Every business aspires to agility, 81% of CIO’s have Digital Transformation as their primary strategy, yet the pace of change is painfully slow. New technologies emerge more quickly than business can consume them and even existing investments are not optimised because the data is bound tightly to the silos.
Historically a monolithic solution aimed to be fundamentally self contained and if advancement came then the big tech companies (Oracle, IBM, SAP, Salesforce etc) acquired or innovated within their own environment to meet this new need. However, as per Moore’s law, innovation has expanded exponentially year over year and no company can possibly ingest all of this and are always at risk of being out flanked by start ups without the technology debt that an existing business always has.
So….how can companies stay agile in an ever changing world?
Imagine an architecture where each service can be disaggregated and the dependencies can be mitigated by an intelligent middleware. Suddenly you can replace elements without doing open heart surgery on your core systems, you can trial new solutions powered by data provided without point to point, disruptive integrations.
The other good news is that the move to this architecture in itself does not have to be a ‘boil the ocean’ implementation. A Proof of Concept in one vertical or horizontal environment can prove out the value and then be extended to cover more use cases as the business requires. As per my previous posts you may choose to implement this to drive a specific strategic outcome, Loyalty, PIM, OMS (Don’t get me started on AI and the RIRO reality there, more to come on that next week) or whatever it is that is going to make the biggest impact for your business.