Post on 14-Oct-2020
From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter
Accenture Technology Vision 2014
Every Business Is a Digital Business
Accenture Technology Vision for Intelligent Infrastructure
Big companies are back in the digital game. For the first time in a long time, the momentum in digital innovation is being driven not by newcomers—the Instagrams and TripAdvisors and Airbnbs—but by the Tescos and GEs and Disneys.
Accenture’s 2014 Technology Vision report notes
that large enterprises are making a concerted push
to transform themselves from followers to leaders
in digital. Backed by their deep resources, enormous
scale and process discipline, many Global 1,000
organizations are rewriting entire chapters of the
digital playbook. For business leaders everywhere,
the next three years will be about determining their
organizations’ pace in the digital race, and their place
in the new digital world.
Pivotal to those efforts will be an emphasis on getting
the IT infrastructure right. Accenture believes that
developing intelligent infrastructure services can give
companies significant competitive advantage as part
of their overall digital strategy.
Intelligent infrastructure services help enterprises
react to, and even stay ahead of, market and
technology changes. They can also help organizations
serve customers better, collaborate and innovate more
effectively, and reduce costs more predictably.
This overview document maps to the six technology
vectors described in Accenture’s 2014 Technology
Vision report, flagging key ideas that IT leaders
should consider as they plan for the next phases of
infrastructure improvement.
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Accenture’s three-part approach to intelligent infrastructure
Accenture takes a three-phased approach
to creating an intelligent infrastructure that
is manageable, cost effective and minimally
disruptive to business operations.
Phase one: Taking the first step into intelligence
in infrastructure services begins with the
automation and orchestration of business
processes, technologies and applications.
Phase two: Creating a generalized service
orientation perspective is thus the next essential
phase of the overall journey. It is important to be
able to link operations to business services that are
virtualized among multiple providers (internal and
external).
Phase three: The final phase is integrating
advanced analytics capabilities with automation
and service integration to make the infrastructure
itself smarter and more autonomous—that is,
capable of taking provisioning or corrective steps
with little or no human intervention.
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Digital physical blur: Extending intelligence to the edge The physical world is coming online as objects, devices, and machines acquire
more digital intelligence. What’s emerging is more than just an Internet of
“things;” it’s a new layer of connected intelligence that augments the actions
of individuals, automates processes, and incorporates digitally empowered
machines into our lives, increasing our insight into and control over the
tangible world.
The outcomes? Consumers become better
informed and better equipped to influence the
ways they experience everything around them.
And businesses get real-time connections to
the physical world that allow machines as well
as employees to act and react faster—and more
intelligently.
An intelligent infrastructure is vital to help
organizations extend intelligence to the edge.
By providing “always on, always connected”
capabilities, it can make it much easier to link
devices such as smartphones, tablets, sensors, and
programmable logic controllers to the everyday
process interactions of the business.
Importantly, an intelligent infrastructure
accelerates and augments the decentralization of
technology; new technologies can be provisioned,
operated and managed regardless of location.
Remotely managed facilities start to become more
practical: the lights-out data center can be more
than just an interesting theoretical concept.
At the same time, an intelligent infrastructure can
help the organization to serve up a rich multimedia
experience for the user – offering compelling and
very detailed graphics, moving text, super-sharp
images, and more, consistent with what more and
more media-savvy users are starting to expect.
Those levels of user experience can be presented
on a wide range of devices—again, consonant with
users’ growing expectations.
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From workforce to crowdsource: The rise of the borderless enterprise Picture a workforce that extends beyond your employees: one that consists
of any user connected to the Internet. Cloud, social, and collaboration
technologies now allow organizations to tap into vast pools of resources across
the world, many of whom are motivated to help. Channeling these efforts to
drive business goals is a challenge, but the opportunity is enormous: it can give
every business access to an immense, agile workforce that is not only better
suited to solving some of the problems that organizations struggle with today
but in many cases will do it for free.
Running and managing truly practical
collaboration sites calls for an underlying
infrastructure that is as agile as possible. The
infrastructure should make it possible to safely and
securely extract and present the wealth of useful
data now available to participants throughout a
business ecosystem. And it will better prepare an
organization’s big data platforms to receive and
properly prioritize today’s abundant data inputs.
An intelligent infrastructure also eases the
challenge for the IT organization of governing
and managing technology in an increasingly
distributed environment. Specifically, it supports
the increasingly vital need for service integration—
that is, the convening and orchestration of service
providers (on-premise, as-a-service, multi-
vendor, and so on) together with the effective
management of that mix of providers.
