Enterprise IT: Into a digital age

The next phase of business IT has begun and it will be all about ‘digital' - but what does that mean exactly?

We have entered a third era of enterprise IT. That's according to Gartner, whose Q4 2013 poll of 2,339 CIOs from 77 countries also found that most are unprepared for the era's main transformative theme: digitalisation. Gartner says it is about IT enabling companies to make themselves faster, cheaper and more scalable, and changing businesses fundamentally - disrupting industries and rewriting the rules of competition.

Dave Sobel, director of the partner community at managed services vendor GFI Max, says a fully digital business is essentially a virtual business. It's all about achieving what customers want and delivering business success - and being able to do that just as productively, wherever and whenever it is needed.

"You're taking it from the perspective of being without a real physical location, and it is business based in the cloud," he says. "I think it is key for the next generation, which is used to being able to do this.

"You have to have the right infrastructure to pull it all together and support it."

A digital business will maximise its agility and efficiency - and people will be happier working within it. When it comes to the technology, the focus is on doing whatever is necessary to achieve that, explains Sobel, and going on adapting the technology as markets, employees, technologies, and business demands evolve.

Even seemingly trivial improvements can become key to digital transformation. Adrian Crawley, UK and Ireland director at Radware, says its customer, clothing catalogue company JD Williams, advanced its mobile strategy by slashing web page load times by 25 per cent.

This enabled JD Williams to improve the customer shopping experience on tablets and mobiles, allowing them to compete better with specialist online rivals. Forty per cent of visitors to JD Williams' website were using a mobile device, but insufficient numbers were actually buying. Crawley didn't have figures to hand, but he confirms that JD Williams is already doing more business.

"A digital business has to be both tactical and strategic. Businesses taking it seriously are planning for digitalisation and moving into the new world - maybe going through outsourcing partners," he says. "It's about moving faster - mobility, cloud, high availability, speed of go-to-market, and it helps to win more clients."

Christian Nagele (pictured, right), chief executive and co-founder of CentraStage, notes that one building block to a digital business might be the centralisation of endpoint management and control, such that changes - even attacks - can be picked up and dealt with in real time, maintaining availability and avoiding overload of any one section of the infrastructure.

"And we're seeing some people with really well-thought-out projects, where they are managing the mobilisation of their workforces," Nagele confirms.

Paul Evans, managing director of Redstor, agrees that the digital business is simply the next evolution of the organisation in a world where the stakes around efficiency and performance are always being raised.

"The bottom line for business is that it is always about wanting to perform better and improve itself. And in order to do that, it needs to give great customer service, be very efficient, and look after its people. The result is profit," Evans (pictured, left) says.

Achieving that great customer experience is about, in part, making sure there are great systems in place. So that is what the digital business is about: transforming businesses so they are better able to achieve that great customer experience.

"If you look at Marks & Spencer recently, it was talking about its results going down. And the CEO has spoken about their IT systems being outdated," he adds.

Appropriate IT systems can help organisations understand their customers and boost their businesses by ensuring accurate information is available in a timely manner. Whereas that might have mattered less in days when the technology was not available, today - because it has now become readily available - it is a differentiator.

Evans notes that this is as true for the public sector as for a sales-focused private sector firm. Its channel has a strong presence in the education market, and cost savings mean that IT becomes a top route to performance and efficiency improvements. Teachers and other education professionals, though, don't necessarily understand that - so the channel must work to educate the educators, as it were, about the broad organisational benefits.

And to do that, channel companies may first have to transform themselves in similar ways, confirms Evans.

Paul Bryce, business development director at datacentre and cloud services provider Node4, says both salespeople and IT managers have challenges to meet when it comes to digital transformation, whether in-house or within a customer business.

"Traditionally IT managers can be a bit fearful, because they see themselves as being in control of certain elements," he says. "Providers must work alongside IT managers to help them realign their role. IT managers are by nature very controlling people; they want to dictate the internet sites you can access and so on."

Younger generations now entering the workplace take a dim view of having their technology use managed in this way. To facilitate the development of digital businesses, IT managers will, Bryce says, have to become more like "stewards of risk" - enabling use while assessing and managing security risks and threats.

"The IT manager has to become a lot more approachable, rather than always erecting a barrier to users. It's all about people adapting," he explains. "And it's about educating ourselves and the market about what this really means for them and the challenges that must be overcome."

Digital disruption in action
Respondents to a Nimbus Ninety survey of 195 companies said the technologies that are most disrupting their organisations are:
■ Mobile technology (70 per cent)
■ Social media (65 per cent)
■ Cloud computing (64 per cent)
In just three years, they predicted, the most disruptive technology trends will be:
■ Big data analytics (50 per cent)
■ Internet of Things (37 per cent)
■ Dynamic visualisation (35 per cent)