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Senior executives want to engage influencers with an informed perspective of key IT market trends and associated drivers. To be of value to their cause, you must demonstrate an understanding of their commercial world. That awareness requires more than technology knowledge; it requires substantive industry domain expertise. Moreover, executives crave actionable lessons learned – from industry-leading peers who have been there, done that.

Throughout my career as an analyst and a consultant, I’ve been fortunate to be able to research many projects and monitor business outcomes, then offer insight and guidance to executive-level leaders across a variety of verticals around the globe. Now, I’m going to share some of the key points about how to build open innovation strategies on top of a solid IT systems foundation.

The cohesive approach to hybrid IT

Cloud adoption is having a major impact on IT culture – including the overarching policies that affect people, processes and technology. Today’s digital business relies upon secure access to transaction data. For many organizations, that means tapping into the intellectual property (IP) entrusted to mainframe servers. It’s typically where all mission-critical workloads reside.

As IT organizations accelerate digital transformation initiatives to take advantage of cognitive, mobile and social technologies, they apply the comprehensive solutions designed to support all of their emerging commercial applications.

To accomplish that goal, the enterprise needs a cohesive approach to hybrid IT — one that delivers the flexibility, adaptability and simplicity required to capitalize on digital innovations, while efficiently managing anticipated growth in workloads.

Moreover, the IT team might utilize different clouds across development, test and production environments — with an appropriate split between public and private clouds. That’s why it’s important to always be able to fully manage the resources within this diverse, somewhat complex, multi-domain environment.

Demand for hybrid simplification

Many forward-thinking organizations have already included mainframes as an integral key component of their digital transformation agenda. Rather than debate the merits of monolithic versus distributed architectures, they’re actively combining both approaches — where appropriate — to harness all of the available capabilities.

While most enterprise IT environments already include some combination of centralized on-premises system of record (SoR) and distributed off-premises system of engagement (SoE) platforms, there are compelling incentives for simplifying the hybrid configuration and thereby improving performance.

It’s now possible, and highly desirable, to combine back end SoR workloads and front-end SoE applications on the same high-performance large server platform.

What’s the key benefit to you – the IT or business leader? Maximize the potential of your most valuable resources: capital equipment investment and skilled technical talent. Free up limited staff time to work on high-priority projects. Do more, for less. That’s an IT solution every CFO would appreciate.

Besides, a modular and fully integrated hybrid IT infrastructure model can greatly increase software developer agility and accelerate your speed-to-market. This compact system configuration will also empower IT administrators to more easily optimize performance and scalability by automating infrastructure provisioning.

Systems of innovation in action

In the next part of this series, I’ll explain how today’s modern mainframe platforms can offer a highly scalable cloud infrastructure that leverages open standards and access to the API economy; thereby allowing you to securely connect your application services across systems, mobile devices and other cloud platforms. Meanwhile, I invite you to learn more now, and discover the possibilities.

IBM z Systems deliver high availability and superior performance with the best protection, lowest security risk and most complete and integrated architectural and development lifecycles for the best possible hybrid cloud solution and the fastest path to business value.

Read part one of my series here.

The post Better together: Systems of innovation (Part two) appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.