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V
endors and solution resellers push
for new system upgrades. Customers
have responded by establishing
prudent spending cultures, often because
IT budgets are among the largest in
companies. This delicate tug-o-war between
sweating assets and keeping the edges sharp
drifts back and forth, and over time everyone
comes out more or less in the green.
But not anymore. Forget for a moment
the risks of accruing too much technical
debt through legacy systems. Changes are
sweeping across the IT landscape, replacing
past systems with a new generation that is
functionally and philosophically a light step
ahead for business management.
It’s the biggest shift since the 80s
Business systems took a revolutionary
step forward in the late 1970s to ‘80s.
Mainframes made way for client-server
architectures, software became more
affordable and accessible, computer skills
started permeating at homes and schools,
systems became more modular and
networks started appearing on business sites.
The early digital incarnations of enterprise
resource planning, business process
management and the indefatigable
spreadsheet appeared. It was a big change
in how companies operated.
This new wave of modernisation is
comparable to that era. The impact of
today’s modern core business systems is as
big as those changes, if not bigger. Ignoring
the changes today is as bad as if you
ignored computers back then.
It’s not always obvious, because the
big change is in how technology is
consumed. That can mean different things.
The switch from OPEX to CAPEX, but also
new agile innovation processes as seen
with dev ops or inspecting real-time reports
on a phone dashboard.
Modern systems talk to a
modern world
That final point about consumption touches
on a broader theme – our entire world
is changing owing to modern systems.
Just consider the laboured example of
smartphones – they are everywhere,
www.intelligentcio.com
One Channel CEO Bernard Ford
and they can be a fantastic portal to
information. A business that modernises its
IT can start exploiting those opportunities
to get more insight on its customers and its
own operations.
Older systems can’t do this for a simple
reason. There is simply too much data for
humans. Machines are much faster and can
handle the volumes of data being generated
today. But it’s not just because they are
machines. If you attempted to manage
today’s data with legacy systems, it would
cost a fortune because they are not designed
to manage so much.
Modern systems incorporate efficiencies
that reduce costs. A common example
is how cloud services can scale to offer
computational power for data processing
at fractions of the usual costs. Those are
advantages you can’t just retrofit into
older systems.”
Customer-facing is in
Another significant difference between older
and more modern systems, such as post-
modern ERPs, is how they are orientated
towards the customer. Ford explains that
customer-centricity is not a fad or buzzword,
but a change in business philosophy enabled
by modern systems.
“Why has it been so hard to create omni-
channel customer experiences or 360-degree
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