What is Your 2017 Business Strategy?

The Time is Now for 21st Century Leadership

By G C Network | November 10, 2013

I’ve just had the opportunity to preview my good friend Melvin Greer’s newest effort, “21st Century Leadership: Harnessing Innovation, Accelerating Business Success“. Now in pre-release, this book highlights the compelling…

Public Cloud IaaS : A Price/Performance vs. Security Analysis

By G C Network | October 25, 2013

Industry’s transition from custom made, one-of-a-kind IT infrastructures to the standardize, commodity based cloud paradigm is well on it’s way. IBM’s recent “Under Cloud Cover” study highlights the rapidly of…

Catch the Cloud with DorobekINSIDER LIVE!

By G C Network | October 17, 2013

  Yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed an opportunity to participate in the DorobekINSIDER LIVE edition on cloud computing.  The conversation was both lively and informative.  Joining me on the show were:…

Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT

By G C Network | September 14, 2013

The call for help began as a rumble. Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor,…

NCOIC/NGA Demonstrates Use of Cloud in Disaster Response

By G C Network | September 5, 2013

     When the world’s next major earthquake, tsunami or other disaster hits, military, government and civilian NGA project is available on the NCOIC website. responders will need to manage and…

NBC4 Puts On A Great GovCloud Show !!

By G C Network | August 25, 2013

NBC 4 in Washington, DC highlighted government cloud computing today as part of their GovInnovate show. Below is just a taste of the informative public service they provided.  Go to…

OMB’s Evidence Memo: A Call for Cloud Services Brokerage

By G C Network | August 21, 2013

by Ray Holloman and Kevin Jackson In a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage. Well, not in so many words. Rather, OMB requested…

Cloud Services Brokerage Lessons From Alex Rodriguez, Baseball’s Trade Deadline

By G C Network | August 8, 2013

( A guest post from Ray Holloman, NJVC Corporate Communications) Two stories sat atop baseball’s marquee in the final days of July. The first was the non-waiver trade deadline, baseball’s…

Lessons Learned: VA Cloud Email Termination

By G C Network | July 17, 2013

According to a Federal Computer Week article by Frank Konkel, The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract for email and calendaring services with HP…

Deconstructing Cloud: An Excellent Guide to the Cloud Computing World

By G C Network | July 15, 2013

On an almost daily basis, I’m approach for my views on “cloud computing technology”.  Although typically innocent in nature, I always cringe at the thought of enduring yet another hours…

Photo credit: Shutterstock


End of year predictions in December are as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise, but a recent video on 2017 Technology Trends helped me really understand how important a digital transformation strategy is to just about any business executive. The CSC Town Hall conversation actually identified some of the specific tasks that today’s corporate executive really need to address in the coming year. To enhance your opportunity for 2017 business success, your action item list should include:

  • Reconfiguring both corporate front and back office operations for digital execution which is expected to reshape organizational structures, employee compensation models and every business’ partner community;
  • Preparing for intelligent machines advisory services to the enterprise that will drastically increase productivity and business competition;
  • Leveraging the industrial internet, aka the Internet of Things, that will use sensor cross connectivity to improve human safety and machine productivity
  • Dealing with radically new and culturally driven business innovations that originate from the East Asian “Sinosphere”
  • Using simplified cloud computing platforms that will drive 80% of all corporate information technology into public cloud platforms by 2020; and
  • Capturing the value proposition of the truly interactive virtual experience and digital interface for enhanced user experience and worker productivity

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To survive these imminent changes, corporations must identify new transformational business opportunities within the context of their specific industry vertical and competitive landscape. This requires much improved collaboration between business and technology leaders around developing an explicit linkage between the cloud computing economic model and the relevant business economic model. This linkage will inevitably include the effective use of virtual IT operational models that include dynamic infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure auto-scaling, application microservices and serverless computing. Preparing for these changes may also require a rethinking of your core business because customer experience design may actually drive your business success. Since quality experiences are based on customer empathy, business analytics, and cognitive technology, a successful business strategy may need to blend all of those capabilities. This also means having an ability to engage with both your customers and employees in meaningful ways, no matter where they happen to be.


Your corporate information technology team itself will also need to deal with an extremely rapid shift from technology operations to robust and automated IT service management. The coming transition to a public cloud dominated IT industry landscape also will also demand corporate strategies around:
  • Matching cloud deployment and service model options to organizational risk tolerance;
  • Enhancing organizational expertise on cloud computing through an increased training investment strategy; and
  • Preventing digital operations failures due to an inability to monitor and enforce the necessarily strict IT governance models.

One final thought. Organizational risk tolerance levels may also need some significant recalibration because it only takes one successful “fail-fast” entrepreneur to reshape an entire industry. Chief financial officers and chief risk officers need to take a holistic approach that integrates business risk management and performance management, including compliance where required, as part of the overall business strategy and execution. In addressing this need, external risk management services may be the key to evolving your company from basic compliance and ad-hoc responses, to optimized business risk management, in which the value of risk management far outweighs the costs. 

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

Cloud Musings

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