The End of Digital Adolescence

Are we growing from just talking about it to doing it?

Over the last 18 months I have attended a number of events with CxOs and other senior stakeholders from many different companies.

A key theme has been that we are all being pressed to do something, as we all work in organisations where customers, employees, business partners and senior managers expect us to be doing something and most of us have.

A key concern has been that we are all scared that we have missed something. Is there an "Unknown Unknown" that will emerge to destroy the new value that we are trying to create. We have all been thinking a lot about the subject and I think that collectively we have come to the following conclusions:

The 3 technologies that we have to get to grips with are:

• Identity Management (and subscription)
• Encryption
• Integration

The things that we should worry less about are:

• Security of the various PaaS and IaaS offerings, as the vendors who supply them spend a lot more time and money securing them than most user enterprises can dedicate or afford;
• Traditional technology selection approaches and worries about vendor lockin - the richeness, utility and value of the continuously evolving offerings obviates the need.

The things that we need to get good at are:

• DevOps - so we can move at Digital Clock Speed
• Service Integration (or SIAM) - so we can run this seamlessly from end-to-end
• (agile) Enterprise Architecture - so we don't lose track of what we've got (where we are spending money) and what we want to achieve in the future
• Security Governance - again so that we

The conversations that we have with other stakeholders in our businesses should focus more extensively on Business Value, rather than infrastructure maintenance and "keeping the lights on". But we also need to establish a different approach to projects, applications and investments, as the traditional ROI based Capital Appraisal, Invest and Forget model does not fit the continuous evergreening needed to sustain Digital Assets and keep them relevant in the face of customer demands.

There are plenty of other things as well, each worthy of a blog of its own, but this is the gist of all these discussions and power breakfasts.