In a recently conducted IT executive poll by CIO.com, to understand where CIOs were looking to put their buck in the coming year, automation, platform strategies, analytics, cloud migration and cyber-security came up as the top areas of focus for most CIOs. And that’s where they are looking to invest majorly to steer the organizational ship forward. A major shift is visible—from a reactive approach to a more proactive approach, powered by forecasting intelligence. We can thus expect the digitization journeys to get more intense in 2017.
Chief Information Officers of some of the renowned organizations in various stages of digital transformation highlighted their strategies for a future-ready organization. We came across the following examples, across industries that are keen to leverage the power of technology.
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for application modernization: The cruise line CIO, Michael Giresi, has always been pro-technology, adding a twist of tech innovation to cruise experiences by integrating augmented reality and RFID luggage tagging. Now on the cards, is an overhaul of Royal’s complete application architecture, with a view of better manage the high workloads. This may involve anchoring new applications, and doing away with redundant ones, to meet the efficiency and scale that Giresi has envisioned.
EarthLink for SD-WAN: M&A is the flavour of the year for EarthLink as it preps up to get acquired by Windstream, yet CIO, Jay Ferro is clear on his strategic intent for 2017. Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) is being touted as the recipe for revenues and growth, and Windstream’s initiatives in such regards may prove useful. For example, EarthLink is looking at upgrading its existing quote-to-cash system, a move that Windstream has already implemented and mastered. Shared learnings will thus help tide over the inefficiencies and legacy applications, in exchange for fresh and innovative solutions. The very fact that EarthLink leads Windstream in the area of SD-WAN service sales, is a promising aspect for Ferro.
Stanley Black & Decker for productivity: CIO Rhonda Gass is looking at employee productivity as the mantra to unlock value. Leveraging the Internet of Things wave is one of the prime ways to support employee and customer initiatives for driving productivity. This shall involve reducing disparate systems and processes- standardization of business processes seems to be the go-to strategy to achieve this productivity. Another key area Gass is looking at is reducing the risks posed by technology, especially cyber security and data threats in the cloud.
Juniper Networks embraces the cloud: CIO Bob Worrall stated that cloud migration was a must-have for staying market relevant. In this attempt, Juniper has reduced its data centres from eighteen to just one, and lowered dependency of server racks for its business applications. The objective is to be totally cloud-based by June 2017. Another important agenda is seamless automation of corporate business processes for people and processes. The company shall focus on integrating big data analytics and machine learning in the processes, to make them more intuitive and informative.
XPO Logistics plays around platform integration: An end to end platform for its shipping customers is the vision of XPO CIO, Sanjib Sahoo. The company is looking at incorporating a API-based platform for collating and managing logistics data. It shall embrace an approach of balancing risk and innovation, to propel core IT functions to a new high.
These are some of the companies that are taking to digitization like fish to water. After all, going digital in an all-encompassing manner has been declared by many an industrialist, to be the success mantra for navigating increasingly volatile business environments.
