Why migrating to cloud based open-source database makes sense ?

Over the years businesses in the SME and Enterprise segment build applications and deployed prepackaged applications on multi-modal commercial RDBMS systems  such as My SQL sever, Oracle and DB2. These DBMS was first designed in the 70s when optimal utilisation of memory and compute resources was critical for performance of application transactions and query processing of various decision support systems.

Since then these RDBMS have evolved into a common IT staple for managing clusters of structured and unstructured data in business environment of any sector. In fact, they have a strong influence on how applications were designed and built in the past.

Most RDBMS vendors also built prepackaged applications that resided on their RDBMS systems further locking customers into their environment, though it must be noted that many of these applications were the foundation for business process automation and integrations that drove workforce productivity.

The complexities of running open-source databases in house..

Growing data and high cost

While many of these solution resulted in high performing systems of the time (pre cloud era) over the years businesses started to incur high cost to maintain the exponentially growing organisational data due to automation, mobility, web and sensors. These included DB licenses, ETL related tools and software licenses, storage, compute, and increasing number of human resources to administer performance of the data layer empowering various business processes.

Migration to open-source databases..

In much recent times, businesses have been experimenting with open-source databases for some applications where data growth is significant in order to cut database licensing cost. But this attempt resulted in various problems such as limited features (or features are not as robust as commercial systems), steep learning curve, expensive support and constant config, bug fixing, patching and performance tuning activities. While businesses were able to escape the licensing cost, maintaining a dedicated database team that keeps the open-source databases at an optimal level was a time consuming and arduous effort on the organisation's part.

Scaling based on forecast demand

To add salt to the pain, all of these cost are incurred based on forecasted demand as most businesses are scaling systems in a conventional environment (without cloud capabilities) which means cost is incurred way before the business hits the projected demand. Though this is a universal problem with most conventional IT architectures that lacks cloud capabilities to instantly provision, scale, update, patch and de-provision based on internal demand.

New cloud based applications and microservices...

As we enter the cloud era, application architectures started to take effect of the SOA capabilities of cloud, with high levels of abstraction in every layer (e.g infrastructure, data, intergration and application).

A polyglot architecture where developers can take advantage of the best DBMS, programming language and other ready cloud services including AI, IOT, and Bigdata that accelerates application delivery, begin to take center stage. Apart from SQL type of DBMS, no SQL requirements to support other data types such as value store, document, graph, time series and in-memory DBMS started to emerge as demand rises to 40%. All of a sudden, purpose built DBMS were starting to look much appealing to developer communities every where as opposed to multi models.

Choosing to build such an applications on commercial database can make projects less viable in terms of both cost and feature sets required for a cloud environment where service orientation and scaling instantaneously based on demand is of high importance.

Why cloud based open-source databases are a good option?

Thanks to increasing popularity of public clouds, open-source databases today are mature enough in terms of features and support for wider adoption in businesses including large enterprises.

Overcome management constraints posed by on premise deployments...

It's common to find MySQL, PosgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and countless others in organisations' on premise environment, underpinning many critical business application both prepackaged and customised, but then those implementations are plagued with similar issues surrounding commercial databases such as scalability, availability, security and high operational cost to keep it updated and running.

Cloud providers' DBPaas services eliminates this issue by removing day to day operational complexities from businesses that just want to use the services to build various business solutions to increase quality of engagement with existing and new types of audiences.

Wider adoption and value extension is now possible....

With database administrative task out of the equation, tech teams can now focus on migrating more applications on open-source databases for better value and standardisations within the organisations.

High priority business requirements can be addressed much faster than before with available team and funds, curbing the need for any shadow IT by LOBs.

Refactor apps for the cloud..

Another indirect benefit of this exercise is to modernise legacy applications sitting on premise environments. The migration process is an excellent opportunity to learn more on what pure cloud based databases can do for some applications.

