Evolution of IT from Business Support to Business Enabler
Every business enterprise – big or small, aims to achieve enhanced productivity. Information Technology, Internet Connectivity and Applications on the web are becoming the enablers for enhanced utilization of corporate resources.
The shift from routine IT infra structure that enabled classic way of doing business to more web based, online is not overnight. It has gone through a series of transitions, none more important than mindset.
Lets explore the most prominent transitions that enterprises IT have gone through and IT evolution business in last 10 years.
Tactical to Strategic
With the advent of mobile devices – laptops, tablets and phones, most IT groups in enterprise were fixated to ensure that corporate data and applications were kept ‘on-premise’ and therefore ‘secure’. There was always a fear that proliferation of corporate data on employee’s personal device(s) will create risk to the very existence of enterprises.
However, some enterprises decided to take it ‘Head-on’ and decided to integrate personal devices with corporate and business applications, giving rise to a new term BYOD.
The level of workforce mobilization created with this small IT shift (mindset), soon became an integral part of business strategy and must do for all corporates.
E-mail to Business Tools
We all know that making e-mails available on personal handheld devices was the biggest factor in enhancing employee productivity and collaboration. However, the opening up of corporate tools, that were sitting behind the firewall, such as – CRM, ERP, Visual collaboration, meeting place etc. turbocharged innovation and increase the velocity of business decision. Not only, did it delight customers, while buying new solutions, it fanned an accelerated quality of customer service, never see before.
I further believe that next phase of enterprise productivity will be fuelled by mobile apps of core business processes. Enterprises will extend core business apps and will make it available anytime, anywhere to their employees and customers.
Device specific to App centric
IT departments had started to apply policies that were device specific. All the associated management frameworks were installed on devices.
The fundamental flaw in this approach was that in the event of theft or loss, entire corporate data as well as personal data was lost. Responding to this, organizations started to build compartments or Enterprise Apps store, where they could create sections of Corporate data accessible to employees on any device.
This was secured through dedicated VPN connection and redundancy. It brought the intrinsic benefit of lowering cost, but also the heartache of losing data, as everything that employee had on its device was always backed-up.
Centralized to Distributed Architecture
As the business and its operations start to expand geographically, many business processes had a need to implement IT infrastructure in local environment. Customized applications, catering to local employee or customer needs, had to be implemented to support local business needs.
The shift to distributed IT architecture enabled employee productivity and enhanced new business norms of 24X7 service availability.
Understanding of this evolution and the shift in trends are critical for businesses to succeed today. We at WCS India understand that. That’s the reason we provide fast growing enterprises the leading technology solutions that can be scaled as per their needs.
