A New Style of Business: 4 key IT transformations of every successful enterprise

However, we have to bear in mind that in this 'idea economy', no industry is immune to disruption.

In order to thrive in today's idea economy, one requires a new model for Information Technology (IT) as an engine for value creation. Thriving in this environment requires a new style of business powered by IT.

HPE has highlighted the following transformations as being critical in ensuring your business does not get left behind by the competition:

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1) Move to a hybrid infrastructure: Cloud computing can make a profound impact, but you should not drop your entire existing infrastructure and move overnight. The art lies in finding the optimal balance of new and legacy technologies. This can mean mixing on premise and cloud computing or using enterprise applications offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Your infrastructure will evolve over time. Plan with this in mind and organize workloads to use the best mix of resources to deliver optimized business outcomes.

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2) Protect the digital experience: With technology at the heart of a modern business, digital assets, intellectual property and customer data need protection.

As commerce moves online, you cannot afford security breaches. The damage from a serious security breach can mean more than a mere financial loss. A breach can harm your reputation, shatter customer or partner confidence, and adversely affect sales.

A digital business needs more than perimeter protection. Assume breaches will happen, plan to act fast when they do and fix things immediately.

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3) Enable workplace productivity: Technology creates opportunities to re-engineer work processes to improve productivity. Enterprises must discard the shackles of legacy systems and rethink how the New Style of Business can reduce cost, and improve both productivity and customer experience.

Enterprises need to look at how mobile solutions can improve customer experience through self-service, re-define how front line workforce can be empowered to improve customer engagement, and out-source work to optimize cost.

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4) Empower the data-driven organization: You need to leverage all your relevant data to be an agile and data-driven enterprise. You will need to merge traditional Business Intelligence with new Big Data technologies to make the transformation. You have to optimize your existing BI investments while also taking advantage of Big Data and enhanced analytics to improve customer engagement and satisfaction, create new business opportunities, and boost your competitive advantage.