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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