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Data supply chain: Putting information into circulation Yes, data technologies are evolving rapidly, but most have been adopted in
piecemeal fashion. As a result, enterprise data is vastly underutilized. Data
ecosystems are complex and littered with data silos, limiting the value that
organizations can get out of their own data by making it difficult to access.
To truly unlock that value, companies must start treating data more as a supply
chain, enabling it to flow easily and usefully through the entire organization—
and eventually throughout each company’s ecosystem of partners too.
An intelligent infrastructure can help to realize the
digital enterprise by enabling the intelligence from
the data in one area of the business to inform
opportunities in other areas. For example, a large
insurance company with life, home and auto lines
of business could share client data to provide
better customer service, as well as cross sell new
products.
More flexible infrastructure also makes it easier for
an organization to deploy and benefit from large-
scale business analytics capabilities.
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Harnessing hyperscale: Hardware is back (and never really went away) Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in software, the hardware world
is again a hotbed of new development as demand soars for bigger, faster,
lower-cost data centers. In this new world, hardware matters more than ever
in transforming enterprises into digital businesses with access to unlimited
computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.
Whether the new “hyperscale” data centers are in-
house or outsourced, every IT organization must
understand the new developments that make such
developments possible—developments not only
at the chip level but also in terms of networking
efficiencies, storage capabilities, and energy
utilization.
Accenture anticipates that leading IT organizations
will develop more proactive technology refresh
plans to ensure that their data center investments
are as effective as possible. Those plans may
involve more intelligent technology refresh
cycles – including automated provisioning of new
capabilities, wherever possible.
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The business of applications: Software as a core competency in a digital world The way we build software is changing. Mimicking the shift in the consumer
world, organizations are rapidly moving from enterprise applications to apps.
Yes, there will always be big, complex enterprise software systems to support
large organizations, and it will still be necessary for IT developers to keep
customizing those systems, providing updates, patches, and more. But now, as
large enterprises push for greater IT agility, there is a sharp shift toward simpler,
more modular, and more custom apps.
In one case, a large global bank has built an
internal app store that allows its users to self-
provision easily.
At the same time, IT leaders and business
leaders alike must decide who plays what
application development role in their new digital
organizations—and how to transform the nature
of application development itself. But new
decentralized development techniques can easily
lead to greater infrastructure complexity.
As such, leading IT groups will stay alert to
anything that veers away from simplicity, and will
work hard to build in governance mechanisms that
keep complexity at bay.
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Architecting Resilience: “Built to survive failure” becomes the mantra of the nonstop business In the digital era, businesses must support wide-ranging demands for nonstop
processes, services and systems. This has particular resonance in the office of
the CIO where the need for “always-on” IT infrastructure, security, and resilient
practices can mean the difference between business as usual and erosion of
brand value. The upshot: IT must adopt a new mindset to ensure that systems
are dynamic, accessible and continuous—not just designed to spec but designed
for resiliency under failure and attack.
To better understand their risks and to detect
attacks, leading IT security organizations must
design, implement, and run systems that shift the
security emphasis from monitoring to
understanding; from collection of data to
visualization of behaviors and anomalies. As such,
those leaders will turn increasingly to data
platform technologies—technologies that provide
access to and aggregation of data via services. The
data platform, and accompanying analytical
approaches, allows security to handle large volumes
of fast-changing data—orders of magnitude
greater in scale than traditional log analysis.
If they are building the system themselves, IT groups
are very likely to use Hadoop or Splunk; otherwise,
they may turn to a solution such as NetWitness,
which is designed to provide enterprises with a
precise and actionable understanding of everything
happening on their networks.
Leading practitioners are already turning to
intelligent infrastructure to make their systems
much more resilient. For instance, they are using
automated unit testing to run new code through
thousands of test cases before being deployed.
Then, best practice calls for the code to be
deployed first on a “canary” server. If there are
any issues, the canary discovers them and stops
the cascading of flawed code or configuration to
the rest of the production environment. Amazon,
Facebook and Google use such techniques to
manage continuous integration of new hardware
and software on their cloud infrastructures—while
staying always on.
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ABOUT ACCENTURE
Accenture is a global management consulting,
technology services and outsourcing company,
with more than 293,000 people serving clients in
more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled
experience, comprehensive capabilities across all
industries and business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful companies,
Accenture collaborates with clients to help
them become high-performance businesses and
governments. The company generated net revenues
of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended
Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
CONTACTS
For more informationJack Sepple Infrastructure Services,
Senior Managing Director
john.s.sepple@accenture.com
Larry Socher Infrastructure Services,
Managing Director
larry.m.socher@accenture.com
www.accenture.com/technologyvision