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POINT OF VIEW
DIGITAL
ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE
Explosive growth in the number of
networked mobile smart devices
is increasing users’ expectations
for anytime, anywhere connection
to family, friends, businesses and
places of work.
People expect to be able to
shop, pay bills, research products
and services and connect with
colleagues at the office via digital
channels every day.
To fulfil these expectations and
stay relevant in today’s digital
world, businesses need to become
‘digital enterprises’. They can do
this by reducing reliance on rigid
internal ICT system development
and connecting with an open ecosystem of external suppliers to
take advantage of fast, agile and
cost-effective ICT technology.
They have to give up control in
order to regain control. The ecosystem will create the control.
GETTING CONNECTED
Industry analysts estimate that more than 4.5 billion people are connected via
social networks worldwide. By 2015, there will be 3.5 billion networked mobile
smart devices, compared to only 1.7 billion networked PCs. This growth in the use of
mobile smart devices is increasing our ability to connect people, products and apps
digitally and in turn increasing users’ expectations.
Consumers increasingly expect anywhere, anytime digital access, whether
connecting with their friends, bank, doctor, garbage service or electricity provider.
They want humanistic interactions that fulfil their needs via the fastest and the
easiest path. With advances in digital technologies, they expect to be able to track
the progress of a request or transaction and shop around to get the best price or
the best product for their needs. Importantly, they are not averse to switching
providers to ensure they get what they want.
Advances in digital technology are bringing interaction with machines closer to the
human experience, simply because we are using more of our physical surroundings
and resources to facilitate those interactions. People now expect consistent,
personalised customer experiences via digital channels, just as they would get in
person. These expectations flow over from home life into work life, so employees
expect to be able to take advantage of digital technologies to do their job more
efficiently and effectively.
STAYING RELEVANT AND COMPELLING
Sonia Eland
Director, Strategic Alliance Ecosystem & Digital
For this reason, businesses must transform their digital offerings to remain relevant
and compelling to their customers and employees. Governments will be under
pressure to deliver seamless citizen services across face-to-face and
digital channels.
Organisations must make smarter use of digital products and devices to connect
with customers, partners and employees in new ways. Regardless of whether they
sell direct to consumers or to commercial and government organisations, they need
to be aware that the consumer is driving the macro changes we are
experiencing today.
Consumers are increasingly using social media applications such as Facebook
to seek opinions about products and services from friends and other consumers
– leveraging the wisdom of the crowd. Businesses must recognise the powerful
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DIGITAL ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE
BECOMING A DIGITAL
ENTERPRISE
Business owners need to scrutinise
their digital offerings with the
following questions in mind: Can
your customers move seamlessly
between face-to-face and digital
channels? Is your business
equipped to attract customers
who are dissatisfied with your
competitors’ services? Can you
capture the right kind of data
about customer purchases to
be able to monitor changing
consumer preferences? Are you
taking advantage of the selling
tools available through social
media platforms?
THINK BIG, START SMALL
Businesses can adopt a bi-modal
model of digital enterprise
transformation whereby they
execute some ICT functions using
new, agile digital systems while the
rest of the business transforms to
the updated processes. They can
then set a target date at which the
two modes of operation will meet.
selling tools available through these applications: for instance, through Facebook
‘likes’, or mentions in ‘people like you also bought’ features on online shopping
pages. Additionally, the concept of using the ‘crowd’ via crowd-sourcing
platforms provides a global, low cost resource pool to co-create applications,
products and services.
CSC knows how important it is to understand the benefits that consumers and
employees seek in their digital interactions with businesses. We ensure our clients
have a plan to supply these benefits, so they don’t risk becoming redundant.
DIGITAL CAPABILITIES
Here are some questions for business owners about digital capabilities:
• Can you provide a seamless and predictive customer experience across face-toface and digital channels?
• Are you equipped to take advantage of consumers’ switching behaviour?
• Does your Information and Communications Technology (ICT) system allow
transparent tracking of purchases so you can monitor changes in consumer
preferences and predictively respond?
• Are you taking advantage of social media platforms and big data analytics to
improve your interaction with customers, co-developers, co-creators and
the ‘crowd’?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, it means you’re part of the way to
becoming a digital enterprise. The benefits to businesses and government agencies
of becoming digital enterprises include:
• Unlimited ubiquitous access to existing and potential clients. By analysing
the customer data generated via digital sales channels, businesses can predict
customer behaviour and proactively supply relevant, timely and convenient
products and services. This can allow extremely targeted and customised sales
and supply chain management. It will significantly improve brand satisfaction and
referrals, in turn increasing sales and reducing the costs of sales and service.
