If you're fortunate enough to be in a business sector that's insulated from the current downturn, you very much need to keep the wheels on your current initiatives, since the reasons for these investments haven't evaporated overnight. But it also means that in sectors where attracting, retaining and upselling customers just got more difficult, it's even more important to 'innovate,' which in plain terms simply means finding new ways of solving business problems.

For the vast majority of firms, key business priorities remain unchanged. These priorities are largely customer-centered and include attracting, retaining and upselling customers, targeting customers more effectively, expanding current customer relationships, and creating new products and services that will be attractive to customers. Other business goals, such as process improvement, reducing costs and increasing the use of analytics, are likewise simply stepping stones to improving the customer offer.

The successful businesses of tomorrow are not currently slashing their IT budgets in a knee-jerk reaction. They are investing now in order to be first out of the traps when market conditions change. They understand that the future business environment will be characterized by much shorter innovation cycles and the requirement to get goods and services to market more quickly. They recognize that to remain competitive and to differentiate their offerings will require an arms race -- where the competitive weapons are effective, modern IT solutions supporting sound business judgement. In this environment advantages will be short lived, the requirement for change will be inevitable, and the ability to implement change rapidly and effectively a major advantage. Such companies don't write blank checks. Rather, they demand that IT investment delivers maximum business value.

That is why they are turning their attention to data migration, because getting it right delivers key business advantages. It enables companies to innovate more rapidly and maximize resources. It allows infrastructures to be consolidated and feature-rich applications to be implemented on lower cost platforms. It delivers rich, accessible and up-to-date customer data to applications that can exploit it to target offers more effectively, enable customers to be dealt with more efficiently and allow workforces to become more effective. And it allows you to switch off legacy, meaning that both budget and skilled workers can be redeployed to better effect.

The ongoing requirement for data migration also means that it is no longer viable to simply throw money and effort at a migration just to get it done. In the future, system renewal -- and the associated data migration -- is likely to transform from a once-in-a-career experience to a relatively regular occurrence. There will be no time to hand-spin migrations, so automation will become essential.

In 10 years we are likely to look back on highly manual migrations in the same way that we think of manual typewriters. The electronic typewriter may have been a step forward, but it is not the PC. In just the same way, leading companies are moving away from first- and second-generation approaches to data migration towards business-aligned third-generation migration technology. They are holding their nerve, transforming their infrastructure and readying themselves for a new way of doing business.

Charles Andrews is CEO of Celona Technologies (www.celona.com).

» posted by ITworld staff

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