NOVEMBER 201919ou've just accepted a gold-en position to create the IT applications blueprint and execution plan to chart the course for IT investment over the next 5 years.The company you've just joined is a complex, highly vertically in-tegrated and rapidly growing one, with entrepreneurial roots, and a fantastic reputation in its markets. It has hit its second wind--now on pace to double every 2 years. Somehow this 15-year old startup has learned to thrive in an envi-ronment of constant product and service innovation, high-touch customer service, in a very com-petitive environment, in a heavily regulated industry. This reinvestment strategy has worked well for new products and markets, but the IT investment has been light as a percentage of sales. As a result, the company has man-aged to grow in size and complexi-ty faster than information systems have been able to keep pace. Once state-of-the-art information sys-tems acquired over the prior 10 years have simply not kept up with the expansion of new products, By Craig Pinegar, Director Enterprise Application Architecture, Ultradent ProductsCXO INSIGHTSCraig is specialized in Value Chain IT Strategy, Applications Team Leadership, Solution Design and Implementation in: Value Chain Planning, Value Chain Execution, Discrete Manufacturing, Inventory Management, Quality Management, EAM and Product Lifecycle ManagementYGETTING TO THE NEXT LEVELmarkets, and ways of engaging those markets. So, now it's time for IT to find a new gear to deliver more with less and faster, and lay the founda-tion for flexibility and responsiveness to product and market change in the future. This story is not new, but for Ultradent, IT modernization is a top corporate priority.During your interviews, you've learned that senior IT management are sold on the potential benefits that new generation cloud and mo-bile applications offer generally, but they need a solid plan and a solid ROI. They know that ERP, PLM, CRM, HCM implementations--even in the cloud--remain monumentally expensive and risky projects.Senior IT management and you have astutely negotiated a generous base salary and a very healthy bo-nus tied to your strategy's ability to modernize existing systems, while simultaneously reducing TCO across the application portfolio as a percent of company sales. The first 2 million dollars will be funded by the corpora-tion, but the rest of the transition to the cloud must be self-funding.So you start by asking the really important questions: Where to be-gin? What to move to the cloud, and in what order? Which technologies or vendors best support the entire strat-egy? How fast and far to move with-out impairing this business on a full gallop? How to phase the program in such a way that the savings from the initial project pay for the next?To answer these questions, you decide to turn all the cards face up. You take inventory and analyze the systems you've inherited and you ori-ent them on a grid. The X-axis helps you position major systems along a continuum of on-premise Vs. cloud deployment. You know that many major systems do not have an easy upgrade path to get from on-premise to their own cloud software.This can mean reimplementa-tion. Reimplementation is risky, ex-pensive, and hard. The Y-axis helps you assess the degree to which your systems are built on proprietary vs. open standards. You know that pro-prietary systems lock you in to your software vendors, who may be great in some ways, and lacking in others. Craig Pinegar, Director
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