Applications for competitive advantage - recommended actions

Applications have become a key driver of strategy, innovation and competitive differentiation. Applications are a crucial gateway to seamless customer experience, new services, and revenue streams. Application and business strategies need to align and merge over time.

Companies need to become software driven businesses. They require a new mind set and way of working, an overall organizational approach to business, IT and applications.

Many opportunities and much to be done

A new IT/ OT operating model needed

IT and Operational Technology must increasingly integrate in the age of IoT. Companies require a new IT operating model and a way of how they design, build, use and manage software. Enabling software in itself is becoming a revenue generating product.

The cloud can help mesh together the formerly inaccessible enterprise and machine generated data. It will help bring different business functions even closer together.

New software development thinking

Traditional coding of applications with complex, lengthy implementation cycles does not meet the business requirements any longer. Companies require modular architectures. They need to use next generation integration techniques, driven by a mobile-first, cloud-first mind set.

Applications need to be quickly assembled out of existing, small, reusable components leveraging modular architectures.

Leverage available technologies

Massive amounts of available data, processing power, natural language learning, cognitive computing and machine learning, rule-based algorithms and other advances in data science call for embedding Software Intelligence directly in the applications or processes.   

Intelligent automation helps achieve major productivity increases, minimize errors and throughput time. It also can effectively support and enhance humans in higher quality work. Integrated Analytics enables Applications to analyze, comprehend and take appropriate actions independently.

Digital Agents, enabled by self-governance, are already serving customers. The artificial intelligence company IPsoft has already deployed an effective digital help desk application that can understand human language in 10 languages, search knowledge and databases and respond to specific customer questions within seconds.

Develop better software

The technological advancement enables also of how software can be developed. Test automation tools can use cognitive computing and robotics to generate test artifacts (scenarios, conditions and results) based on plain text functional requirements.

Post deployment tools for service operations can continuously accelerate problem resolution by curating specialized application knowledge and leveraging descriptive analytics and natural language processing.

Applications can and should now automate routine tasks, improve business processes through integrated analytics und ultimately govern themselves.

Leverage Agile, DevOps and other agile engineering techniques!

The importance of APIs

New Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) must enable flexible, efficient exchange of internal and external software components and services. The Internet of Things will bring together all current IT devices with technology equipment, sensors and other devices.  Products will increasingly turn into product-service hybrids.

Support Big Data & Analytics correctly

Extracting the biggest value from Big data & Analytics, requires the right structures, processes and components across the value chain. Big data architectures need to be embedded within the business processes and applications, not at alongside.

Re-work IT systems

One of the barriers is the often monolithic nature of IT systems. Astonishingly, 70 percent of all business transaction still happen in COBOL. Enterprise architecture must support platform integration capabilities, security, API lifecycle management and monitoring. Virtualization, abstraction, simplification, separation of technical and business logic, modularization, componentization and containerization are effective techniques.  

As part of an ecosystem, the individual player need to work together to mitigate the risks of connected applications. Obsolete and legacy applications carry limited or now security built in and must be tightly managed.

Unfortunately, while key technologies are advancing at massive speed, business processes and applications lag behind.

Use IT across the organization

On a larger scale the formerly stand-alone IT function need to be integrated in and fully used by the individual business functions across the organization and value chain.

Integration, Orchestration and Business Process Management services will help configure applications customized to business needs at an ongoing basis.

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