THE Cloud offers a captivating promise of enhanced speed, agility, and efficiency for organizations committed to modernizing business operations and restructuring processes to gain a competitive advantage.
Regional tech companies like Tokopedia, Grab, Lazada, and others have offered powerful examples of how digital-first enterprises can disrupt industries and trigger new shopping trends. The key to accomplishing this vision of a future-ready enterprise is controlling and utilizing the massive volumes of valuable data generated each moment across the organization so that it can be used to influence decision-making and drive growth.
On a practical level, CIOs of traditional organizations in the Asia-Pacific region face conflicting priorities that complicate the journey to achieving the digital-native, cloud-first enterprises capable of delivering on this promise.
They must balance the annual maintenance and operating costs of legacy systems with the adoption of fast, flexible technologies, and manage these systems without the skilled workforce that is needed.
Research shows that the global shortage of skilled workers is worsening, rather than improving. In the Asia-Pacific region, a survey by Vanson Bourne and Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, found that 51 percent of respondents cited insufficient in-house skills as a barrier to transformation.
On top of these constraints, organizations still struggle in silos to leverage data effectively. Unintegrated, poorly coordinated data repositories and application stacks create static and internally focused IT infrastructures restrict innovation and prevent companies from responding nimbly to market changes. This year’s pandemic drove home why these capabilities are so important as organizations of all sizes responded to the sudden economic changes it caused.
Now, organizations realize that digital solutions in an open IT ecosystem are needed to adapt to changing environments quickly and reduce the impact of budget, talent and data challenges. Fostering customer-centricity, quickly unlocking value from IT investments, boosting agility, making data-driven business improvements, and innovation are dependent on connecting diverse information and applications.
Disparate systems, manual processes, and disconnected workflows need to be combined and orchestrated to drive operational excellence and great digital experiences without long and expensive development projects. Adopting cloud-based systems and integrations can help align technology with business priorities so that organizations can address challenges quickly and cost effectively.
That is especially important given the hybrid IT environments that are becoming the norm across the region. It is what makes it possible for financial services companies to expand product and service portfolios, for grocers to automate processes that streamline supply chains for fresh food, and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development of life-saving medications.
Without data integration and the connection of people, processes and technology, organizations will fall short of modernization efforts. This means that integration is a concern for more than just the IT department, but a responsibility of the entire organization.
It lays the foundation for future-ready organizations to adapt to the rapidly-changing market. For modernization projects to live up to its potential, integration capabilities need to be faster and more agile than technology solutions of the past. The organizations that succeed in their efforts create unique value propositions that disrupt the market.
