The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170618120246/http://dotnet.sys-con.com/node/4007992

Welcome!

Microsoft Cloud Authors: Andreas Grabner, Stackify Blog, Liz McMillan, David H Deans, Automic Blog

Related Topics: @CloudExpo, Mobile IoT, Microsoft Cloud, Eclipse, Release Management , Log Management, @BigDataExpo, @ThingsExpo

@CloudExpo: Blog Feed Post

Ongoing #DigitalTransformation | @CloudExpo #Agile #CIO #IoT #AI #ML #DL

Information technology (IT) advances are transforming the way we innovate in business

Systems of Innovation for Ongoing Digital Transformation

Information technology (IT) advances are transforming the way we innovate in business, thereby disrupting the old guard and their predictable status-quo. It’s creating global market turbulence. Industries are converging, and new opportunities and threats are emerging, like never before.

So, how are savvy chief information officers (CIOs) leading this transition?

Back in 2015, the IBM Institute for Business Value conducted a market study that included the findings from over 1,800 CIO interviews from around the globe. The resulting insights are worthy of revisiting today, as we consider the digital business transformation outlook in 2017.

Introduction to the Torchbearer CIO
CIOs realize the barriers between formerly distinct industries are collapsing, as organizations in one sector apply their expertise to others – producing new hybrids and erasing prior traditional industry classifications in the process.

They believe it's the most influential trend that's transforming the mainstream business arena. Those deemed to be the ‘Torchbearer’ CIOs are particularly attuned to the shift - in fact, a full 79 percent of these IT leaders expect industry convergence to have a significant impact.


How have these CIOs been preparing for a world of converging industries, intensifying competition and hyper-speed innovation? They’re focusing on three key goals in particular: 1) enhancing their organization intelligence and insight, 2) digitizing the front office and 3) strengthening the IT staff skills.

hat said, only 57 percent of CIOs are reassessing their strategic direction. Many of the infrastructure decisions the IT department makes are no longer purely about technology -- they’re now considered core components of an organization’s essential business strategy.

Most Torchbearer CIOs have a plan of action. Seventy-one percent are considering the strategic implications of new technologies. They know they still have to provide basic IT services, as economically as possible. But they’re also looking for opportunities to create a competitive lead and improve the organization’s bottom line performance.

Moreover, the Torchbearer CIOs also place far more emphasis on building an agile organizational culture – one that supports rapid software developer experimentation and IT services prototyping – to help their team reach the market first with innovative new offerings.

In addition, the Torchbearer CIOs are eager to form partnerships that exploit the full potential of digital business technologies. They recognize that few enterprises can provide the full array of products, services and experiences that their stakeholders need and want.

Torchbearer CIO Lessons Learned
What can your organization take away from these study findings? What are the best practices that Torchbearer CIOs employ. Here’s four actionable insights:

  • Focus on disruptive innovation. Build an agile culture where rapid experimentation, informed by reliable intelligence, is the norm. Split big projects into smaller, more manageable chunks, allocate specific tasks to different teams and give them the freedom to get on with the job.
  • Pay close attention to what your external customers say. They can help you identify new trends, pinpoint problems with a product or service, clarify what differentiates your offering and establish what really matters to them, not just what you think they value.
  • Invest in technologies that will help you decipher the data you collect, and ramp up your organization’s analytical power. Identify the sorts of skills you’ll need to perform tomorrow’s jobs, not just the talent you need today.
  • Recruit for the future and collaborate with organizations that possess relevant expertise. Rotate existing employees every few months to help them develop an innovative, entrepreneurial spirit, strong business sense and the ability to communicate complex technological issues clearly.

Hybrid IT in Action: Systems of Innovation
Progressive CIOs have another significant thing in common; they know how to maximize their investment in legacy IT systems, and apply that solid foundation with the adoption of new platforms that - when combined - enable them to achieve superior transformation results.

For too many years, the decline of the mainframe platform has been predicted by those who have not been aware of the ongoing enhancements to these highly reliable systems. Many of the uninformed parties thought that mainframe extinction would be accelerated with the growth of cloud computing services. In fact, the mainframe has become a key component of hybrid cloud scenarios.

According to a Forrester Research market study, the mainframe is leveraged by 92 of the top 100 banks worldwide, 23 of the top 25 U.S. retailers, all 10 of the world’s largest insurers, and 23 of the world’s 25 largest airlines. Furthermore, successful CIOs have already unleashed the data and business processes that are embedded within their mainframe-based applications.

Starting with integrations between systems of engagement (SoE) and systems of record (SoR), they’ve defined innovative products and services that can tap the mainframe resource via APIs. Besides, containers and microservices are coming to the mainframe as more organizations adopt DevOps methodologies.

Forrester believes that integrating established apps with smaller new services will advance the mainframe environment towards faster application delivery, even greater scalability, and better overall manageability. They describe this evolved hybrid IT state as the ‘Systems of Innovation’ that so many CIOs apparently crave. In a follow-on editorial, we'll describe this phenomenon in more detail.