• Improved staff productivity and satisfaction. By predicting how staff members
will carry out their jobs, businesses can proactively supply them with the right
digital tools to work efficiently and move seamlessly between offices and off-site
locations. This is particularly important for field staff who need to connect to
office systems remotely.
• Contestability of ideas, prices and services. Businesses will have significantly
more choice by outsourcing IT and other services to the best provider for the
job – rather than limiting procurement to set providers or just using in-house
resources. Competition between external providers means businesses can shop
around and switch to services and products with the best cost, benefit and
risk profiles.
• Scalability of ICT systems, both up and down. Businesses can now outsource
ICT operations to a growing number of ‘as-a-Service’ ICT providers that customdesign and often host cloud-based systems for business clients. The clients
only pay for the services and digital capacity they use, rather than having largecapacity in-house ICT systems sitting idle during non-peak times. They are also
not constrained by lock-in contracts, outdated legacy technology or internal ICT
silos that don’t integrate with other company divisions.
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DIGITAL ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE
• More innovation and increased speed to value. By outsourcing to talent beyond
company walls, businesses are no longer constrained by ICT security issues, ICT
silos that operate as separate entities or cumbersome in-house ICT processes.
• Natural integration of outside ICT providers and the creation of a self-regulated
governance model. An open, software-defined system will encourage the
seamless integration of outside ICT providers. There is no need to employ people
to manage and control standards when a transparent and trackable digital
system allows staff members to see how ICT choices affect customer activities.
Only services, products and systems that perform well against criteria such as
price, benefit, risk and performance will rise to the top. Poor performance choices
will be dropped.
• Digital Supply Chains. The entire business eco-system is connected, from clients
and their devices; employees and their devices; the internet of things; to suppliers
and their devices. It is connected, predictive, automated and open.
This is the digital enterprise imperative. However, becoming a digital enterprise is
easier said than done.
THINK BIG, START SMALL
Most large commercial enterprises and government agencies have significant
investments in old ICT systems that are effectively a patchwork of integrated and
stand-alone systems and environments. To reduce their reliance on outmoded
systems and move to more intuitive and flexible digital systems, businesses need to
think big and start small.
The first step is to develop a road map that identifies a fast lane and a slow lane
for your transformation. In the fast lane you identify a series of quick wins against
strategic business priorities. Target areas where the business needs are most
urgent. In the other lane, is the underlying core ICT foundational infrastructure
and managed services transformation program. By driving further efficiencies out
of current ICT environments, organisations can create a self-funding model that
allows them to start the journey to becoming a digital enterprise under a wholistic
program. More importantly the ICT department can win back the trust of frustrated
company executives by responding fast to quick win projects that are futureproofed innovations, ensuring the continuity of core business operations.
By doing this, businesses can adopt a bi-modal approach to digital
enterprise transformation.
THE SERVICE-ENABLED ENTERPRISE
Being a service-enabled business means not being locked into technology and
hardware choices across the organisation, but instead able to access an open ecosystem of external service suppliers.
When it comes to infrastructure, organisations can use a variety of clouds to serve
a variety of needs. A hybrid environment combining internal cloud and externally
hosted clouds is elastic, allowing organisations to effectively access a marketplace
of providers and can automatically switch from one to another depending on the
workload requirements. No longer locked into a small set of prescribed services at
preset prices. This can be supported by a hybrid data storage environment– that
takes advantage of web-scale economics.
Of course, no cloud is useful without the applications that run on it. For instance,
organisations need to be able to integrate their Software-as-a-Service applications
– such as Workday or Salesforce, Evernote or Box – which are inherently and
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DIGITAL ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE
A NEW APPROACH TO ICT
SOURCING
Becoming a digital enterprise
calls for the seamless integration
or even elimination of towers in
favour of a model with elastic
infrastructure, on-demand
compute power, composite
applications and REST interfacing.
This will help to integrate customer
experiences across all service
delivery channels. The traditional
outsourcing procurement
processes will not drive the right
outcomes anymore.
ORCHESTRATION PLATFORM
New ICT sourcing processes will
be governed by an orchestration
platform that embeds specific
policies for each workload
according to criteria such as
cost, performance, security, user
profiles, devices and location. This
will allow organisations to deploy
application workloads that take full
advantage of contestable market
rates – and to switch providers
as desired.
ubiquitously mobile and run on elastic infrastructure. But more importantly, they
need to decide whether to modernise their traditional on-premises applications
currently. These are generally capitalised expenditures on an organisation’s balance
sheet and may also be highly customised or specialty applications, developed over
many years.
