By Dinesh Venugopal, President, Mphasis
The way business works has changed drastically in last 5 years and the digital revenue is expected to grow from 16% to 37% in the coming 5 years. Our organizations need a smart game plan for this new digital era. Gartner defines digital workplace as “a strategy for promoting employee effectiveness and engagement through a more consumer-like computing environment.” It is important to understand that we can’t rely on our traditional infrastructure for this transition and hence there is an urge of innovative platforms that are flexible, agile and programmable – something that is driven by digital mindset and not just technical skills.
For digital workplace, below are the services/operations required from infrastructure point of view:
• Changing world of data center operations – Cloud
• Getting to production faster – DevOps
• Managing service continuity for a digital business
In this digital world, traditional infrastructure operations need to step out of their comfort zone and take part in constant innovation to meet the ever increasing expectations. To meet the digital business demands requires a two-fold strategy –
1. Refurbish the basic infrastructure operations management
2. Build innovative agile systems
Some of the top notch C-level executives claim that there are these three key trends in the world of digital business – Cloud, DevOps and Infra automation/analytics.
Let’s look at each of these three trends in detail:
Cloud
The new era needs more intelligence, speed, innovation and risk management and Cloud offers bottomless storage and real time data analytics. The ability to deploy cloud will help shape the pace at which enterprises go digital. It is the hybrid data center, which is the future for most organizations.
DevOps
The requirements for digital transformations are creating issues for IT. This dictates the need of continuously evolve to this change and DevOps can deliver quick responses to meet the quality, agility as well as efficiency. It is an approach that focuses on culture and people over processes and tools.
IT Automation
Automation is leveraged as there is need to free up resources and increase the speed of resolution. It helps automate most of the manually-run operations, freeing up a major chunk of IT budget as well as improving customer experience. An effective automation strategy is required at organization level to reduce redundancy and automation silos. Automated incident management improves the productivity as heuristic and machine learning help in predicting service outrages and can be resolved before they actually happen.
Creating a digital workplace has been a challenge but it can be seen that digitization acquires innovation, productivity, collaboration and employee satisfaction. The business that can tear down the line between technologies, people and the workplace will be successful in future.
