Page 6 - EngineerIT September 2021

ICT – DIGITAL INNOVATION

Innovation at the speed of business

By Greg McDonald, director of systems engineering at Dell Technologies South Africa

n 2020 the necessity and power of IT departments can and should step up to amplify their “technology super powers” in
digital platforms became apparent the form of multi-cloud, mobile, AI / ML and EDGE / IoT. Each of these aspects needs to be
Ias businesses grappled with keeping addressed to transform businesses in order to compete in the digital era. Digital innovation
a remote workforce connected. This in any of these areas requires a flexible, consumable digital foundation. What is most
year, having seen the power and scope exciting is when these four technology super powers are used in new combinations to
of digitisation, the need to justify the innovate and change organisations in order to align with the fourth industrial revolution and
increasing turn to technology in order to to avoid being left behind.
optimise how an organisation operates in Over the last five years, many organisations and IT departments were primarily
our “new normal”, is a given. focused on advanced analytics to understand user behaviours of infrastructure; this
There is no doubt that technology has brought about the rise of next-generation store fronts, for example Amazon online
and will continue to underpin almost every shopping, with one of the keys to success being self-service, recommendation engines
facet of an organisations’ existence. and a simplified approach to customer experience.
CFOs are increasingly having to build So, can organisations in other industries get apps up and running and service
road maps for future investments and customers in the same manner?
align business goals and objectives As we move into the future, organisations will need to spend more time focussing on
with the innovation required to perform how to digitise and apply innovative thinking to streamline their business process and align
optimally. All of this places an increasing their product or service to the changing needs of the customer. This entails understanding
onus and responsibility on the CIO and IT data – which on its own has zero value. Turning data into information, using context
department to develop a consistent set of to turn it into actionable business insights has infinite value. How organisations collect,
operations and infrastructure to run the manage and process all of the data they generate will help define, improve and automate
organisation’s digital foundation. business processes. The aim here is to use data to gain insights in order to build modern,

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