siliconindia | | April 201919GETTING TO THENEXT LEVELin others. Open standards-based applications open many opportunities to decompose those systems into smaller bits and shift those bits to other, more optimal places on the grid more on this later.So after taking inventory, you decide to position your systems like this:For a fleeting moment, you are tempted by the idea of moving your major systems to the cloud wholesale--one by one--and you know it would be a popular sale. But you wait for the data to come in. Your risk analysis tells you that these chunks may be too big, too slow, too expensive, and too risky. And at the end of all your effort, the disparate ma-jor systems you've just migrated to the cloud will continue to operate in a si-loed manner. With this much IT capital remaining in the proprietary quadrants of your grid, you calculate that your TCO will be through the roof, and your bonus will be blown.Think in terms of capabilities, not systemsWith the cards face up, and after per-forming many simulations, it's becom-ing clearer that you'll get faster, safer, better aligned results over the next 5 years by decomposing your IT as-sets into capabilities. Capabilities are meaningful, discrete units of work, integrated workflows, or packets of in-formation that systems provide better than people. A fully-formed capability will also encapsulate identity manage-ment and security protocols within it rather than relying on the underlying application to enforce those aspects. Good design principles suggest that you'll get the biggest return for your IT investment by reusing each capabil-ity across the enterprise as many times as possible. Each capability carries its own value proposition within itself.You rank those capabilities in terms of strategic alignment, criti-cality to ongoing operations, com-pliance, financial performance, and growing the market to determine and ratify which capabilities to focus on, in which order. The mortar is just as important as the bricksSince the IT integration strategy grew organically from stitching together off-the-shelf, monolithic applications using point-to-point integrations, you decide to invest your first million dol-lars in a coherent, effective, reliable, scalable, high-performing integration strategy, built on open standards. The framework should connect on-premise systems and cloud applications equal-ly well, and should communicate with proprietary as well as open standards.You immediately go to work im-plementing the integration frame-work, re-tooling the business system analysts and developers, and chang-ing the conversation between IT and the business, as you jointly become a capabilities-oriented, rather than sys-tems-oriented IT partner.Like an expert kayaker paddling skillfully with the current, you are now in command of your transition from on-premise to cloud and from proprietary to open standards, delighting your customers, delivering real business value along the way. Many major systems do not have an easy upgrade path to get from on-premise to their own cloud software
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