How To Cope With The Changing Pace Of Technological Change

This is a huge question, and one that many businesses and organisations would struggle to answer.

11:33 16 November 2020

Digital space, cloud space, big data & analytics, functional languages and presentation layers are all evolving and offering a wide variety of possibilities in technology for today’s businesses. The decisions over if, how, and when to incorporate them are complex and it is not surprising that businesses often fail to understand how they may best use them to their benefit.

 

Businesses are questioning which areas they may see benefit, should they look to optimise cost, maximise revenue or improve customer stickiness. The issues arise from the way business platforms have been created traditionally. Changing one layer of a system can interfere with performance and stability of other layers. Add to this the fact that system layers can be so intertwined it can be far wider reaching to incorporate new technologies than business leaders feel able to cope with, manage or afford.

 

With constant pressure to justify spending, streamline processes, systems and structures, businesses need to adapt and harness the potential benefits technological advances offer and make decisions on how best to deploy these within their businesses.

 

Most large enterprises, for example, still run core business processes using mainframes, which, rather than developing and adopting the advancements in technology, have actually become harder to change. With many companies trying and failing to adapt to change, we look at some approaches to follow to enable change to happen.

 

Organisations need to continuously evolve and refresh their IT to make it current and relevant to the changing ways they need to operate. To remain competitive, they need to embrace the culture of innovation and emerging technology, or the pace of change will out run them – and they need to do so quickly. The further behind a business falls, the harder it will be to catch up. 

 

What can be done?

 

Some steps you could take to cope with technological change could include:

 

• Externalising your mainframe assets using service orientation and making them available to the open world.
  
  
• Removing and relocating mainframe application parts that are MIPs-hungry and non-revenue generating. (The cost reductions achieved can mean the savings become available that could be utilised elsewhere)
  
  
• Re-engineer parts of the mainframe application that are strategic to the business to make them available to all other applications.
  
  

To keep up with the pace of change, it is important for organisations to understand the need for technology layers to remain independent, able to evolve at their own pace and ensure that change does not interfere with other layers. Businesses are able to adopt emerging technology more efficiently, more cheaply and with less disruption, by moving away from their rigid mainframe technology restrictions.

Change consultants are now facing the need to help businesses make such changes to ensure organisations are not left behind, simply treading water, and ultimately drowning in the decisions of how best to utilise and keep up with the technological advancements being made.

 

With clunking mainframes proving difficult to move away from, many organisations have tried and failed to effect genuine technological change. Enlisting the services of a specialist that has experience in helping businesses dealing with change will help show how starting the change process is the key to doing more than coping with the changing pace of change, instead learning to harness its benefits to the business’ best advantage.