Riding The Wave of Digital Transformation
Upgrading IT environments to become competitive
Experts observe that “re-engineering existing business and IT environments into modern competitive, integrated architectures is non-trivial”. Among the non-trivial problems of upgrading IT environments to become competitive, are legacy code skills shortages. Surprisingly, legacy code is not only a phenomenon of older ERP applications: “Accelerated development methods have left enterprises with modern legacy systems. Complex Java and .NET applications have many of the same problems as older COBOL applications.”
Modelling that is flexible and configurable
Low code developments are initiatives in solving the serious problem of keeping software flexible and extendable. As things stand, “potential incremental changes” and re-engineering of enterprise software require a software integration know-how and technology. Without it enterprises resort to ‘wholesale risky replacements of systems’, the risk being that the problems, leading to the wholescale software replacement, will reoccur.
Tapping into citizen data scientist talent
How can the problems be addressed, and which are the better options? To quote P. Vainikka of Cognite*: “True digitalization is about enabling a rising tide that will lift all boats within the enterprise… It is about empowering the dormant citizen data scientists and citizen developers who already reside within your organizations — within business units as diverse as the enterprise — to be as productive individually and collectively as possible…”
The people who are experienced in the marine industry and who understand the subtleties of the processes that produce the data can develop into marine domain citizen data scientists. Being domain experts and process owners, they are the people who can use the new technologies and thereby integrate non-digitised enterprise content in ways that makes the right data for the right process accessible at the time of need. “True digitalization requires universal access to understandable data”. Understandable data is data that is useful for your current discussions and decisions.
