Changing the way that businesses leverage technology
Business leaders are changing the way they source and utilise technology. Cloud computing and software-as-a-service herald new delivery models that can be accessed faster and at lower cost than traditional on-premise capabilities. Cloud-based technology platforms deliver huge benefits but also demand new methods for procurement, governance, management and integration. Used properly, these technologies can foster new levels of organisational agility, innovation and enable new digital business models.
At Deloitte we apply this definition to the technology that underpins businesses and their ecosystems, whether it’s a new capability or as an approach to liberating the value in existing assets.
Architecting and deploying these resources (applications, data, infrastructure) as a platform allows participants to configure services to meet their needs. These platforms are self-contained and have a well-defined set of secure protocols and interfaces that facilitate collaboration with these participants, which could be other platforms, staff, customers and external organisations.
The benefits are clear when thinking about and deploying technology this way:
- Embracing the rapid changes in technology means that organisations are less likely to find themselves ‘painted into a corner’ with technologies that aren’t interoperable
- As platforms are self-contained, it isolates technologies into domains, allowing intra platform change to happen at a different pace to inter platform, without overly impacting each other
- This approach allows organisations to leverage lower cost technologies and services when they become available without having to incur substantial cost
- It allows the business to implement new ways of working, enabling them to respond to opportunities and threats in a way not possible before.
- Technology platforms are a key enabler for organisational agility but they are only part of the solution, as the value of platforms is only truly unlocked when the entire organisation operates in the same way, following the same cadence.