinosphere"
• Using simplified cloud computing platforms that will drive 80% of all corporate information technology into public cloud platforms by 2020; and
• Capturing the value proposition of the truly interactive virtual experience and digital interface for enhanced user experience and worker productivity

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To survive these imminent changes, corporations must identify new transformational business opportunities within the context of their specific industry vertical and competitive landscape. This requires much improved collaboration between business and technology leaders around developing an explicit linkage between the cloud computing economic model and the relevant business economic model. This linkage will inevitably include the effective use of virtual IT operational models that include dynamic infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure auto-scaling, application microservices and serverless computing. Preparing for these changes may also require a rethinking of your core business because customer experience design may actually drive your business success. Since quality experiences are based on customer empathy, business analytics, and cognitive technology, a successful business strategy may need to blend all of those capabilities. This also means having an ability to engage with both your customers and employees in meaningful ways, no matter where they happen to be.

Your corporate information technology team itself will also need to deal with an extremely rapid shift from technology operations to robust and automated IT service management. The coming transition to a public cloud dominated IT industry landscape also will also demand corporate strategies around:

• Matching cloud deployment and service model options to organizational risk tolerance;
• Enhancing organizational expertise on cloud computing through an increased training investment strategy; and
• Preventing digital operations failures due to an inability to monitor and enforce the necessarily strict IT governance models.

One final thought. Organizational risk tolerance levels may also need some significant recalibration because it only takes one successful "fail-fast" entrepreneur to reshape an entire industry. Chief financial officers and chief risk officers need to take a holistic approach that integrates business risk management and performance management, including compliance where required, as part of the overall business strategy and execution. In addressing this need, external risk management services may be the key to evolving your company from basic compliance and ad-hoc responses, to optimized business risk management, in which the value of risk management far outweighs the costs.

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