The explosion of AI over the past two years has tipped the scales on a long-developing paradigm shift: technology is no longer merely another tool to support business objectives, but a fundamental driver of business value. To maximize this value and join the AI revolution, organizations need an IT foundation that’s purposefully designed.
For many organizations, this means rethinking their hybrid, multicloud IT strategy and shifting from a piecemeal hybrid-by-default architecture to one that’s intentionally structured to achieve key business priorities and maximize return on investment (ROI): hybrid-by-design. By incrementally adopting an intentional approach to hybrid cloud architecture across technology, platforms, processes and people, organizations can help achieve their business priorities and desired outcomes. In contrast, organizations who maintain the status quo are poised to risk repeating patterns of sluggish, siloed technology adoption while their competitors speed ahead.
Global managing partner for IBM’s global hybrid cloud services business.
From default to design
The default approach to adopting new enterprise technology is often sporadic with different departments acting independently and shifting workloads between clouds, on-premises and edge servers in search of quick wins. Without an overarching strategy, cloud transformation efforts largely fail to meet expectations: an HFS research report found less than one-third of cloud transformations are realized on time and on budget, and just one-fourth could demonstrate a hard return on investment. In chasing shiny new technologies, organizations often accumulate unrealized implementations, leading to tech debt—where technology investments become liabilities hindering agility and scalability.
A hybrid-by-default approach not only leads to inefficient budgeting and lower ROI, it also creates a siloed landscape and unchecked sprawl that hinder organizations from creating the flexibility and scalability needed to address current and future business demands—such as harnessing generative AI.
If this sounds like your enterprise, you’re not alone: in a recent study, only 16 percent of surveyed executives expressed strong confidence that their cloud and data capabilities are fully prepared to support generative AI investments in 2024. To adapt, organizations must shift from a reactive approach where technology dictates business limitations to a proactive architecture designed to meet new business and customer demands, a changing technology landscape, and new processes and skilling requirements.
Driven by an organization’s key business objectives, hybrid by design guides the transformation journey with intentionality and consistency. It amplifies the priority, speed and scale of value creation across the organization, with a user-centric approach at its core. It ensures seamless data flow and collaboration by harmonizing systems, as needed, across the architecture. And it enhances agility and innovation, where needed, through unification across multiple hybrid cloud environments. This intentional approach will ultimately lead to better business outcomes and a higher ROI.
Patterns of alignment
Based on conversations with a wide range of companies, I’ve identified five common patterns in organizations that operate successful hybrid-by-design strategies: they have a product-centric mindset for enabling business priorities, build an intentional architecture for core competencies, create consistent development and operational experiences across platforms, empower product teams, and harness the power of data and scale generative AI.
The first two patterns involve aligning IT and the business to define key business priorities, then determining how products and services will support these priorities and determining their order of importance to the business. Without a clear articulation of the key business priorities, stakeholder buy-in and a product-centric approach, a hybrid-by-design redesign is impossible.
Patterns of action
Building on these business and product objectives, successful companies also develop a strategic, consistent technology architecture to accelerate and scale business competencies. This architecture should standardize a target environment with deliberate choices on elements like the containerization and data layers and security, while also clearly distinguishing between technology components and the organizational and operational model components.
This process should be approached gradually: rather than tackling the entire cloud ecosystem at once, focus resources on high-leverage areas first and then expand to additional technologies that support the business case.
Even the most brilliantly designed technology implementations will fail if not properly utilized. This leads to another key trait of well executed hybrid-by-design strategies: team empowerment. Successful companies implement training to cultivate cloud-native behavior among their employees, and even reorganize business and IT teams to encourage stronger collaboration.
As competency within the hybrid-by-design approach grows, companies can begin adopting of the final identified pattern: forward-looking experimentation, such as applying generative AI to business processes. With the foundational structures in place, this experimentation will align more naturally with business needs, leading to more immediate, tangible results and the ability to scale.
Taking the leap
A redesign of this scope is never comfortable. With AI integration and adoption now an absolute mandate, enterprises no longer have a choice. It’s necessary to recalibrate transformation programs to better align to business imperatives and priorities, in addition to understanding how generative AI can amplify the value of cloud and accelerate digital transformation. Hybrid by design seeks to accomplish this goal.
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