Modern Applications: Business Innovation with less IT

For decades, business innovation and IT have gone hand in hand. It’s hard to think of business innovation without input from IT. Yet we’re at a crossroads whereby companies can if they choose, continue to innovate, but with less input from IT.

To suggest this sounds contradictory, as IT has been at the heart of business for years. Yet, thanks to the cloud and GenAI, aspects of the IT product lifecycle are no longer the preserve of IT departments as we witness the emergence of fusion teams.

For example, by standardizing your IT services and creating an enterprise service catalog, and also streamlining IT operations through managed services, you will reduce the workload associated with IT activities.

IT departments are opening up to the idea that business analysts, augmented by GenAI, can start to develop IT products. A couple of years ago, this would have been unheard of. But by creating teams which have a wider input from across organizations, there are benefits.

Business leaders understand their IT needs better than developers, and developers are happy to hand over the initial aspects of IT design and build so they can focus on higher-value products.

Active innovation

With more people working on business innovation, development will move at a quicker pace. Once you are cloud-native, the ability to scale up or down while incorporating technology from different vendors is easily achieved. This not only reduces capital expenditure on physical technology, but also allows for the quick adoption of specific technologies. Being cloud native means that you are free to choose from a far greater amount of tech offerings, and far more quickly, too.

For example, if you need to deploy a GenAI product, you can request it and within minutes, you have the full benefit of the service without a large investment which would have been required in the past.

Scale more

Of the many features of the cloud, scale is one of its most impressive attributes. The on-demand nature leads to the ability to scale quickly, whether up or down, which keeps investment to a minimum. Gone is the fear of activation.

This ability to scale leads to organizational transformation as there are no restrictive upfront costs. This encourages organizations to investigate new technology without a cost barrier.

This is hugely advantageous. Coupled with GenAI’s ability to bring business leaders into fusion teams with IT, it means that organizations of all sizes, whether SMEs or multinationals, all have the same IT tools at their disposal. The cloud has democratized the availability of technology in a way that is unique in the history of IT.

We can ultimately incorporate the notion that agility, facilitated by a product delivery team model or iterative application modernization approach based on a pipeline, is driving change without the cost of extensive governance or program structures.

Define Priorities

Before the cloud and cloud-native technologies, your IT environment was limited by capital and resource expenditures fixed over long periods of time. This meant that priorities were clearly defined by the investment made in specific technologies.

These days, the initial overriding priority has to be a commitment to modernize applications by using the cloud. Without this, there will not be a transformational change within an organization with the creation of fusion teams and GenAI’s influence.

Yet, if we can scale or try out new technologies with minimal investment, this presents its own problems. This is where we need to clearly define our priorities, create client-centric principles, and agree on a roadmap. Business priorities need to be established, thus defining the technology solutions which will have the biggest business impact.

We will be continuously evaluating the value delivered and not just following the classic Finops cloud model, but instead integrating cost, sustainability and value consideration to be reviewed by a Value Realization Office.

The result will transform how organizations operate internally to how they serve their customers. Furthermore, by using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) both business and IT results can be measured.

Summary

Business innovation with less interaction with IT can only happen once organizations move to one of the greatest innovations in the history of IT – the cloud and GenAI. Once that transition has been made, business analysts have never been in a better position to innovate in ways which were traditionally the preserve of IT developers.

Sogeti and Microsoft have been strategic partners for more than 25 years. Together to demonstrate the strength in our technical alignment we bring you the latest eBook: ‘Start in control and stay in control – five cloud native adoption principles for enterprises’.

Learn more about these business benefits and to download the eBook.