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In an age where the digital world is transforming right in front of us, there are some cliffs we in the IT world must make sure we don’t hang on by the tips of our fingers. In Tuesday morning’s keynote session by Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro, Neemuchwala deliberated on the 5 key actions to watch out for as we as IT mountaineers and IT era climbers conquer the digital peaks.

In “The New Service Economy: Gaining Advantage in a Digital World” Keynote, Neemuchwala broke down the elements of “Conquering the Digital Peaks” during Tuesday morning’s presentation of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. He discussed now simplifying the legacy environments, introducing design persuasiveness, building a “true” cloud environment, enabling DevOps and ensuring information security are all very mission-critical actions the engineers of tomorrow’s digital frontier need to be mindful of. We are all seeing a shift in our digital age, and more than anything else, we need to continue to make this a “swift shift.”

1. Simplifying Legacy Environments– With legacy systems being the foundations upon which we build today’s information technology innovations, we have to make sure we all take it “back to basics.” As we continue to shape and mold newer technologies, we have to make sure that our legacy foundations are solid. Put ourselves in the users shoes- they want unpretentious, simple systems and by providing the users this, we can trust our past legacy environments to provide us the solid groundwork for us to continue building the technology new age moving forward.

2. Introducing Design Pervasiveness– It’s an interesting thought to consider that today’s users are transitioning from the digital world to the real world, as much as several times a day. Back and forth, users enter digital frontiers and go back to their real lives as much as 20 times a day. As technology engineers, we must create with design being the most crucial element of conquering today’s digital peaks. Neemuchwala took a moment to discuss and examine the Apple iPhone in detail. IPhone engineers are one of the many to make the design aspect top of mind, and because they do, the international conversion rate of how many people intuitively understood how to maneuver the device in a matter of a few hours was off the charts. Design with universality.

3. Building a “True” Cloud Environment– There is no way around it, Hyperconnectivity is all the new rage and it’s not just about migrating today’s programs we use and just dropping them in the cloud, it’s about “true digital re-imagination.” As simple as it may be just to transition our systems into Cloud-based applications, platforms and infrastructure, we should look farther than that. The Cloud give us permission to enable applications, programs and application programming interfaces (API’s) to interact with one another, in a way that they never have been able to.

4. Enabling DevOps– “Agile System Administration” or “agile operations” are all ways that have been used to define DevOps in the past. Our favorite definition, and perhaps one of the most intricate definitions we’ve heard is from Jez Humble, “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” One-click deploys, automated systems are all constituents of DevOps. Nowadays, digital rigs have been made to construct, prototype and test newly developed applications- all in the name of increasing the speed to market rate. DevOps gives us an opportunity to deliver new products to users that meet their expectations around availability, performance and the technology world’s pace of change.

5. Ensuring Information Security– With all the hyper connectivity and heaps of data flowing within and across enterprise systems, security should always be on- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Some enterprises have been taught hard lessons about information security recently, and it’s up to us to ensure that all IT systems going forward should uphold security with upmost importance. There will always be worry and concern around the security issue, but with today’s augmented intelligence platforms, information security and the detection of it will be enhanced and further enhanced the farther we go.

The digital frontier is changing daily and the new digital experience is created for and by us, the IT mountaineers. The steps and actions taken today will shape tomorrow’s digital world- let’s keep climbing in the right direction. (Image Source: Oracle Corporation)