The demand for digital transformation may come from any number of sources: competitive pressures, post-merger integration, the sunset of a previous technological platform, new leadership, or simply the pain of data not flowing among various systems. However, when that demand comes, it leads to the complex task of determining a technology strategy—a task that must be driven by business objectives and centered on people, processes, data, and brand-new capabilities from a constantly evolving technology landscape. To succeed, you must effectively define your problem, develop a strategy linked to business value, understand market and economic constraints, and then turn that strategy into a technology-enablement roadmap. The roadmap is driven by the firm’s core competencies, its technology talent, its inventory of software, and its appetite for innovation but the most important of these drivers is the market. Technology is the competitive advantage and the strategic roadmap is its genesis.

User preferences are changing, information needs are changing, user tolerance for latency is changing. In today’s world, businesses need custom, multifunctional applications to stitch together data from different sources and present it in an intuitive interface. No longer running in silos, critical applications have to be interoperable, capable of exchanging information with other solutions, and flexible to meet changing business needs.

Today, every good business decision arises from meaningful data. Without a comprehensive, readable repository of data, all the technology in the world will be useless to your company. Yet in today’s big data environment, you need an architecture and engineering strategy to reduce costs and risks. You reduce costs by steering away from uneconomical data archiving, dirty data, and wasted computing resources. You reduce risks by focusing on security—keeping this data safeguarded from hackers—and the fact that ever-evolving data strategies could end up leaving you behind.

A good analytics platform mimics your business model to convert data into the information you need to answer the key questions of your business. A great analytics platform also shows you the information you didn’t know you needed—the business intelligence that you wouldn’t otherwise see but could benefit from. For your humans (and machines) to effectively diagnose, predict, prescribe, and continually improve every decision, they need self-service analytics.

A successful analytics application is designed around user experience (UX). It draws in the user with clever layouts, encourages data discovery with intuitive navigation, and spurs data exploration through tailored visualizations. After all, the most important function of an app is adoption: if your people don’t use it, they never see the data they need.

Because applications in the cloud are not hardware-dependent, you pay only for the computing resources you need. Thus, if designed well, cloud solutions lead to significant cost savings. Self-scalable and self-healing, they reduce your need for database administrators as well as capital-intensive servers. Eventually, moving to the cloud is a no-brainer.

For all of these infrastructures, platforms, and apps that make your business run, AArete can manage them for you. If you decide that maintaining and supporting technology is not a core competency, you can outsource it to us. After all, who could be better at managing your systems than we who built them?

A company’s IT systems should provide easy access to critical applications, systems or networks to the right people at the right time while keeping unauthorized users out to prevent theft and fraud. Whether they are customers, employees or vendors, each user’s digital identity should grant them access to select portions of the IT portfolio through an Identity Access Management (IAM) program that includes the policies and technologies to grant appropriate permissions and safeguard critical information.