Tony Staples is CTO Group’s Digital Enterprise Capability Leader. He has developed his expertise over 25 years working in the Information Technology industry on large high profile government and commercial projects.
Digital transformation requires a holistic approach to people, process and technology to be truly successful. In this blog, we begin our exploration of the technology aspect of this triangle and, in particular, a concept which CTO Group calls the Digital Enterprise Technology Platform.
This platform provides the computing power that runs through a digital enterprise and can be visualised as three layers, the technology services, business services and consumer services layers.
The technology services layer forms the foundation of the digital enterprise. It holds the enterprise’s infrastructure, things like compute, storage and network capabilities. Within a digital enterprise this infrastructure is industrialised and increasingly leverages a hybrid cloud model consisting of public, private (on premise) and vertical (community) cloud service providers.
The technology services layer also holds the enterprise technologies. As the name suggests, this covers technologies used primarily within the enterprise. In a digital enterprise these technologies provide intelligent automation, data intelligence, consumer relations and staff productivity capabilities.
Technologies at this layer do not differentiate the enterprise and are prime candidates to be purchased in an ‘as-a-Service’ model. This helps to drive agility, but the key benefit is that it enables the enterprise to focus on what differentiates it, rather than being distracted with providing infrastructure and standard enterprise capabilities.
Just as enterprises are not distracted by generating their own electricity, so they should not expend effort to generate their own compute resources — unless they have a specific need to do so.
In my next blog I will explore the other two layers in the platform, in the meantime please let me know what technologies you would like to see included.
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