If your organization is frustrated with how long it takes to roll out new applications and updates, they are not alone. Speed-to-market is an obsession at many companies today (see call-out box below), so anything that restricts or slows it down is a problem.
Today’s decision-making is different than even a few years ago. More “data” is used, and the data inputs take several forms, including humans.
A big part of today’s strategy and decision-making at enterprise-class organizations are committees, made up of a company’s subject matter experts and relevant stakeholders for a critical company initiative. They may meet quarterly or as needed and the committee work is in addition to their “day job.”
In a recent survey of decision-makers and professionals working in, or overseeing, integration infrastructure (i2) architecture or operations at large enterprises, we found that these corporate priorities warranted having a committee:
Top Committees in 2021:
Cloud Strategy
IT Transformation
Innovation
Risk Management
Quality / Customer Experience (CX) Improvement
Other - Integrations
Upon further discussion with senior executives, we kept hearing that while all committees officially drove strategy and direction for their initiative, the named initiatives with both a committee and an attached budget to fund the initiative made progress much more quickly.
Your strategy is to move everything to software configured and cloud-connected existence. I can say this with absolute confidence because quite frankly this is everyone’s strategy in 2021.
With cloud thinking, every decision becomes an operational choice without the historical lags previously associated with massive capital changes.
The problems of the past did not go away, they just continue to grow in complexity as environments grow. There is a mathematical, formula that shows that as the number of sub-components grows then the number of interconnections that must be managed grow at an exponential or even geometric rate.
IT is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Moores Law used to be the principle by which we considered the evolving performance/cost of computing, but today this seems to be less useful, instead, we need a model that considers how many layers of systems do we manage.
The initial polling of IBM MQ customers reveals some interesting trends as we enter 2021.
Poll #1: When asked which one area they were looking to learn more about in 2021, the top response was “Tools for Cloud Migration of Messaging Middleware.” It is important to note that all the respondents have IBM MQ messaging middleware in their estate, most also have Kafka, and many also have IIB (IBM Integration Bus), IBM ACE (App Connect Enterprise), and/or TIBCO EMS are part of their IT stack.