Your 3-Step Roadmap to
IT Modernization
W H I T E PA P E R
IT modernization is more than an industry buzzword: It’s a strategic path to helping
organizations become more productive, efficient, agile and successful. But it doesn’t
come without a smart plan and meticulous execution. Read this paper to learn about a
3-step approach to IT modernization that you can begin today.
Organizations confront business conditions that grow more challenging and unforgiving every day, due
to a wide range of financial, operational, technological, regulatory and competitive issues. This is driving
businesses to turn to digital transformation as the foundation of how they will operate, compete and
succeed into the future.
This digital transformation mandate—increasingly sponsored by and championed at the highest levels of the
organization—requires a new way of thinking about how they work inside and outside the traditional four
walls of the enterprise. This has forced businesses hoping to achieve higher levels of success to come up
with new strategies for how their teams collaborate and use all forms of business content more effectively.
Doing so requires a new mindset for IT, one that centers on and rewards more innovative ways to align
technology with fast-changing business goals. When you’re giving different parts of the business the ability
to access the same content to accomplish unique goals reliably, securely and cost efficiently, old ways no
longer suffice.
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Your 3-Step Roadmap to IT Modernization
IT leaders and their business counterparts must embrace
the notion of IT modernization, particularly when it
comes to rethinking the core enterprise concepts of
infrastructure, workplace services, and business process.
But accepting the notion that IT ecosystems must be
updated and upgraded to allow organizations to compete
more effectively and better serve their customers, and then
actually turning that goal into a reality, are often two very
different things.
With so many IT organizations still devoting anywhere
from 60 to 80% of their time, energy, human resources
and budget to supporting legacy systems rather than
developing transformative solutions, it’s clear that a
fresh approach is required. Much of that new approach is
predicated on key concepts such as collaborative teams,
easy content sharing, role-based access and creating a
future-proof architecture for systems and processes.
Let’s be clear: IT modernization isn’t just about buying new
hardware, deploying new applications or embracing new
architectures such as cloud computing and virtualization.
As important as each of those are, truly modernizing your
IT means modernizing your workplace, your business
processes and your IT infrastructure.
ACKNOWLEDGING AND CONFRONTING
ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGES
Organizations of all sizes, industries and geographies are
up against big challenges in their infrastructure, workplaces
and business processes. And IT modernization cannot
become a reality without an honest, open assessment of
the inherent challenges in each area.
•
Infrastructure. Despite major IT investments in recent
years, most organizations still rely on a considerable
amount of legacy hardware and software. This typically
results in issues surrounding security, management
complexity, incompatibilities and inefficiencies that
result in higher-than-necessary costs. The increasingly
heterogeneous IT infrastructure landscape too often
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Your 3-Step Roadmap to IT Modernization
breeds complexity in everything from technology
refresh to monitoring and managing systems and
applications. And organizations’ increased reliance
on IT to achieve business goals often comes without
commensurate increases in budgets and staff,
resulting in those initiatives fighting for the same—
or less—IT resources.
•
•
Digital workplace services. Organizations’ increasing
need for collaboration has made it more challenging
to grant access to the same data to different teams.
Organizations with legacy content management tools
have run into problems because those older systems
were not designed with the heightened and more
complex collaboration demands in mind. Workplaces
also have been challenged by the rise of “shadow IT”
efforts that spring up outside the normal IT chain
of command, as well as by well-meaning but overly
ambitious do-it-yourself users who think nothing
of using their own applications and devices without
anyone’s knowledge or approval.
Business process. There’s an important dichotomy
taking place in most enterprises’ business processes.
On one hand, there has been a dramatic swing away
from traditional, manual processes in favor of digital
processes that are becoming increasingly automated.
But on the other hand, organizations too often
continue to manage legacy data with legacy processes.
There also is an increasing need for processes to
become more interconnected for legal, regulatory and
governance requirements—but those interconnections
are far more challenging when attempted in
organizations that are increasingly fragmented
geographically and across workgroups.
Addressing these challenges demands an IT modernization
plan across all three of these elements.
STEP 1: INFRASTRUCTURE
MODERNIZATION
One of the most fundamental steps organizations should
take in modernizing their infrastructure is to understand the
inherent limitations and drawbacks of legacy infrastructure
and to begin eliminating them. Simply put, legacy
infrastructure, such as network shares, enterprise content
management systems or general-purpose file servers,
are out of alignment with how organizations increasingly
work. These and other legacy systems are inefficient,
costly and difficult to manage. Rather than promoting
user mobility and collaboration across the extended
enterprise, legacy infrastructure impedes that goal by
limiting content and application access only to those
within your physical enterprise.
Modernizing your IT infrastructure means migrating
away from network shares in favor of a cloud content
management platform. There are several specific steps
involved in making that migration smooth, efficient, secure
and successful (LINK HERE TO THE PAPER ON NFS
MIGRATION), and the sooner you begin this process,
the better.
Among the most important benefits in modernizing
your IT infrastructure is the alignment of cloud content
management with the way organizations work today
and the way they will increasingly work in the future.
These include support for increased mobility, support for
multiple device formats, distributed workgroups across
regions and business units and greater collaboration with
outside organizations, including customers, suppliers and
trading partners. IT modernization also supports essential
enterprise risk management features such as compliance,
legal, security and data governance.
