Zero Touch Enterprise: A Practical Guide to Business Centric It

This book is a practical guide for technology leaders to support their digitalisation journey. It maps out a practical path towards enterprise digitalisation, the necessity for change in operating model, importance of culture change, value of measuring success and practical HOW-TO examples to lead the change and create ecosystems of change-leaders. The book describes the comp0onents and characteristics of digital 3.0 enterprises, and also describes the role of technology and data in applying and measuring change management to achieve Zero Touch IT. The book will categorise the approach in 3 parts:

1) Data: is the bloodline for an enterprise in a digital business. It is, however, frequently neglected and marginalised Â- often used only for the purpose of analytics or security. The book will cover all aspects of data in an organisation, from security to structure issues and from data science to data-centricity, as the latter has a strong connection to point 2, below. This is, after all, a book about how to become a Data-Centric Enterprise. Many organisations embark on the journey of building a Âdata lake which is a costly and time-consuming exercise. The point that many organisations forget is that they will need to secure all of their data, but they donÂt need to structure and analyse all of the data. The cost of managing a data lake can reduce significantly if they apply Data minimization policies, where possible, to reduce the amount of unused and irrelevant data. Another point is that the raw data itself is often not of particular interest to the organisation. The trends in that data and the insights that can be derived from it is where the focus should be. The real skill lies in identifying the key business challenges (use-cases) that the data can resolve, and understanding how to answer them through data science and Machine Learning.

2) Culture: of traditional organizations is often hierarchical and siloed. Roles are defined and interactions between the silos are more of a norm than a rule. Information is power and willingness to share knowledge is limited. The book will recommend the path and approach to building a digital culture and also warn the analogue companies that if they donÂt change the ways of working and operating model, they wonÂt survive the Digital Age. Based on ForbesÂs research Seventy-five percent of companies in the Standard & PoorÂs 500 will be new entrants by 2027 at the current run rate.

3) Technology: is usually the focal point for transformation as it is tangible and easy to understand. It is a mature market with easy to comprehend benefits - e.g. move applications from desktop to cloud and spin off different web-based tools, deploy robotics and automate some of the systems and back-office functions to save money. However, without a centralized strategy and a data-centric approach, many corporations spend large sums of money on applications and tools that can lead to more unstructured and sometimes insecure data and add complexity to already complex IT landscapes. Technology is a business enabler and in Âanalogue companies, is often used as the focus to see immediate results without consideration of the long-term impact to operational costs. In order to gain the highest ROI in Technology investments, corporates must reduce their legacy technology and application landscape, which will support security efforts and facilitate the design of Global business processes. Only then can digital technology be implemented in a user friendly, cost-efficient, and sustainable way, as outlined through this book