In 2003, Writer Nick Carr shook up enterprise C-suites around the world with
his seminal article for Harvard Business Review he provocatively titled IT
Doesn't Matter.
Fresh off the dot-com crash but before cloud computing took off, Carr
observed that the belief that IT's strategic value increases in parallel with
its potency and ubiquity was seriously mistaken.
His central thesis: "What makes a resource truly strategic - what gives it
the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage - is not
ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing
something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT - data
storage, data processing, and data transport - have become available and
affordable to all."
Carr then explained how proprietary technologies can provide strategic
advantage, but over time, technology become... (more)
Preparing for the Next Disruption
By Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I'll never forget the day that I first encountered the Internet. It was 1989
when a friend who worked in aerospace showed it to me - and I immediately
ignored it.
I wasn't alone. Almost everyone missed the true impact it would have on the
world. I originally told this story in my first book, The Quantum Age of IT:
Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change and went on to explain
how this encounter had precipitated the three market forces that had changed
everything.
These three market forces were:
The consumerization of IT - how consumer technologies changed the
expectations and perceptions of technology consumers The criticality of IT -
how technology moved from a back-office focus to powering every business
process, every customer interaction and virtually every element of the ... (more)
The visual model to declarative metadata representation to immutable
deployment vision is in essence what SD is all about.
The secret to making this approach practical, and thus the key to
understanding why SD approaches have become so prevalent, is the word
immutable.
Once we get an SD approach right, we no longer have to touch the deployed
technology whatsoever. Instead, to make a change, update the model and
redeploy.
In a recent Cortex, I bemoaned the fact that as buzzwords go, Digital
Transformation is excessively vague. There is yet another buzzword of our
times that is suffering the same fate: Software-Defined.
Rare though buzz-adjectives may be among the pantheon of buzz-nouns and the
occasional buzz-verb, Software-Defined (SD) has become remarkably pervasive.
In fact, it ties together many different, quite disparate concepts into what
has become a vague mi... (more)
The Deconstruction of Digital Transformation
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
The complex idea behind the term digital transformation is that technology
has created a fundamental shift in how organizations operate. The
consumerization of technology - and the customer empowerment it created - has
upended the traditional operating paradigm of organizations moving it away
from a capital and process-centric model to a customer-centric one.
The need to digitally transform your organization is now - or at least should
be - a strategic imperative. The fact, however, that the term digital
transformation is now a bona fide buzzword has obfuscated its importance.
The problem is that we create buzzwords because we need a simple, shorthand
way of communicating what is otherwise a complex idea. In the process,
however, the deeper, underlying complexity of the... (more)
We've seen many buzzwordy innovations in technology over the last decade,
from cloud computing to big data to microservices and beyond - but artificial
intelligence (AI) by far has the most buzzword baggage.
On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations
since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it
continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves.
We didn't suffer this kind of PR nightmare with the cloud, or the web, or
even client/server. In fact, AI has an unprecedented set of PR challenges
that threaten to sink the entire movement.
AI vendors, from the burgeoning gaggle of AI startups all the way to IBM, are
all crowded together at the eye of this hurricane. However, this PR storm
impacts enterprises as well, as AI promises to change the role technology
plays for every industry on this planet... (more)
Intellyx's 2017 Digital Transformation Predictions
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.
And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous
elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it's
been a rough year.
But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx's digital
transformation prognostications were close to spot on!
As is our tradition, each year we review last year's predictions and make all
new fresh ones! This year, it is my turn to review Jason's 2016 predictions
and let you know what I see happening in the coming year.
A Look Back on a Year of Inflection Points
Our predictions for 2016 centered on one thing: inflection points.
We predicted that blockchain, IoT security and open source web scale
technology would all turn the corner... (more)
A completely new computing platform is on the horizon. They're called
Microservers by some, ARM Servers by others, and sometimes even ARM-based
Servers. No matter what you call them, Microservers will have a huge impact
on the data center and on server computing in general.
What Is a Microserver...and What Isn't
Although few people are familiar with Microservers today, their impact will
be felt very soon. This is a new category of computing platform that is
available today and is predicted to have triple-digit growth rates for some
years to come - growing to over 20% of the server market by 2016 according to
Oppenheimer ("Cloudy With A Chance of ARM" Oppenheimer Equity Research
Industry Report).
According to Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Suvola Corporation - a software and
services company focused on creating preconfigured and scalable Microserver
appliances for deployin... (more)
Finding Transformational Success by Ignoring Labels
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
She's smart. He's funny. They're the ambitious ones. That company is an
innovator. This technology is a game-changer.
As humans, we love labels. Consciously and unconsciously, we slap them on
everything - and with good reason. The average human brain must process over
34GB of information each day. There is no way to do that and maintain our
sanity unless we organize all that information in some way. And sticking
labels on things is how our brain copes.
As a cognitive system, it works. But only when the things that we're sticking
labels on fit into the world as we know it.
When things are in a rapid state of change, however, that same labeling
process becomes problematic. When we attempt to label things that do not
adhere to the existing frame of reference, thos... (more)
Digital Transformation: It's the Customer, Stupid!
By Charles Araujo, Intellyx Principal Analyst
If you cannot explicitly articulate how investing in a new technology,
changing the approach or re-engineering the business process will help you
achieve your customer-centric vision of the future in direct and measurable
ways, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
At Intellyx, we spend a lot of time talking to technology vendors. In our
conversations, we explore emerging new technologies that are either
disrupting the way enterprise organizations work or that help enable those
organizations to cope with disruption.
The rate at which new companies and new technologies are emerging is
staggering, and it can be difficult to keep up - even for those of us whose
sole job is to do so. It's no wonder, therefore, that so many people draw a
straight line between the concept of digi... (more)
Technology Isn't the Answer to Surviving Digital Disruption
Guest post by Charles Araujo, Principal Analyst, Intellyx
There's a funny thing about digital transformation: we are simultaneously
over-hyping it and understating it. On the one hand, every tech company in
the world is talking about it. It doesn't matter how mundane the technology;
every company is somehow relating their products to digital transformation.
On the other, many people are failing to grasp the import and impact of what
digital transformation really means. In far too many cases, business and IT
leaders are dismissing it as nothing more than a marketing ploy. The
unfortunate result is that the over-hypedness of digital transformation is
obscuring its real meaning.
This dichotomy is most apparent in what I call the tech company fallacy.
Everywhere I turn, I hear another company executive make a procl... (more)
First came Data Processing (DP), as massive, arcane behemoths of computers
crunched numbers for select enterprises and government agencies. DP evolved
into Information Systems (IS) and in turn, Management Information Systems
(MIS). Next up: Information Technology (IT) and its cousin, Information and
Communications Technology (ICT).
As the corporate department responsible for enterprise technology evolved, so
too did the title of the executive in charge, eventually settling on the
Chief Information Officer (CIO) - in spite of the fact that CIOs are rarely
if ever in charge of an organization's information per se.
Throughout these changes, the role of the organization we now label IT has
evolved, and with it, the focus of the CIO. Today, with digital
transformation upending the status quo across the entire enterprise, IT is
transforming once again.
Given its history... (more)
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