Five emerging technologies for rapid digital transformation
Most people involved in enterprise technology are well aware that we live in exponential times, with the rate of change across most technological trends occurring at a rate far quicker than in years past. Almost daily, the industry witnesses data points in the tech media that show us that we are currently at a high watermark for technological innovation.
In this hyper-competitive yet nearly flat operating environment that organizations face today — where customer choices are almost all equally accessible — the pressure to keep pace and deliver a wider range of digital capabilities has never been greater.
But how much of this pressure is actually being exerted by IT leaders and from which stakeholders? How are they responding to it?
More importantly from a practitioner standpoint, what emerging tools and techniques are they using to accelerate their IT modernization and digital transformation efforts?
To get a sense of what pressures IT leaders were under and how they were dealing with them, I recently sampled just over 50 of the top practitioners in the space with a focus on what I regarded were leading organizations in their industry — mostly large enterprise CIOs, as well as a few CTOs, CDOs, and EVPs of IT who I knew were pushing the envelope — to better understand the IT initiatives they are focusing on to becoming more agile.
By picking cutting-edge leaders at top organizations, the intent was that the data will show what they’re facing and how they’re dealing with it this year, in a way that gives more typical organizations time to prepare for what they’ll likely face next year and beyond.
Unsurprisingly, the data clearly that top IT leaders are feeling much more pressure for their team to move quicker than they ever have in the past. What was startling however was the number of organizations who note they’re receiving this message — with fully 94 percent of executives saying they are feeling significant pressure (either “strong” at 31 percent or “very strong at 64 percent) — to move quicker than ever to keep up with the pace of technological change.
The pressure itself is apparently coming from all quarters as well, as the responses were evenly balanced between all stakeholders (lines of business, the C-suite, customers, etc.) However, rather significantly, zero respondents said that digital transformation was not a focus for their company this year.
Clearly the winds of digital change are at the backs of the vast majority of these IT leaders.
Curious to understand which technologies these IT leaders would be employing to move faster and be more agile in 2017, I provided a list of options, see below. While I provided fixed answers in the survey, where the top responses focusing around using better BI/analytics/data (presumably to create faster and more accurate feedback loops to IT projects) as well as public cloud, and DevOps, the survey also allowed free-form responses.
This highlighted some interesting patterns that give a sense of what top organizations are employing this year to move faster with IT. Many respondents noted that there were several technology tools in particular they relied on to be agile: Apache Spark, Capriza, Okta, MultiChain, and Puppet notably stood out in the free-form response section of the survey. Having these technologies in their agile toolkit is a key enabler for their digital transformation initiatives.
Apache Spark: As companies look to take advantage of big data, one hurdle is the ability to process and analyze today’s vast and growing volumes of business data in a timely and effective manner. One effective tool for getting over that hurdle is Apache Spark, a powerful open source tool that enables instantaneous stream analytics.
Spark provides companies with unprecedented agility because of its ability to harness and process vast amounts data to make better decisions faster and more confidently.