Many cloud databases such as Aurora, Dynamodb, Azure, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Datastore, Aspara and DocumentDB are quickly maturing in feature sets and support for other open-source database engines especially MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and etc. These cloud databases are designed for cloud applications and is highly service oriented to scale unprecedentedly in a highly available and secure manner.

Taking advantage to create low risk initiatives to migrate at least some applications to these cloud databases can result in elimination of years of technical debt inflicting your IT environment.

So, where to get started ?

Identify the open-source equivalent of your commercial database/s

Best method is to start from DBMS systems that contributes to a significant share of the licensing cost and prioritise those pending upgrades and require additional licensing. Identify how many applications are affected, documentations, customisions and integrations to external systems.

Research potential open-source databases and their fit to replace your current commercial databases. Upon a selection, start segregating apps that can and cannot be migrated to the new target database.

Identify cloud based open source database providers....

Next research and identify cloud vendors who provide DBpaas services for open source and cloud based databases. Most cloud vendors such as Aws, GCP, Ali, IBM, Azure provide services for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Maria DB, MongoDB, Firestore and other popular open-source databases. They manage bug fixes, patches, upgrades and scaling, along with day to day operations enabling a far less number of DBAs to manage a bigger number of database clusters.


Rate migration complexities for each app...

Once service providers of choice are identified, explore portfolio of tools provided and recommended by user communities (3rd party) to make an initial assessment on migration complexities of the selected applications. When choosing or building migration tools, think of repeatable usage for both data and refactoring requirements.

Once the potential tools are selected run some initial rest to rate apps, based on migration complexities (single step, multiple step, data size, refactoring levels) and other criterias such as critical app, number of users and etc. At the end of the phase select your pilot case or cases.

Contact 1 or 2 cloud providers to start experimenting...

Next contact your current or suitable cloud providers to compare services and pick one that best suit your business in the long run. You can decide this based on range of service offerings, supported open-source DBMS and cloud databases, price-service effictiveness, cloud eco system offered (other services, partners, user communities, availability zones and etc).

Upon selection of vendor, start experimenting your pilot cases ranging from low to high complexity. Document challenges faced and resolved with future migrations in mind, which means processes must be repeatable and automated as much as possible.

Create a migration schedule and milestone for large scale impact

Having assessed pros and cons of migrating to open-source databases operations to the cloud, build a schedule for migrating apps to the cloud and start executing them in line with business objectives. Leave room for changes in the event new priorities enters the business.

Start large scale migration of all target environment..

Upon completion of pilot migration case, refining and further automation of tools start to migrate applications with low complexities first to the new cloud based open-source database, one at a time.

Address any refactoring needs and test each service before moving to the next, till all low complexity migrations are completed. Repeat the process for complex migration projects. Keep updating schedules, findings and refine tools if neccesary.

Relieve resources for high impact projects

At the end of this process, your team would have not only realised licensing reduction and much stable performance of your databases powering critical applications but eliminated at least some technical debt around critical applications and relieved valuable IT resources for other high impact projects to build new business capabilities, improve access to business insight and performance of queries instead of maintaining 'lights on' projects.

Navigating Values - Cost, Technology Debt, Data ROI and IT Resources

Often a open-source database adoption is initiated due to lack of funds for commercial databases or to cut back on commercial licenses that results in millions of dollars of recurring cost.

Cost

But moving to a cloud provider and consuming DBpaas services results in cost reduction in all types of licensing including those used in ETL processes. In addition , users need not incur cost until a demand arises. This changed how tech organisations plan for future needs, while allocations are made, they don't have to be spent until need arise.

Technology debt that hinders availability, scalability and security design

Another key value is the migration process trigger application modernisation activities to refactor key business solutions on premise to scale and perform better in the cloud both public and private. Migrating to cloud based databases such as Aurora and Azure increases these values by leveraging services enabling high availability, concurrency, business continuity, security, and scallibility.

IT Resources

These values are best navigated with scale of adoption horizontally and vertically. The wider the adoption the higher the value accross the organisation, freeing resources time, money and people to do what matters most to your growth - improving experience for customers, creating business innovation, increasing efficiencies and speed to react to market opportunities.

