Creating Your Digital Strategy

Cloud Computing Wargames !!

By G C Network | January 22, 2009

Wikipedia  “A wargame is a game that represents a military operation.” “Military simulations, also known informally as war games, are simulations in which theories of warfare can be tested and refined…

President Barack Obama. A New Day for Cloud Computing !!

By G C Network | January 20, 2009

Yesterday, President Barack Obama’s transition team released a new video touting the benefits of cloud computing and government transparency. “Cloud computing, which allows consumers and institutions to access their files…

How the Government Tweets – An Update

By G C Network | January 19, 2009

Thanks goes out to Twitter_Tips for a link to Government agencies on Twitter: a few comprehensive sites posted by lindyjb which includes the following: The Government’s A-Twitter: A Comprehensive List…

How the Government Tweets

By G C Network | January 16, 2009

Last September in “Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app? ” and ” The Cloud Wins in Minneapolis at the RNC! “, I wrote about how the cloud infrastructure and microblogging…

Bob Gourley on Cloud Computing and NetCentric Operations

By G C Network | January 15, 2009

Bob Gourley, Crucial Point CTO and former DIA CTO, just posted  Cloud Computing and Net Centric Operations on his website CTOvision . In it he outlines how the OSD and ASD NII…

Obama Administration CTO Top Suggestions

By G C Network | January 14, 2009

Check out the top vote getters for suggestions to the nations’s first CTO! #5 with 5,835 votes Open Government Data (APIs, XML, RSS) We can unleash a wave of civic…

2009 Cloud Computing Events

By G C Network | January 13, 2009

2009 is off to a fast start with the following events on the horizon! February 2009 – “Bi-Annual On-line Government Cloud Computing Survey”, On-line February 3, 2009 – Open Group…

World Summit of Cloud Computing Virtual Site

By G C Network | January 12, 2009

The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) has made its recent IGT 2008 World Summit of Cloud Computing available on-line. Speakers include: Day 1: Stevie Clifton, Co-Founder & CTO Animoto…

1105 Government Information Group does Cloud Computing

By G C Network | January 9, 2009

Mark your calendars for April 29, 2009 ! 1105 Government Information Group has announced that there will be a Cloud Computing Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.…

Sun Acquires Q-Layer

By G C Network | January 8, 2009

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced their acquisition of Q-layer. This Belgium based company automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. In the press release, David Douglas, SUN’s…

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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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