EDITOR’S QUESTION
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H
ere are some considerations from
my experience at Altron Karabina,
accumulated from years of assisting
companies to digitally transform.
Does your business have a clear
Target Operating Model and defined
way of working in this new world?
If not, try and build a simple model of the
business and how you intend to operate in
this digitally enabled era. There are plenty
of tools like Business Model Canvas and a
few others to help you simplify the business
operating model.
Do you have a clear set of key
business processes that need to
be configured or changed to enable
the business?
Why bother building Standard Operating
Procedures and process maps on outdated
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INTELLIGENTCIO
of your IT systems. Defining the application
landscape aligned to on premise versus
cloud and how these would service the key
processes in the post-modern application
world is important. Mapping these to
how they fulfill the revamped and legacy
processes with easy standards and way
of working will change the way a business
works. While we have focused on the
Microsoft solution stack with Dynamics 365,
Office 365 and Azure as the cloud platform,
our tools are generic for most scenarios and
platforms. Don’t do this at your peril – just
when you think your system is standalone
and does not need integration is when you
need to start hiring lots of people to add
data and information to make it easier to
interface to.
processes when the key processes need to
be defined first. You may start going down
the rabbit hole only to realise that process
needs to change in the first place. We have
developed a very simple Business Control
Model together with key processes to help
define this and link it to the operating model
in the business. We have also defined in
conjunction with these processes, the right
level of analytics and reporting required to
highlight efficiencies in the process. Whether
this is in the financial reporting, sales or
down to warehouse management systems
to show errors and issues at a site level.
Application landscape and inventory
defined? What if you go out and buy
applications without having defined
Step 1 and 2?
Well, you might have some cool apps, but
Frankenstein might well be alive and well in
the application landscape and architecture
Consider your IT platforms including
networking and connectivity
Once you have made some clear strategic
decisions on what you want to enable and
applications to support this going forward,
the platform to deliver this becomes an
important discussion. From new technologies
like Software Driven Networks (SD-WAN) to
new methods of cloud enabled infrastructure,
these technologies can reduce barriers
to entry and improve the customer and
employee experience dramatically. When
we have considered a combination of new
Azure capabilities with the latest networking
technology from a number of providers, we
have seen how applications and processes
have changed the way companies interact
with their customers. This is sometimes done
the other way around where companies have
a large revamp on platforms planned but are
seriously misaligned to the company strategy.
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