The short timeframes businesses have in which to compete successfully against one another in the increasingly connected and digital world of business are driving them to re-engineer their operations to create agile business systems that can respond rapidly to transient opportunities, says information technology (IT) systems multinational IBM World Wide Client Technology Centres distinguished engineer Frank De Gilio.

Business assets that include operational processes and workflows developed over time can be leveraged and turned into born-in-the-cloud applications (apps). These apps can then be used as virtual services, rather than being anchored to specific hardware.

These apps can also be expanded and altered to meet demand, and De Gilio notes that the time scale requires the ability to alter an existing workflow app to meet new requirements within a day.

“What I work with each day is helping businesses to transform. The ability to conceptualise a new business capability in the morning and then have it in production by the end of the day is the type of agility that business systems must provide.

“Our research starts in the field, not in the laboratory, and we typically look at how businesses can use new information or capabilities and leverage that to their advantage. This then cascades all the way through the business to change the way it operates and responds to opportunities,” he illustrates.

The abstraction of work processes and development from technical ‘bits and bytes’ means that employees at the coalface of the business will increasingly design or modify the systems they need using object-based programming tools that enable various elements to be added to a program.

“Even low-level employees will be able to do amazing things with the new capabilities provided by digital business and cloud systems. They will be able to drag and drop enterprise-grade capabilities into a new workflow that will automatically requisition suitable IT resources in a cloud environment.”

This capability also means that a business that has been tied to set ways of performing tasks can quickly change the way it works and digitalise its operations.

“The delivery model for IT capabilities is shifting towards software. This is driving a change in the architecture of business IT systems and security measures.”

A new use case is to encrypt data on mobile devices that can then be decrypted using services that are only available over a company’s secure network. If the device is not on that network, those services are not available and the data cannot be accessed. Security is, therefore, enhanced through the use of software services that can be localised by a company.

These changes in IT, and associated business culture changes to meet new operational demands, are leading to a unification of IT systems across enterprises; this is intended to solve business problems using the multitude of technologies available.