More Stories By David H Deans

David H. Deans is the Managing Director at the GeoActive Group. He has more than 25 years of experience in the Technology, Media and Telecom sectors.

@ThingsExpo Stories
With the introduction of IoT and Smart Living in every aspect of our lives, one question has become relevant: What are the security implications? To answer this, first we have to look and explore the security models of the technologies that IoT is founded upon. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Nevi Kaja, a Research Engineer at Ford Motor Company, discussed some of the security challenges of the IoT infrastructure and related how these aspects impact Smart Living. The material was delivered inter...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ayehu will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on October 31 - November 2, 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara California. Ayehu provides IT Process Automation & Orchestration solutions for IT and Security professionals to identify and resolve critical incidents and enable rapid containment, eradication, and recovery from cyber security breaches. Ayehu provides customers greater control over IT infras...
SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a client-oriented software development company, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. MobiDev is a software company that develops and delivers turn-key mobile apps, websites, web services, and complex software systems for startups and enterprises. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business...
SYS-CON Events announced today that GrapeUp, the leading provider of rapid product development at the speed of business, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company, specialized in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market acr...
In his session at Cloud Expo, Alan Winters, an entertainment executive/TV producer turned serial entrepreneur, presented a success story of an entrepreneur who has both suffered through and benefited from offshore development across multiple businesses: The smart choice, or how to select the right offshore development partner Warning signs, or how to minimize chances of making the wrong choice Collaboration, or how to establish the most effective work processes Budget control, or how to ma...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Enzu will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st Int\ernational Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enzu’s mission is to be the leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions worldwide. Enzu enables online businesses to use its IT infrastructure to their competitive advantage. By offering a suite of proven hosting and management services, Enzu wants companies to focus on the core of their ...
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Lachapelle, CEO of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), provided an overview of various initiatives to certify the security of connected devices and future trends in ensuring public trust of IoT. Eric Lachapelle is the Chief Executive Officer of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), an international certification body. His role is to help companies and individuals to achieve professional, accredited and worldwide re...
SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business - from apparel to energy - is being rewritten by software. From planning to development to management to security, CA creates software that fuels transformation for companies in the applic...
IoT solutions exploit operational data generated by Internet-connected smart “things” for the purpose of gaining operational insight and producing “better outcomes” (for example, create new business models, eliminate unscheduled maintenance, etc.). The explosive proliferation of IoT solutions will result in an exponential growth in the volume of IoT data, precipitating significant Information Governance issues: who owns the IoT data, what are the rights/duties of IoT solutions adopters towards t...
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
When growing capacity and power in the data center, the architectural trade-offs between server scale-up vs. scale-out continue to be debated. Both approaches are valid: scale-out adds multiple, smaller servers running in a distributed computing model, while scale-up adds fewer, more powerful servers that are capable of running larger workloads. It’s worth noting that there are additional, unique advantages that scale-up architectures offer. One big advantage is large memory and compute capacity...
The current age of digital transformation means that IT organizations must adapt their toolset to cover all digital experiences, beyond just the end users’. Today’s businesses can no longer focus solely on the digital interactions they manage with employees or customers; they must now contend with non-traditional factors. Whether it's the power of brand to make or break a company, the need to monitor across all locations 24/7, or the ability to proactively resolve issues, companies must adapt to...
In this presentation, Striim CTO and founder Steve Wilkes will discuss practical strategies for counteracting fraud and cyberattacks by leveraging real-time streaming analytics. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Steve Wilkes, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Striim, will provide a detailed look into leveraging streaming data management to correlate events in real time, and identify potential breaches across IoT and non-IoT systems throughout the enterprise. Strategies for processing massiv...
In his keynote at @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Director of IoT Engineering at Citrix and co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, focused on building an IoT platform and company. He provided a behind-the-scenes look at Octoblu’s platform, business, and pivots along the way (including the Citrix acquisition of Octoblu).
The consumer IoT market is growing at an astounding rate – device ownership increased 259% from 2015 to 2016. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Noelani McGadden, Vice President of IoT at PlumChoice, will present thought-provoking insights from a recent survey, while exploring the opportunities and challenges as the market continues to grow. The data highlights which types of devices consumers currently own and are planning to purchase, the reasons why they’re purchasing these devices and their pr...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Striim will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo® | @ThingsExpo New York, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Striim™ (pronounced “stream”) is an enterprise-grade, real-time integration and intelligence platform. Striim makes it easy to ingest high volumes of streaming data – including enterprise data via log-based change data capture – for real-time log correlation, cloud integration, edge process...
When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 20th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 add...
A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, whic...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Clouber will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Clouber offers Migration as a Service (MaaS) across Private and Public Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) including bare metal migration to cloud. Clouber’s innovative technology allows for migration projects to be completed in minutes instead of weeks. For more updates follow #clouberio