Can IT become the “nervous system” of business?

Businesses today face a tsunami of challenges unlike it has ever faced in history: globalization, geo-political, rise of the Internet consumer, customer mind-share dynamics, proliferation of information and content to manage and maintain (with regulatory & security concerns).

This requires new ways to do business:

1)provide an enriched and consistent quality customer experience;

2)conduct business over any form of electronic channel;

3)rapid adoption of new business models;

4)transact business in the most efficient & effective means possible;

5)incorporate “turn on dime” transaction workflow, and rapidly make informed decisions.

So what are IT executives supposed to do with this? Most are faced with…

1)budget cuts;

2)skill set shortages; complexity of their infrastructure;

3)while keeping the lights on and doing more with less!

The good news is…

Innovations in the “2.0” phase of everything IT (Web, Client/Server, Grid, Utility, Datacenter, SOA, and Utility Computing) are creating a foundation of “interactive & real time” information, connectivity and processing capabilities.

These capabilities may just become the foundation building blocks for IT organizations to build and use to create an always connected, always available, always working type of platform.

Perhaps the combination of these capabilities could become the foundation of building the “nervous system” of business.

What has been missing is the past are two things:

1)”interactive experience” that is similar in nature to humans collaborating, sharing and conducting business; and

2)”interactive infrastructure” that is able to interpret, sense/respond and execute processing as needed-when needed.

The attempt of this blog is to share collective experiences and lessons in realities. The lessons my team gained from building a real time infrastructure for Wall Street type business, leads us to believe that the nervous system of business can be provided by IT.