IT transformation done right?

How did we get here? 

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s we were all doing ok, polishing our mainframes and getting to grips with the gradual appearance of personal computers on desks across the office. 

In the ‘90s x86 servers dominated the enterprise landscape and people started to move IT out of their offices and into “proper” data centres. 

After a brief interlude for Y2K, we started to virtualise infrastructure and move from waterfall application delivery to agile – IT done fast was a business enabler. 

In the last decade we’ve discovered “The Cloud”.  With near-infinite compute and storage resources at our disposal, resilience built in, and DevOps pipelines to enable continuous release of application functionality, it feels as though we’re reaching a technology nirvana. Businesses should be able to respond rapidly to market disruptions and opportunities through the deployment of digital solutions. 

And yet… 

At each stage of technology evolution there have been systems that have been left behind:

• Applications that never quite migrated from the mainframe.   

• Bits of functionality that are obsolete and are “definitely going to be replaced next year”.   

• The AS/400 sitting on its own in the corner of an otherwise decommissioned data centre facility.   

• The software project that just seems better suited to fusty old waterfall delivery.

• The third-party outsource service that promised much, but now, seems to slow things down. 

These examples bring to life the “two-speed” IT experience of most enterprises that have significant IT estates – they’re “multi-modal" (in Gartner-speak.) 

Two-speed transformations 

These legacy systems and the infrastructures that they sit on, are often complex and costly to change.  They are mostly undocumented and poorly supported, but nonetheless - provide critical services or support core business processes.  

And so, when the annual IT strategy planning cycle comes around and thoughts turn to transformation it is no wonder that many would rather focus on the latest cool new technology - the benefit of which can easily be articulated to the business.  

New application functionality is always an easy win as are web capabilities that support greater customer engagement, or perhaps you should invest in AI platforms that promise to fundamentally change the way that the world works. 

At the other end of the initiatives list are the ever-present unwelcome guests of end-of-life remediation, data centre power upgrades, or end-of-support OS version updates that cost a lot but seem to deliver little other than the closure of security vulnerabilities. Worse still is that because these are costly and offer little new functionality, they struggle for business sponsorship outside of the risk and compliance function (perhaps you could leave them for just one more year…) 

The danger of doing easy 

Look closely at the IT estate topology of most enterprises and you will spot some familiar themes.   

• A set of modern, responsive technologies ultimately bottlenecked by an increasingly complex web of interconnections and service buses tied to legacy platforms.   

• Local and cloud estates that sprawl well beyond the confines of the CMDB, and data kept “just in case” but owned by nobody and striped across local and network storage and orphaned mailboxes. 

Each security audit brings news of old vulnerabilities still not closed and new attack surfaces that need to be protected.  Meanwhile the pressure to contain costs is ever present and core vendors want to talk about price rises. 

For some businesses a devastating cyber-attack or IT failure finally forces the prioritisation of projects to address systemic technical debt, while putting everything else on hold.   

Other organisations cross their fingers and hope that they are not next... 

Holistic IT transformation done right 

For any IT transformation to be truly successful it must address both the challenge of delivering new platforms to empower the business AND the backlog of technical debt and IT plumbing. Else, these will otherwise act as an inhibitor to the effectiveness and adoption of these new capabilities. 

While there is often a need to start with projects that are necessarily technical and inward looking in nature, (for example getting on top of identities and access or implementing network controls to secure the perimeter of your estate) an effective IT transformation plan will look to interweave these with incremental drops of business focussed outcomes at the earliest opportunity – it is our experience that these are critical to ensuring ongoing business engagement and support for the transformation. 

To help with planning and prioritisation it is useful to group initiatives into themes, for example: 

• Security and Control 

• Operational Efficiency 

• Data Exploitation 

• Innovation. 

Each theme sponsored and linked to a set of expected quantitative and qualitative benefits. Dependencies between initiatives should be identified and any must dos clearly called out. With the analysis completed a transformation roadmap can be developed, and delivery can start! 

So - what can go wrong? 

If that sounds like common sense, why do tales from IT Transformations often sound like survivor accounts from disaster zones?  Two common mistakes are resultant of biting off too much at once, leaving IT teams over-stretched and unclear on priorities, inserting insufficiently decomposed infrastructure tasks into the transformation sequence leading to a log jam of other initiatives or trying to deliver too much business functionality ahead of the underlying changes in infrastructure, data, and governance that are required for them to be successful. 

What do IT foundations, fit for the digital age look like? 

• Robust and scalable networks are essential in handling the increased data traffic and seamless connectivity required by digital services.   

• Cloud computing and hybrid end-point solutions provide the flexibility and scalability needed to support rapid innovation.  

• Putting strong security measures in place is vital to protecting sensitive data, maintaining customer trust and managing exposure to new cyber vulnerabilities. 

• Strong data governance is critical for managing and analysing the vast amounts of information stored across the enterprise, enabling better decision-making and fuelling new AI initiatives.  

In our view, to achieve “the perfect holistic transformation” (if perfection exists) you need to start with a solid technical foundation - getting the plumbing right - accompanied by having a clear plan to for incremental business facing benefit.