Current Blog Series: Answers to the top 10 Questions CIOs face when considering an IBM i Digital Transformation Project
We recently launched a new blog series. Over the next couple of months, we will be discussing the Top 10 questions CIOs face when considering the Digital Transformation of their IBM i application portfolio. Following is the fourth in the ten-part series.
Question 4: Are there emerging technology offerings that can provide meaningful digital transformation for my organization?
The pandemic, shelter in place orders, and the resulting imperative for organizations to support a remote workforce have created a massive digital transformation demand. Technology and government leaders like Eric Schmidt and Ro Khanna are advocating for Federal funding of Broadband access, Digital Design, and a Federal "Chief Experience Officer" to provide access to digital services critical to our national infrastructure.
To address the urgent demand for Digital Transformation, technology companies created and promoted new offerings such as "Edge Computing," "Digital Workplace," "Cloud Computing," and "Data Mining."
Many of these new offerings were successfully deployed in the marketplace. In fact, Microsoft enjoyed a 17% increase in revenue over the past year due to the enormous demand for cloud services.
Another player in this marketplace, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided, and highly touted their digital transformation solution last year for the dilemma facing State Unemployment Offices. The state's legacy systems were decades old and unable to accommodate the additional requirements needed to interface with the Federal CAREs Act programs. They were faced with adding Federally funded relief to unemployment insurance benefits for an unprecedented number of recipients. To address this issue, AWS deployed a call center application on the front end to accommodate the increased demand for services. Unfortunately, however, the application did nothing to address the legacy systems' deficiencies behind the scenes.
How do these offerings provide meaningful Digital Transformation to my organization?
The short answer is, they don't. Many technology vendors suffer from the "if we build it, they will come" syndrome. Their incredibly powerful, intuitive technology supports the efficient delivery of tremendous amounts of unstructured data from a myriad of sources deploying powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms and machine learning.
Yet none of these technologies address the elephant in the room – the mission-critical applications running on legacy systems that support your organization's essential daily functions. While legacy systems are not glamorous, slick, or modern, they are critical to your business and should not be dismissed.
If yours is like most enterprise organizations, your greatest asset is the application portfolio that supports your daily operations - not just your data. The vital role these systems play in supporting your business must be acknowledged, and significant resources must be focused on transforming them before they collapse.
Emerging technology can provide your end-users with an enormous amount of data. Still, it lacks the ability to put meaningful data and proper business context into the hands of organizations running on legacy systems.
The barrier to this effort lies squarely with the isolated legacy application portfolio that supports your organization's daily operations. The most meaningful data used to support an organization's critical functions is trapped in legacy systems with limited access to the internet, cloud, and emerging technologies.
Until these critical legacy systems are migrated to a modern platform, they will not support the fully integrated business intelligence needed to empower the agile, self-service data access required to achieve significant digital transformation.
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