Companies that can anticipate their customer’s evolving needs and preferences tend to prevail
Hybrid IT – an interim step of what’s to come
As CIOs grapple with how to manage their organization’s digital evolution, some take a wait-and-see strategy while others jump right in to gain first-mover advantages. The majority though, take a hybrid approach to IT.
What is hybrid IT and why it matters to CIOs?
In short, hybrid IT is an approach to enterprise computing where organizations manage certain IT resources internally while using cloud-based services for others. This blended approach give CIOs the flexibility and comfort level to transform their IT operations at the speed that their enterprises need. Certain enterprises may want to keep various mission-critical applications in-house while other IT assets in disperse data centers around the world where they can access either through a public and/or private cloud environments.
“This is not new. In fact, IT as an industry ripe for disruption.”
Why should hybrid IT matter to CIOs who’s customers are dispersed nationally or internationally?
There are a myriad of reasons companies may want to have technology /data/services closer to their customer that goes beyond latency, control and technical reasons. For example, there may be geo-specific reasons such as addressing an untapped market opportunity in a different industry that may have regulatory requirement to be ‘close’ to their customers. This scenario is a growing reality in our ever-flattening global economy where companies need to expand internationally to grow market share.
Companies must adapt (more often anticipate) to the changing needs of their customers. And customers are fickle, they’re demanding faster, better, more-personalized services that enable them to be more agile, innovative and efficient. If a company cannot offer (or demonstrate) this value to their customers, their competitors certainly will.
Hybrid IT can be seen as an interim step towards virtualization of an enterprises’ entire IT environment but dive deeper and hybrid IT can also be viewed as a reflection of today’s market trends where enterprises realize that they need to have their technology, data and services, often via data-centers, closer to their customer base.
What if customers aren’t human but rather a device or machine?
For CIOs, The Internet of Things (IoT) is a next industrial revolution and with it comes an entire set of drivers to be ‘closer’ to the customer.
Time and time again, the marketplace rewards those companies that are closer and more ‘in-touch’ with their customers. Companies that have a better understanding of their customers’ evolving needs and preferences and can react faster to changes — whether to competition, industry trends or technology curves — tend to win.
In fact, companies that help their customers anticipate change and can future-engineer their customer’s experiences make themselves a more integral part of their customer’s lives. This helps deepen and further entrench their relationships with their customers.
- One of the five strategies that Paul Leinwand and Ceseare Mainardi propose in Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap is that companies that ‘shape the future instead of reacting to it…’ consistently leap ahead of their competition.
- Source: Leinwand, Paul & Mainardi, Ceseare. Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap: Harvard Business Review, 2016. Print.