Too often we at Knowit encounter frustrated CIOs and IT executives that are being challenged to lower their IT spend by business stakeholders, who do not always understand the service delivered nor the received value. As companies become more digital, the volume of IT spend tends to increase, placing greater demands on transparency of IT costs and underlying cost components. Without cost transparency, it is difficult to understand what is driving an increased IT spend, what the link to the business is and what business value it brings. Inadequate traceability of costs thus reduces the ability to create a tight link between business strategy and technology investments and explain the impact of change in IT cost.

Cloud is no longer a hype – it is mainstream amongst companies worldwide. Gartner estimates that the global market for public cloud services will reach a value of $266.4 billion in 2020, as adoption of cloud-based services for both software and infrastructure continue to grow. The consensus now states that it is no longer question of “if” a shift to cloud should be executed, but rather a question of “when” it should happen (if it has not already). As such, companies are increasingly focusing their efforts on formulating strategies and roadmaps for the inevitable shift that promises benefits such as cost savings, increased speed and flexibility, improved innovation, and evergreen IT, amongst other. In such a scenario, we ask ourselves, do companies expect the right benefits enabled by cloud?

It is no longer news that the rapid development and increasing maturity of technology in recent years have impacted all industries and redefined how business is made. However, many companies are still struggling with how to make use of this new technology, be it to innovate new products, create new business models, generate new revenue streams, ensure operational efficiency or simply just keep up with competition. This article deals with what should be (but isn’t always) considered an important part of the foundation, or the core, of a digital business, namely the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Without this “digital core” in place, innovation efforts tend to become more cumbersome and eventually risk becoming futile. Regardless of how mature your digital core is today, a proper ERP strategy is always a key component of your organization’s strategic plans to be able support the business tomorrow.