Creating Your Digital Strategy

Craigslist.org Founder Hypes Government Transformation

By G C Network | July 29, 2009

Craig Newmark, best known for being the founder of the Craigslist website, is working hard to get the word out on Gov2.0. Last week in FedScoop, he really laid out…

Maria Spinola: An Essential Guide to Cloud Computing

By G C Network | July 27, 2009

Maria Spinola, a Strategic IT Marketing and Innovation Adviser and editor at www.Cloudviews.org, has recently published An “Essential Guide to Possibilities and Risk of Cloud Computing“. Her very pragmatic approach…

US Interior Department IT Infrastructure Vision

By G C Network | July 22, 2009

Tim Quinn, Chief Infrastructure Officer, US Department of Interior, sees IP convergence as a key part of DoI’s future IT infrastructure. During the Federal News Radio Executive Forum, he also…

DHS Acting CIO Margie Graves on Current DHS Challenges

By G C Network | July 20, 2009

During the Federal News Radio Executive Forum, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Acting CIO, Margie Graves provides a unique insight on the department. In her remarks, she described the challenges…

DHS EAGLE & First Source Digital Guide Launched

By G C Network | July 17, 2009

The Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions (EAGLE) is a multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle, specifically designed as the preferred source of information technology (IT) services for…

Looking Forward To GovIT Expo!

By G C Network | July 14, 2009

I am humbled and more than pleased to serve as the Technical Chair of SYS-CON’s 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo. To highlight the importance of this conference, I…

Publishing Synergy: Blog, Twitter and Ulitzer

By G C Network | July 13, 2009

Have you ever been given the task of building and executing an aggressive customer outreach program? Well I received my assignment about a year ago and trust me; the budget…

Input: Cloud Computing, Security to Drive US Gov’t IT Spending

By G C Network | July 12, 2009

According to a PC World article, cloud computing and cybersecurity will be the high-growth areas for government IT spending over the next few years. The analysis and consulting firm Input…

GovIT Expo 2009

By G C Network | July 11, 2009

I’m happy to announce my appointment by SYS-CON to be the Technical Chair of the 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo. This event is a 1-day deep dive into…

NCOIC To Help FAA on NextGen

By G C Network | July 7, 2009

Today, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC™) announced an agreement to work together to advance the Enterprise Architecture of NextGen, FAA’s national…

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For many corporations, welcoming the New Year also heralds the season of strategy development and budget distribution. This year, however, companies of all sizes are struggling with how to deal with the accelerating consumerization of technology and the mind numbing societal changes it brings. While each industry vertical has its own processes and business models to deal with, they all share a pressing need to develop an appropriate digital strategy. For 2017 this seems to be at the top of every executive to do list.

Business strategy experts around the world have categorically stated that data is now a strategic asset that can be sold and exchanged. In order to identify important data and manage it in a digitally driven future, companies will need to evaluate their organization’s structure, go-to-market approach, and overall corporate identity. Accomplishing this task effectively requires these companies to first establish their role within the new data economy.  To do this, IBM experts have created the Data Economy Framework which is used to characterize companies, their roles, capabilities, and overall trends in how they act in the data-driven digital economy. Specifically, will your company become a:

  • Data Producer – generate data from IoT and traditional big data sources (i.e. business applications, social media, websites, open sources, financial transactions, surveys, censuses, and digitized hard copies);
  • Data Aggregator/Custodian – provide data normalization services that enables data collection from heterogeneous devices and efficient data distribution; 
  • Platform Owner – provide application programming interfaces (APIs) for connectivity and ecosystem device discovery; 
  • Insight Provider – design and development of the semantic models, analytics libraries and machine learning techniques necessary for taking efficient and effective action based on data; or 
  • Data Presenter – make complex and large datasets easy for business users to consume. They also allow consumers to have intuitive access to the underlying data and its derivatives.

Once you have settle on yourdesired role, experts offer up four strategic pillars that must be addressed when executing on a corporate digital strategy:

  • Executing processes on a resilient digital platform that’s secure, available on demand and easy to set up and use; 
  • Offering anytime, anywhere digital insights, driven by analytics; 
  • Creating a digital workforce platform of connected workers, using advanced monitoring, search and analytics tools; and 
  • Proactively managing a digital innovation ecosystem comprising multiple partners to incorporate the latest technologies.

Digital transformation will also require reconfiguring both your corporate front and back office operations for digital executionMicroservices and serverless computing are at the heart of this process. Serverless computing, also known as Function as a Service (FaaS), is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping virtual machines as necessary to serve requests Requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine hour. One of the leading serverless computing options is IBM’s OpenWhisk. It uses business rules to bind events, triggers, and actions to each other. OpenWhisk actions run automatically only when needed. Its servlerless architecture is quickly instantiated with the scalability needed to meet the evolving demands of the modern user.
Microservices is a service-oriented architectures (SOA) specialization used to build flexible, independently deployable software systems. “Services” in a microservice architecture (MSA) are processes that communicate with each other over a network in order to fulfill a business goal. These services also use technology-agnostic protocols. This option represents a modern approach to software architecture for systems where continuous integration and DevOps are practiced. In its core, the microservice architecture advocates partitioning large monolithic applications into smaller independent services that communicate with each other by using HTTP and messages. The architecture pattern is a child of the continuous integration revolution and is designed for deployments that use a DevOps-based continuous delivery model.

 

In summary, developing a new digital strategy for you company requires you to:

  1. Select the right digital economy role for your company’s business future; 
  2. Design implementation steps that align with the four strategic pillars of digital strategy execution; and 
  3. Reconfiguring corporate front and back office operations in ways that take advantage of microservices and serverless computing.
Make 2017 the year your company creates its digitally driven future.


This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit ITBizAdvisor.com.

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