Category: Topic 4

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Wonkyu Lee

Maksim Yakubovskiy

In the digital age of transformation, the environment is rapidly changing to meet the demands of businesses and consumers. Companies must meet the growth of the digital age or face failure; by doing so, technology innovation leaders become an important asset at the executive level. Business leaders or technology leaders must adapt and change just as the organization would, being able to anticipate and prepare to support increasing innovation and technology demands on a wide scale. Technology leaders must foster collaboration among key stakeholders (i.e., business leaders, IT teams, and subject matter experts). Teamwork is important when aligning the architectural shift to the business objectives and addressing critical pain points. Facilitating pilot projects and proof of concepts to demonstrate the value and feasibility of the architectural focus will be necessary to help meet stakeholders’ resistance by building their confidence. Executive leader will need to buy-in on the direction and decision to support such changes that will improve the organizations’ ability to adapt and react for any circumstance.

For many reasons, businesses operate from legacy systems and technological constraints that can increase risk within information systems. Technology innovation leaders must address the challenges of integrating and modernizing legacy systems while balancing the need for innovation to maintain business continuity. Knowing how to adapt legacy systems to support new standards and industry practices is a challenge, but it is necessary to evolve such systems to ensure organizational growth, change, and trust. How technology leaders address today’s problems will affect future decisions.

Gartner’s Leadership characteristics that support adaptability and resilience within organizations:

• Harness the expertise and ingenuity of all employees by democratizing technology delivery.
• Asses the digital scaling potential of “game-changing” technologies.
• Apply combinatorial innovation to identify new opportunities.
• Partner with business technologists and create fusion teams for enterprise-level use cases.
• Redirect resources by utilizing job-to-be-done.
• Unleash digital channels by adopting a disciplined digital product management approach.
• Reach beyond technology to actively sense and respond to disruptions and anticipate change.

 

Resources:

Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation Leaders Primer for 2022. (2022, February 4). Gartner. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from https://www.gartner.com/document/4010113?ref=d-linkShare

Leadership Vision for 2022: Technology Innovation. (2021, August 12). Gartner. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from https://www.gartner.com/document/4004633?ref=d-linkShare

Technology is not only transforming the means/methods by which businesses interact between customers, but how organizations are structured to support business driven outcomes. But what really is Technology infrastructure architecture? Technology infrastructure architecture helps address the kind of technology used to provide/implement solutions to support information systems within the business architectures. It also provides the underlying foundation to support the organizations information strategies.

“IT infrastructure is defined as the collection of hardware, software, network systems, facilities, and frameworks that enable IT services delivery to different business units and help maintain its digital presence.” – Chiradeep Basumallick

At its basic building blocks, technology infrastructure consists of hardware, software, and networks to support business goals. Each of these blocks are linked in a manner that creates a unique system that defines that organization’s identity. The hardware will house the software, which support the applications and the network will link all the various components/IoT devices to support the entirety of the technology infrastructure architecture. Hardware like routers, serves, data centers, computers/workstations create the physical business structure to support business activities. Software such as operating systems, applications, in0house built apps and so on, provide the interface to develop and implement business capabilities. The network as stated, will use both hardware and software components to manage and provide a system of connections to define the business environment. All three are needed to support the Technology infrastructure architecture.  There are many combinations and types of technology infrastructures that exist, design uniquely to support business goals, such as cloud-based architecture, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), traditional and many more.

The top strategic technology trends for 2022 focus on three themes: accelerating growth, sculpting change, and engineering trust. In the end, the real goal to understand with any organizations is the desire to achieve technology that supports business agility, maximize value and deliver cost-efficient growth. Leveraging these trends and technologies builds on and reinforce one another to support business priorities.

Seven Best Practices to support Technology Infrastructure Architecture, according to Basumallick:

1. Benchmark your current and projected level of digital maturity
2. Find labor arbitrage opportunities through managed IT services
3. Explore how AIOps could streamline IT infrastructure management
4. Clarify ownership of resources, assets, and processes between the business and IT teams
5. Outline a cloud-first roadmap
6. Protect your IT supply chain from security vulnerabilities and attacks
7. Invest in backup and disaster recovery infrastructure

 

Resources:

Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022. (2021, October 18). Gartner. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from https://www.gartner.com/document/4006913?ref=d-linkShare

What Is IT Infrastructure? Definition, Building Blocks, and Selection Best Practices – Spiceworks. (2022, February 10). Spiceworks. https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/it-strategy/articles/what-is-it-infrastructure/