Will Data Privacy spark the next Wave of Innovative Applications?

Privacy is a top agenda as we live in an era where data is a fundamental requirement to access healthcare, education, financial facilities, commercial services, employment, security, welfare, social networks, media and even exercise voting rights. Everything around us is designed to optimise and improve by harnessing data, that it has become an undeniable asset with unprecedented utility. 

This makes data a prime heist for unethical hackers and modern day criminals who steal, doctor and manipulate it for illicit purposes including financial gain, scams, terrorism, identity theft, spreading fake news or spying. Some notable breaches from 2018 are the Aadhar breach involving a staggering 1.1 billion records, forum site Quora, Googleplus, Facebook, several airlines and other online entities.

This is why many large corporations that gauge petabytes of user data are under heavy scrutiny by privacy enforcers and regulators such as National data protection authorities in the European Union through the much debated GDPR guideline. For instance a recent announcement by one of Alphabets subsidiary, Sidewalk Lab on a plan to package and sell cellphone data for various service enhancement sparked outrage from various ethics observer and human rights groups, even when the company justified that the unique identifiers will be removed from the dataset.

Staying connected at all time and living somewhat transparently, is the future reality...

But harnessing data is an unavoidable exercise when it comes to achieving greater quality of life, good decisions and optimal utilisation of natural resources.  As such, refraining from the internet, social networks, online media and performing digital transactions will only result in disadvantages, inconvenience and missed values from economic, social and safety standpoints.

Even if we successfully retained a mysterious existence, we will not be free from unwarranted surveillance by both businesses, independent institutions and governments in public places for various reasons as cities, buildings and public amenities become embedded with sensors, camera feeds and chips that connects to the Internet or clouds to perpetually collect data and create values.

Privacy in Asia....

Asia witnessed multiple incidents of data breach last year among CSPs, healthcare providers, financial service providers and even government sources that lead the public to question credibility of domestic institutions in protecting personal, usage and behavioural data. According to a report by Gemalto, Asia Pacific region contributed to over 35% of cybersecurity incidents last year. 

In most cases, institutions took no further action to restore user confidence apart from the breach announcement, which is a mandatory compliance requirement. Gemalto further stated that the numbers could have been much higher in reality, due to unreported incidents especially in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an exception to this as the authorities take great pride in concluding data breach cases successfully to safeguard the regional digital economy.

Asia also suffers from an overall weaker legal framework and laws for privacy though dedicated privacy task force is emerging in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Philippines, out of which Singapore perhaps is the most advanced in ratifying and enforcing the aforesaid laws. 

At the same time, there is a rise in governments that are explicitly developing and extending state surveillance under the pretext of national agenda, security and cyber crime laws for political reasons. Technologies such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric, advanced identity card systems, ever increasing compute capacities and various citizen facing applications are converging into social scoring systems that provides granular monitoring of individuals, regardless of their consent. 

But there is a new way to tackle privacy - a new form of application architecture is on the rise .....

Apart from comprehensive legal framework, enforcements and the use of advance security architectures, strategies and tools, the application design and architecture itself can serve as a mechanism to protect privacy by separating personal data and identities from applications.

For instance, a project led by Led by Tim Berners-Lee called 'Solid' and is currently run from MIT, consist a set of tools and conventions that helps to preserve integrity of identities, privacy and data ownership while enabling developers and businesses create a new wave of innovative web applications. Solid is a web decentralisation project that aims to put rightful ownership of data back to every users and empower applications that are completely decentralised. 

Currently the use cases are limited for developer community alone, though discussions on Solid servers and tools are beginning to emerge in Quora, Reddit, FB Groups and GitHub.

Similarly Digi.me and HAT are all projects aiming to decentralised applications on the web, where users can create libraries of their data and is completely in control of how the data is used by corporations and governments.

Privacy concerns will lead to new opportunities ....