STEP 2: THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE
Workers need an intuitive, easy-to-use way to collaborate,
provide mobile access, integrate with other applications
and securely share content across the extended
enterprise. These systems should enable efficient and easy
collaboration in order to work across teams, geographies
and technology platforms with easy sharing, editing,
commenting and reviewing in a single location.
Modernizing your workplace also means that resources
are always available—not just during traditional working
hours or in desktop-centered locations. The ability to
work anywhere and anytime is now a hallmark of modern
workplaces, so you need to look for ways to provide that
access while also ensuring content security, promoting
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Your 3-Step Roadmap to IT Modernization
collaboration and delivering a positive user experience
that results in more innovative usage and better
business outcomes.
Because of the interconnected nature of workplaces and
their users’ applications, your workplace modernization
must include the ability for workers to easily integrate
with a wide range of third-party applications that they
use regularly.
Additionally, workplace modernization’s very definition
demands context-specific insights that promote higher
and deeper levels of intelligence. This may take the shape
of customized delivery of high-value content, while also
obviating the need for routine, repetitive activities that
traditionally have chewed up IT resources such as people,
budget and time.
STEP 3: BUSINESS PROCESS
MODERNIZATION
Today’s changing competitive environment, as well as
rapidly evolving legal, regulatory and risk governance
needs, means business processes and workflows have had
to change as well, and that organizations need to re-think
the way they are interacting with their customer with
modern digital experiences.
As business processes and customer engagement have
become both more complex and more inter-related,
organizations have had to move away from traditional
workflows based on manual steps and processing. At the
same time, demands such as support for pervasive mobility,
customized on-demand content and analytics workloads
have begun transforming business processes in order to
better manage the archival, search and retrieval of content.
This transformation and modernization of business
processes requires a new platform to connect key business
applications with team-centric activities that rely on secure,
reliable and timely access to relevant content—wherever
and whenever it is needed.
This has become particularly true as the way business is
conducted has changed in meaningful and irrevocable ways
in all industries, from healthcare and financial services to
government, education and manufacturing shop floors.
As workers, customers, partners, suppliers and other third
parties increasingly interact on more and more activities,
business processes have evolved in order to accommodate
the “new normal” of everything from global, integrated
supply chains to industry- and geography-specific
regulatory environments.
Legacy business processes have been shattered, and they
need a new approach to IT to support them.
THE CRITICALITY OF CLOUD CONTENT
MANAGEMENT FOR IT MODERNIZATION
A key element of IT modernization and digital
transformation relating to content management is the
reality that legacy infrastructure solutions – network
shares, on-prem content management systems, and sharing
through email attachments – are no longer are sufficient
for the way people work today, and the way they want to in
the future. As workforces become increasingly virtual and
distributed, yet at the same time increasingly collaborative
across functions, the cloud becomes an essential part of IT
modernization to support content management.
Moving content management to the cloud supports all
three elements of IT modernization discussed in this
paper—infrastructure replacement, digital workplace
initiatives and business process. Although there are a lot of
potential options organizations may consider in evaluating
cloud content management solutions, it is important to
look for a platform with certain key features and functions.
These include:
•
“Boundary-less” solutions that transcend geographies
and workforce locations, as well as enable easy
collaboration across organizational boundaries.
•
Broad support for mobility in its many forms, such as IT
consumerization, bring your own device programs and
the rapidly expanding requirements of the Internet of
Things.
•
Intelligent automation of content-driven business
processes across employees, partners and customers. •
Integration with all the most popular apps your
organization use, so users are more productive and
content is more secure.
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Your 3-Step Roadmap to IT Modernization
•
Alignment with security, compliance and data residency
requirements for any industry and geography.
•
Centralized management of content access sharing
inside and outside the organization, while minimizing
the potential for data loss through full visibility and
control over files, policy and provisioning.
•
Simplified IT management that limits the need for
manual monitoring, management and performance
tuning as needs expand, access requirements increase
and content inevitably grows.
•
Ability to add content management capabilities into
custom applications, exposed through application
programming interfaces and software development
kits, and easily integrated into back-end systems.
A key element in your IT modernization strategy should be
the use of a cloud-based content management platform to
use financial and human capital resources more efficiently,
while also driving workforce productivity using a more
flexible, agile, future-proofed architecture.
Decision makers should take stock of their current
infrastructure, workplace and business processes in order
to spot new ways to achieve their goals, identify and
eliminate roadblocks to those goals and engineer the
necessary changes with new IT strategies that align with
evolving business goals.
CONCLUSION
Businesses need to commit to a well-thought-out IT
modernization plan in order to align IT systems with the
way work is conducted—across locations, timeframes, roles,
applications and devices. Without a modernized approach
that accounts for new approaches to infrastructure,
workplaces and business processes in a highly competitive
and challenging business environment, enterprises will
struggle to achieve their desired efficiencies and outcomes.
ABOUT BOX
Box (NYSE:BOX) is the cloud content management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionize how they work by
securely connecting their people, information and applications. Founded in 2005, Box powers more than 80,000 businesses
globally, including AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with
offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. To learn more about Box, visit http://www.box.com/.