Building a Resilient and Agile Digital Business Technology Platform

The future belongs to the data-driven: companies that are using digital technologies to change the world and disrupt their industries … with innovative business models, new ways of working, and new digital experiences for their customers, employees, and partners.

Where are you at in making your organization’s digital core a solid foundation for digital innovation and business agility? Are you where you need to be? Or are you struggling with outdated core systems and legacy operations that slow innovation and drag down efficiency?

According to Gartner^[1], “Companies building digital business technology platforms face significant challenges, as they are often the company’s first foray into modern application architectures and methods, including cloud platforms and agile/DevOps methodologies.” “Application leaders can expect to be overwhelmed with new, conflicting priorities, and may be at a loss as to where to start building the platform.”

The Gartner Report: Building a Digital Business Technology Platform Requires Clear Goals and a New Team With Cloud Skills provides guidance for application leaders responsible for application and product portfolio governance that are working to build a digital platform. According to the report, “Gartner’s 2020 Building Digital Platforms Survey found that application leaders tasked with building a digital platform struggled to establish clear goals and build a skilled team. Survey results in this report recommend ways to jump-start or accelerate efforts.”

At Hitachi Vantara, we believe that having a strategic road map for modernization — for distributed cloud, data center infrastructure, data platforms and applications — is the best way to align your investments to get the business results you want when building a digital platform. By taking a strategic value-driven approach to modernization, you lay a digital foundation for driving innovation and capitalizing on new experiences that formerly were not possible.

Modernization starts with clearly defined business strategies, objectives, and measures. It is essential to take an inventory of your existing portfolio and assess it for short-term and long-term requirements across various dimensions of risk, cost, performance, and efficiency. This will help to ensure business needs are met on a continuous, timely basis with less risk and impact to the organization.

^{[1] Gartner, Building a Digital Business Technology Platform Requires Clear Goals and a New Team With Cloud Skills, Bill Swanton, Deacon D.K Wan, 13 January 2021}