Most large businesses perceive privacy as a critical challenge to overcome with growing pressure from regulators. Though regulators approach are not helping as solutions developed around privacy laws are difficult and expensive to attain technically, especially for Internet giants.

In the end, solution might just emerge from the tech world itself through new architectures and business models lead by smart startups willing to embark on new frontiers such as Solid, Digi.me and HAT to develop fully decentralised applications that satisfy users, businesses and regulators.

Larger companies might use 'business within business' approach to innovate in the privacy space or quickly get onto the new themes through acquisitions, mergers and rethinking business models. On the another note, decentralised web may lead to even larger paradigm shift, similar to the ones we experienced when organisations moved from on-premise to cloud of everything, creating new digital eco-systems altogether. The one thing that no one can afford to do, is to remain unchanged.

Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

#LKminiblog - Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

Indonesia is planning to regulate ride-hailing rates, amid pressure and protest from driver groups. Both Grab and Go Jek depended on low price offers to passengers in the past for initial growth and expansion, but prices have always surged as business matures. Plus, the ride hailing firms subsidises drivers during discount campaigns. 

Low price is just an entry strategy....

The low price was just an opportunistic route to break into new grounds and get customers accustomed to a new alternative. Over time, reliable and consistent service quality became the foundation to sustaining the massive success of these unicorns. 

Ride-hailing businesses run on leading edge technologies, not an easy feat to replicate...

Unlike traditional transportation service providers, ride-hailing companies built their business capabilities by adopting various leading edge technologies (AI, ML, DL, Augmented Reality, Mobile app, bigdata and IOT) for operational automation, service delivery, prediction and planning. User data is collected through mobile app and harnessed to innovate faster, improve services and maximise values to the whole business eco system. 

A well functioning alternative service to riders.....

The arrival of ride-hailing companies in Southeast Asia were welcomed, as for once passengers had a choice to abandon conventional transportation service providers, that mistreated clients for decades (all of which were regulated businesses). Since the arrival of ride-hailing companies, more passengers comfortably leave their vehicles at home and use the ride-hailing services. After all, passengers can easily book a ride via their mobile app and get served within 7 to 10 minutes, as opposed to the old call booking system where getting through is extremely difficult.

The solution to driver economics problem is dynamic in nature...

Question is, why would we need government intervention to solve a problem already resolved? Secondly, there are two methods to solve this driver economics issue - one by increasing passenger prices, the other is by streamlining the large number of drivers according to current demand. Both are dynamic elements and neither strategies can be executed by the government efficiently without realtime data, reliable predictive capabilities and the backing of a credible data science team.

Let's not get politics in the way of good business....

Finally, driver groups involved in protests may carry other hidden agendas (speculative but that's the popular trend) than just preserving their economic interests. Government intervention here might end up protecting business interest of politically linked individuals or groups that destroyed service quality, encouraged business monopoly without competition and frustrated consumers in the past.

5 Levers to Optimise Learning

“Nothing is ever Achieved without Enthusiasm”, Emerson

Ever wondered how Uber, ANT Financial (Alipay), Xiaomi, DiDi Chuxing, or Airbnb turned into world's largest unicorns in 2017 (and yes, please note that 3 out of 5 are actually from China) ?

Perhaps it was the early market lead, a disruptive technology, platform inspired business model, successful fund raising rounds or simply favourable government policies. Each firm hacked growth based on different mix of factors but shared one similarity. Their leadership and workforce was able to keep pace with the supersonic growth and recalibrate repeatedly to the next future state.

Entrepreneurs whom are in constant pursuit of new knowledge and finds a thrill in the perils of solving difficult business problems are effective learners. They promote sharing of information, inferences and team collaboration for optimal execution of every business function. Making optimising learning capacity of individuals and teams in organisations an imperative measure in driving and sustaining growth. A metrics closely observed by leaderships and funding ventures alike.

Technology to Assist and Augment 

Businesses operate in an extremely fast environment today, where advancements in consumer gadgets and enterprise technologies have enabled us with massive computing power capable of deciphering quintillion bytes of data in nano seconds. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is further sophisticating automation of softwares, machines, neural networks, robots and humanoids.

