Three mistakes to avoid when mapping your digital journey

1. Choosing an ‘on the cloud’, not an ‘in the cloud’, solution

This might sound like a small dis­tinc­tion, but it rep­re­sents a big dif­fer­ence in prac­tice. “As a provider, I could, for instance, sub­scribe to some capac­i­ty from your pre­ferred cloud provider and load Win­dows 95 into it,” says Phil Lewis, vice-pres­i­dent of solu­tion con­sult­ing EMEA at Infor, a glob­al leader in busi­ness cloud soft­ware spe­cialised by indus­try. “Does that make me a gen­uine cloud provider? No. It sim­ply means I’m host­ing a lega­cy sys­tem in anoth­er company’s data cen­tre.”

Cloud cus­tomers should look for a true cloud provider, one that has engi­neered its appli­ca­tions to be able to take advan­tage of all the pow­er the cloud offers. This means tak­ing them from tra­di­tion­al, on-premise tech­nol­o­gy and entire­ly reengi­neer­ing them to become cloud-ready.
“Organ­i­sa­tions come to us because we work close­ly with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, the largest cloud provider, so we ben­e­fit from being able to use their ser­vices to deliv­er capa­bil­i­ties, future­proof the sys­tem and pro­vide a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for our clients,” says Lewis.

A true in the cloud provider will be able to deliv­er new capa­bil­i­ties for their clients as they become avail­able in a non-dis­rup­tive, seam­less way. Sim­i­lar­ly, they can imple­ment new tech­nol­o­gy and SaaS inno­va­tions imme­di­ate­ly with­out hav­ing to embark on major upgrades, with all the inher­ent dis­rup­tion that comes with that.

2. Opting for a generic system

“Organ­i­sa­tions are now demand­ing tech­nol­o­gy that’s built to be rel­e­vant to their sec­tor and their activ­i­ties,” says Lewis. “They’re fed up with hav­ing to heav­i­ly mod­i­fy soft­ware to make it capa­ble of run­ning their busi­ness­es. It’s restric­tive, it’s expen­sive and it stops inno­va­tion.”
Instead, he argues, cloud cus­tomers would be bet­ter work­ing with spe­cial­ist providers. “We design, devel­op and deploy tech­nol­o­gy with those last mile fea­tures spe­cif­ic to each indus­try includ­ed. This min­imis­es the need for cost­ly mod­i­fi­ca­tion and inte­gra­tion because it’s all there, out of the box, ready for the cus­tomer to use.”

This approach pro­vides organ­i­sa­tions, what­ev­er their sec­tor, with the abil­i­ty to con­trol their busi­ness process­es with­out hav­ing to try to adapt gener­ic appli­ca­tions to fit their require­ments.

3. Viewing digital as simply a bolt-on

“So often you see dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ties sim­ply being bolt­ed on to exist­ing sys­tems,” explains Lewis. “This means that those sys­tems become dis­joint­ed and expen­sive to main­tain.”

Putting the cloud at the heart of oper­a­tions allows com­pa­nies to ben­e­fit from all the tech­nolo­gies it can offer. It’s to exploit these oppor­tu­ni­ties that Infor, which has been recog­nised by Gart­ner as a ‘Leader’ in the 2021 Mag­ic Quad­rant for Cloud ERP for Prod­uct-Cen­tric Enter­pris­es, has cre­at­ed Infor OS. The com­pa­ny describes it as “a cloud oper­at­ing plat­form for the future.”

“Clients tell us that they like the fact that with­in Infor OS every­thing they need is avail­able as stan­dard,” says Lewis. “All the capa­bil­i­ties are con­nect­ed and ready to use, whether that’s big data, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, machine learn­ing, process automa­tion, the inter­net of things or user expe­ri­ence.”

A grow­ing num­ber of Infor’s 65,000 cus­tomers across more than 175 coun­tries are tak­ing advan­tage of these cloud tech­nolo­gies.

“They like the fact that they don’t have to embark on any expen­sive inte­gra­tion project,” says Lewis. “They can just use it to trans­form every ele­ment of how they do busi­ness, whether it’s cus­tomer and employ­ee engage­ment, improv­ing oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, increas­ing sup­ply chain vis­i­bil­i­ty or sim­ply con­nect­ing every­one and every­thing.

“They can build a busi­ness mod­el that was unimag­in­able a few years ago and one that is now ready to help organ­i­sa­tions make the most of the excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties the cloud has to offer.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it infor.com

Pro­mot­ed by Infor