The IT of Tomorrow: Resilient, Flexible and Personalized 

By: Thomas Failer, Founder and Group CEO of Data Migration International  

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the past months, it’s that enterprise IT has to become more resilient, flexible and personalized. And the speed at which organizations have been forced to change should act as a catalyst for greater adaptability. 

This applies at all levels of the business. To become more resistant to external shocks, resilience needs to start with your IT infrastructure. This lays the foundation for flexibility and personalization, permeating the entire organization.  

Resilience 

Essentially, resilience means being able to respond well to change. But to achieve this, companies need to ensure that every component in their IT stack is loosely coupled. And there needs to be the scope to dynamically connect or combine components as required. This extends from the IT infrastructure to the data layer, and all the way through to applications. 

Thomas Failer, Founder and Group CEO of Data Migration International

 

Gartner calls this kind of physical infrastructure “composable”, a principle that extends enterprise wide. To create a composable enterprise, it’s critical that the data layer is separated from the application level – and the two interconnected only loosely. This is one of the key prerequisites for increased flexibility and personalization. 

 

Flexibility 

Enterprise IT can only be considered flexible when it’s capable of supporting hugely diverse scenarios – and mastering multiple business goals at the same time. This means that all short-term measures designed to boost resilience should also aim to increase flexibility. From a business perspective, the main objectives are: 

  • Supporting agile business scenarios such as divestments, mergers and acquisitions  
  • Optimizing data quality 
  • Decommissioning legacy systems and archives 
  • Reducing the transformation effort for data, documents and business objects when migrating to new software generations such as SAP S/4HANA 
  • Rightsizing and cost optimization of existing and future system landscapes 
  • Increasing legal certainty in line with GDPR through comprehensive lifecycle management of historical information  

To reach this level of flexibility, there are two key requirements. The first is the separation of the data fabric from the application layer for historical information – in other words all the data and documents that are used in day-to-day business purely on a read-only basis. The second requirement is the openness of this system-independent data layer to third-party systems. Both are essential prerequisites for increased personalization. 

Personalization 

In the digital economy, the provision of digital services has become a critical competitive differentiator. And in terms of creating value, IT is center stage. The vast majority of these services are not major application packages, but rather Cloud-native functionalities delivered as containers and microservices. And depending on the situation, these can also be reused as required. In this way, flexibility blends seamlessly with personalization, the most powerful differentiator in the digital platform economy.  

Loosely coupled data and applications 

The JiVS Information Management Platform (JiVS IMP) from Data Migration International helps companies to systematically decouple their historical information from the data processing level. The benefits are substantial: 

  • Lower operating costs by an average of 80% in comparison to maintaining legacy systems  
  • Reduce the transformation effort by 50% for SAP S/4HANA migrations  
  • Decrease the total cost of ownership for SAP S/4HANA by around 25% 
  • Optimize the quality of your data  
  • Support agile business scenarios faster and with less effort 
  • Ensure greater legal and IT security  
  • Escape the dilemma of cost optimization versus innovation