Ignoring such developments and their benefits in assisting and augmenting work in sectors such as health, legal, high tech, retail and financial will only leave the business irrelevant to market over time. Instead every technology disruption provides a purposeful learning opportunity to move higher in the work chain that should be embraced.

Make Sense of Data

Similarly online business models, platforms and devices are flooding us with data and information. Researching a customer or partner, means pulling and collating information from various sources internal and external (e.g. within the enterprise walls, certified agencies and what is available publicly).

Using analytics to make sense of the different data sets and correlation to business helps to build better reasoning for business cases, speedily scratch the surface of critical operational issues, dive deeper into situations, or anticipate an upcoming threat (or avoid the ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon). It expands cumulative ability to uncover answers to inherent business questions and expose unchartered frontiers for seeking new understandings. This improve resources allocation and focus for all the right business activities in product innovation, sales, marketing and support.

Practice Problem Solving

Growing startups exposes entrepreneurs to various types of business constraints. Some problems are clearly defined with goals, while others are inhibited by vagueness, thrusting us into a panic zone. The iterative process of identifying, classifying, defining, diagnosing, understanding and breaking down the problem, results in expansive mental progress that improves strategies and methodologies in problem-solving over time.

However, exhausting teams with repetitive problems (which is a target for complete automation anyway) will only erode this cognitive exercise to an inertia. Instead refocus them to address complex challenges, where the process of active revealing and listening in search of a solution mechanism takes place. It is here, where many startups stumbles over a lead, growth engine, untapped market, or a golden opportunity to gauge market share from conventional players.  Riding back on the iceberg parable illustrated in the previous point, the deeper you dwell into business inhibitors, the more questions you will uncover. The journey to answer these questions will lead to breakthroughs.

Failures multiply Worth of Lessons

It's bizarre but success and failure lies in the same direction. Success is reiteration of adjustments made from failure to failure without ever loosing the excitement for the venture.

If Abraham Linchon would have shied away from numerous disappointments and feared the angst that may arise, it would have taken a lot longer to abolish slavery and build a modern America. If Nelson Mandela would have stopped fighting apartheid in South Africa at the thought of being imprisoned for life, South Africa will still be torn in civil wars and severe human rights crisis.

Failure teaches value of resilience, focus, reflection and to bounce back stronger each time a pursuit hits a dead end. Only by apprehending the lessons of defeat, one can gain clarity to amend path forward and avoid repeating mistakes. In fact, no one successful is ever reserved from having to confront calamities, criticism, and temporary standstills. After all, success is sweet when you can tell a story that can inspire others.

Performance Support Tools

Performance support tools, such as collaboration platforms, portals, advance analytics (including bigdata), case and content management solutions (e.g.  JIRA, G Suite, Slack, Asana, and other SMB SaaS Services) that are integrated across the various business functions in the organisation is a great way to distribute and update team members of newly available learning assets. In addition, the design and representation of these tools across functions can influence how quickly complications in process or product can be resolved.

The Act of Perfecting the Game

Using the levers mentioned above will speed learning pace and get us quickly to the deeper composite nature of any business riddle. This creates more room to effectively piece personal mastery with cumulative learning assets garnered from others in a collaborative manner. Pushing teams to increase adoption of core capabilities to understand complexities, prioritising what matters most and develop effective conversations to perfecting the game.

Practise does make us perfect (or at least better) but equally important is to break away from bad habits of not seeing the big picture quick enough, getting stuck in management myths, or living in a delusion that learning comes with experience (The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge). As they say, you can’t gain without pain or by being oblivious.