Many businesses depend heavily on their applications and systems. In most cases,
however, applications were not developed for a cloud-based world. Businesses
must not only remediate the applications, but also extend their functionality by
moving to multi-threaded, more social applications. Business operators need
to be able to unlock key customer information from the data collected by their
digital applications. This will allow them to re-architect their processes and enable
frictionless distribution through web browsers and mobile devices. Businesses need
to be open to integrating applications from a variety of sources – creating so
called mashups.
All of this helps to free up the data previously held hostage by continuous
development cycles and the introduction of multiple frameworks. The data can be
used to predictively deploy services and work systems to clients and staff, via a big
data analytics platform.
Of course, in the new world of crowd-sourcing, organisations also want to take
advantage of niche, agile applications developers while retaining secure information
inside firewalls. Cloud-based applications can be made available via a company app
store on the basis of user profile, with costs based on consumption of the service.
This new way of operating is governed via an orchestration platform that imbeds
specific policies for each workload, based on criteria such as cost, performance,
security, user profiles, devices and location. This allows the company to deploy
application workloads that take full advantage of contestable market rates – and to
switch ICT providers as desired.
CREATING A DIGITAL ECO-SYSTEM
ICT services were once sourced by tower. Over time we recognised that various
towers within a business had little in common and that there was no interplay
between the infrastructure and applications in each tower. The outcome was often
service of the lowest common denominator. Businesses became frustrated and
looked for a new ICT model.
In response, an era of ICT multi-sourcing began to try to better match business
needs. This is known as the ‘outsourcing’ procurement model. However, over time
this created a ‘spaghetti’ environment with a multitude of suppliers in each tower.
This made it slow and expensive for businesses to develop and launch new ideas
and drove a need for interfaces to connect and integrate business processes.
As cloud-based systems, mobile applications and ‘as-a-Service’ providers
proliferated, business stakeholders began to demand quicker IT responses and
became frustrated when this didn’t eventuate. This led to the growth of shadow
IT, where employees bypassed the company IT department to source their own
applications. This uncontrolled sourcing added to the complexity and redundancy
of many businesses’ IT environments.
Becoming a digital enterprise calls for the seamless integration or even elimination
of towers in favour of a model with elastic infrastructure, on-demand compute
power, composite applications and REST interfacing. This will help to integrate
customer experiences across all delivery channels. Because of this, no large-scale
enterprise will be able to get all it needs from another single organisation, no matter
what that organisation’s size.
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DIGITAL ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE
To achieve your vision of a digital enterprise, you need contestability of ideas,
delivery, processes and prices on a global scale. This is only possible with a broad
and invested partner eco-system, where co-engineering ensures frictionless and
‘evergreen’ services, together with a unique commercial model that removes
stacking of overheads and margins that typically exist in prime/subcontractor
arrangements. This is the new ICT sourcing model.
HELPING ORGANISATIONS WITH THEIR DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
At CSC, we realise that a digital eco-system is critical to businesses procuring
frictionless, fast and evergreen IT ‘as a service’ – to become service-enabled
enterprises. To help our clients do this, we are bringing together a core digital ecosystem, working with key strategic partners globally, with collaborative engineering
from HCL, AT&T, IBM, SAP, Oracle, EMC, VMware, Microsoft, AWS, Workday,
Salesforce, Hitachi, Cisco and many more best-of-breed players. To enhance this
core, we then work with industry-specific operational technology and platform
providers (from control systems providers to industry niche analytics providers), to
connect eco-systems together in a way that drives real business transformation for
our clients.
CSC brings these companies together in an eco-system – acting as a ‘delivery
partner of partners’ – to help organisations become integrated service-enabled
enterprises as part of their digital enterprise transformation.
Without this expertise, large enterprises and government agencies will not only
need to build out their own integrated eco-systems, but will need to have the skills,
processes and embedded governance policies to be able to procure, orchestrate
and consume services seamlessly across the eco-system.
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About CSC
The mission of CSC is to be a global leader in providing technology-enabled business
solutions and services.
With the broadest range of capabilities, CSC offers clients the solutions they need to
manage complexity, focus on core businesses, collaborate with partners and clients and
improve operations.
CSC makes a special point of understanding its clients and provides experts with realworld experience to work with them. CSC leads with an informed point of view while still
offering client choice.
For more than 50 years, clients in industries and governments worldwide have trusted
CSC with their business process and information systems outsourcing, systems integration and consulting needs.
The company trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “CSC.”
© 2015 Computer Sciences Corporation. All rights reserved.
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