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Chief information officers are facing an IT infrastructure environment that is becoming more complex and fragmented, making it much harder to manage than in the past. Jordi Moncada, a partner with Bain's Information Technology practice, outlines six rules for IT design that can help CIOs and vendors tackle the growing challenges of complexity.
Read the Bain Brief: Six IT Design Rules for Digital Transformation
Read the transcript below.
JORDI MONCADA: Five to 10 years ago, CIOs were promised the world of simplicity and no need to manage their own IT infrastructure. Today, those same CIOs are realizing that the new has not replaced the old. Actually, it's been added on top—creating a world of complexity, fragmentation, and difficult decision management that are very hard to have to deal with. Also the cost, regulation, security, and other compliance pressures have not gone away, hence creating a really hard environment. Bain has worked with more than 100 CIOs and their tech vendors to understand how they can address this world of complexity for the future years.
We've come up with what we call the six rules for IT design that we believe will help CIOs and vendors to address the complexities. The first one is the need to break the boundaries across the IT stack. The tools need to be able to understand all the stack, from the application, data, the management, the infrastructure, and the different stacks they've got to manage in a multicloud world.
The second one is the need to be DevOps-friendly. Tools need to be able to integrate developers with operations. The third one is being open. The world of monolithic and closed applications has ended. Applications need to be modular, open source, and API-friendly. The fourth one is the need to incorporate policy engines. Applications need to be aware of the requirements of policy and compliance and be able to automate that across all the stacks.
The fifth one is induce insights. CIOs are flooded with data. And they need the tools to understand what the data says. So by introducing machine learning, advanced analytics, and other tools into that data, they can create insights. Finally, all the tools need to be user-friendly and need to be easy to manage in this multicloud environment.
In summary, we believe that by following these six design rules, CIOs and their tech vendors will be able to successfully address the demands of digital transformations that lay ahead.
Six IT Design Rules for Digital Transformation
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First published in juillet 2018