Cost , When IT Advisory Breaks Down

No Enemy is Worst than ‘Bad Advice’

When the financial books are closed each year, we meticulously measure the profits; growth of assets;  intellectual property and patent portfolios; accumulated liabilities to employees, suppliers, service providers, regulatory bodies, investors and owners. Subsequently a lesser portion of entrepreneurs, submit further to observe number of unexpected business turns, mishaps or even anomalous increase in operational cost, which consumed significant part of the already tight resource allocations. In other words, the discovery of a series of cash burners that lead to the flushing of valuable resources which could have otherwise deployed

for growth engines. 

For instance, If a small business is operating on a budget of $50 million and is incurring 5% unexpected expenses on average per year, that translates into $2.5 million in financial losses alone. In addition, let’s say that 50% (25 million) of your operational budget is allocated for production which incurred an overrun of 10% of the forecast which translates into another $2.25 million. That is still a total of $5 million over the budget (assuming that no buffer allocation was made for unexpected expenses). Reflecting carefully a little deeper, every one of the drawbacks, may lead us to a point when we received ‘bad advice’ or even worst ‘no advice’ (withholding information intentionally is also a form of ‘no advice’) from a cadre of expert and specialist consultants that we retain as financial, legal, marketing, advertising or technology advisors, among others. According to a survey conducted in the U.K small businesses loss over £6 billion due to misdirections from experts with IT consultants leading the pack (44% followed by management and marketing consultants at 34% and 32% respectively) causing the most damage to businesses.

The common theme here is to take every advice with discretion. As such, investigating IT projects that are currently squandering resources and yet hindering the business from its goals, is a necessary step to identify sources of specialist misrepresentations. 

The Alluring Appeal of the Third Platform Infrastructure and Services

Asian SMBs are pouring billions of dollars (3rd in spending after North America and Europe) into technology with the hope to increase their competitiveness and success rate against larger businesses by adopting more and more of third platform infrastructure solutions (e.g. mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, Blockchain, social tech and collaboration tools) and services (e.g.  AI/cognitive, virtual /Augmented Reality, IOT, 3D, Security, Robotics). Choosing the obvious ‘cloud’ path (both private and public) may have reduced the conventional risks associated with IT projects but even then, there are questions to be asked and answers to be probed to avoid mistakes. Matching the software or services that links best with business operation; choosing the right cloud technology (often to be align with the existing tech eco system); picking the right development platform for mobile or IOT applications and even understanding the various direct and indirect licensing estates, is crucial in realising the returns of investments channeled into automation, optimisation, waste and redundancy elimination. In short, pretty much any decisions on solutions to business challenges depend on sound IT advice.

When Reputed Automation Projects turns into Drawbacks

When strategic IT initiatives get derailed they turn into impediments that weigh on the business forming waste, sluggish business processes, redundant workloads and prone to manual interventions to produce – the very same elements that we are trying to abolish for a much error free and productive business environment. For instance, in 2004 HP stated that is suffered a shortfall of $400 million in quarterly revenue due to a failed ERP migration of its ordering and supply chain systems. The breakdown caused a 12 weeks business interruption with order process and resulted in manual intervention to conduct day to day business, not the least three key executives fired by the CEO Carly Fiorina, at the time for the costly affair. Closer to home, AirAsia was sued by the Australian regulators in 2010 for breaching consumer law by not displaying the total ticket prices on their 
reservation systems. AirAsia later admitted that this was due to a poor localisation of their system for
the Australian market. However, this incident caused them $200,000 in fines. In 2006, CPF took action on a leading global IT Services provider for a failed IT project it contracted in 2001. It was cited that communication breakdown within the parties along with complacency has caused the project to collapse.

Such is the price to pay when IT projects goes awry. While they may not impact the business severely as isolated incidents, a plague can form collectively if not addressed in timely fashion resulting in overrun of budget, miss delivery dates, suboptimal applications that leak revenue, threat from various non-compliance (industry, consumer, data privacy, security, tax, accounting, software licensing), wasted computing resources (comatose VMs, equipment), damage to brand reputation and overall workforce productivity.

But Should Technology Advisors Condemned?

Pointing the fingers never helps anyone. In majority of cases, relationship breakdown between business and IT advisors over accountability and delivery of outcomes, or dissensions arising of it, are the true causes of project failures. The agency theory problem perhaps is best to explain why either party might get derailed from accomplishing project goals in the process of aligning and creating values for their employers (sometimes may involve several business units), partners, customers and their ownself. What’s important to know though, is that most IT advisors (technical and business) are earnest and perform credibly to stay in repute. Nevertheless, provisions should be allocated by both parties to take action in the event of negligence, complacency or breach of contractual agreements, that likely to emanate losses.

In addition, it’s crucial to tap into this rich pool of experience, knowledge and technology mastery in scoping and deliberating on what makes an IT project successful. What a cognitive waste it would be, to just ask this group of plans and recommendations but to never dive in the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ such recommendations takes full effect to benefit business. Here are some notable areas to heed in navigating conversation with your IT advisors.

Firstly, understand who your IT Advisors are, what they represent, aims and areas of conflicting interests. In any one project, it is common to have several IT advisors with slightly different agendas and strength. On the vendor’s part, sales and consulting has a responsibility to promote, position and sell their solution as the best fit for your requirements. An independent or in-house IT champion may maintain a neutral position to assess what's the best for the organisation but tend to build assumptions and loyalty with certain providers from past experiences, creating a blind side to their judgement. Sizing these advisors and their leverage in key initiative, is the first code to crack. It is also advisable to adjust compensation model if necessary to suit the dynamics of the relationships, their interests and priorities (E.g instead of hourly rate to delivered functions).

Secondly, align expert recommendations and proposals with business, strantegy, users and its automation needs. Don’t underestimate the power of isolated units, their fiefdoms and current workarounds to complete order processing, procuring supplies, making payments or even connecting with other third party providers such as logistics to ensure business runs as usual. Bring together owners of processes to communicate the automation plans and why it is important to the business. Early involvement of all stakeholderst of the respective processes, aids in uncovering challenges that would be otherwise missed.

Thirdly, request your IT advisor to help you visualise a best case and worst case scenarios of success, with current resources, work culture, best practices, governance mechanisms, process methodologies and existing technology environment. This should help match risk areas during implementation, triage of business interruption, impact to productivity and regulatory compliance among others. This information will enable further adjustment to budget, timeline and drive the necessary changes (e.g. skills upgrade for workforce, upgrade of relevant tools and applications, inducing suitable best practices, familiarisation of the futuristic workplace notion) which in creases the success rate and contain risk exposures.

Technology Advisors turns into Priceless Assets

Recognising a reliable and credible technology advisor is somewhat facile. They are ‘rebels’ and ‘masters’ of their field, constantly contending the constraints of modern technology in a value creating business, even though they are not entirely immune to defeat. A good advisor will ensure you invest in the right business areas; choose the right technology solution; lead technology benefit analysis; help define a suitable integration strategy for best inter operability of tools, systems and applications; promotes acculturation of the right skills and best practises; outlines risk exposure; and is never without a mitigation and disaster recovery plan. 

Much importantly, they stick around wielding their prescience and immaculate social intelligence, when a project is hit with unanticipated calamities or additional requirements to include ongoing changes from regulatory, compliance, technology landscape, integration, operation, customer and market behaviour perspective. 


But these traits can only be an asset if the idea to manage failure, change and challenges is premeditated in the governance of IT initiatives. Expecting everything to go exactly as planned is a ‘mortal sin’ in this practise, as much as surrendering to stultifying statements claiming all application projects are headed for Armageddon (as stated by Gartner) which is both highly disturbing and questions the very constituent of IT advisory.

Third party platform may have intensified complications notably in areas of integration, security, data privacy, intellectual property, access to services, and multiple clouds; but instantaneously this also made way for much efficient delivery, flexibility and agility to the business. Exercising sufficient control on bodies of work according to timeline and extracting values as you go, is the new norm of the tech world. If this is understood correctly, than we know which part of our conventional wisdom should be relinquished for the future of a democratised technology environment