Companies must make judicious choices when embracing new technologies.

Withdrawing cash from an American bank at a sun-drenched ATM in Marrakech, it’s easy to be awed by technology’s advances. Most technology executives are painfully aware, however, that today’s IT systems teeter upon fragile foundations from a bygone era.

Enterprises must make judicious choices when embracing new technologies. Adopt a loser, and you waste precious time and money. Adopt a winner too late, and you lose market share to competitors and new entrants. Accenture has identified eight interrelated trends that reveal the secrets to avoiding such costly mistakes. They are part of a whole new ecology of “enterprise agility” that is emerging across industries.

By looking holistically at the emerging technologies, decision-makers can see the wide-ranging business problems and opportunities shaping the new ecology. With a whole ecology for guidance and support, decision-makers can create and execute a first-mover strategy with confidence and without risking technology obsolescence.

The End of Legacy Systems
Today’s enterprises are hapless heirs to IT systems that, at best, no longer serve their needs. When they first emerged, IT systems were simply applications for discrete business processes. They each ran on their own hardware platforms and shared a trio of unwelcome traits:

• When two applications sought to interoperate – either to share data or common functions – only one option was available: create an ad-hoc breach in both applications. Such point-to-point integration spawned hundreds of application stovepipes, with even simple modifications requiring utmost skill, lest the whole system collapse.

• Business processes became deeply embedded into the system’s innards, making them hard to change and impossible to re-use. Many companies, particularly in financial services, had no easy access to their most unique processes, which were buried in a snarl of undocumented systems.

• Applications clung to the hardware on which they ran, a “box-per-application” approach that led to inelastic hardware capacity. One application would be starving for hardware resources while another was grossly underutilizing them. To avoid nail biting during peak usage, many enterprises reacted by building a fixed-cost, over-provisioned infrastructure. Often, fewer than 10 percent of the services were using more than 10 percent of their capacity.

Most enterprises now recognize the need for legacy systems to be replaced with more flexible, efficient ones. But what will the new enterprise IT system look like? The end of legacy systems marks a new age for IT: the age of enterprise agility.

Eight Trends Toward Agility
Eight key trends are poised to create a new IT ecology that is agile at all levels:

Trend #1 – Seamless interoperability: Integration is the goal of this trend, which turns monolithic IT applications into modular business services with standardized interfaces by exchanging messages in a standardized language.

Trend #2 – Process-centric IT: While Trend #1 grapples with integration, Trend #2 offers a new way to execute complex business processes. Together, these two trends comprise “service-oriented architecture” (SOA), a paradigm that extricates business processes from IT systems and represents them formally in a business language. Process change no longer requires digging deep into IT systems; rather, business units can respond quickly to market conditions by directly changing the processes directly.

Trend #3 – Virtualized infrastructure: New technology is emerging to apportion processor cycles, storage and network bandwidth dynamically to different applications. This “virtualized” infrastructure frees applications from a single piece of hardware so they can use resources efficiently. Predictive positioning is another new approach that uses historical data to “predict” an application’s computational needs.
 
Trend #4 – Industrialization of systems development processes: While Trends 1through 3 offer agility at the levels of infrastructure, architecture and applications, Trend #4 tackles system development, which is notorious for cost overruns and outright failure. Today’s software development is further complicated by onshore-offshore teams working across distances and time zones. A more disciplined and industrialized approach to software development is emerging, by integrating tools tightly with team support, formalizing processes and automating.

Trend #5 – True enterprise intelligence from data is on the horizon with sophisticated extract, transform and load capabilities, which are emerging in ERP systems to give access to ERP data. Combined with Web service standards, they are allowing enterprises to extract sensor and Internet data. Meanwhile, process-centric IT can reduce cycle time for translating business intelligence from data into action.

Trend #6 – Fluid collaboration platforms: Trends 6 through 8 promote operational agility by enabling far-flung workers, both mobile and office-bound, to communicate and collaborate effectively. Today’s workers are overwhelmed by faxes, e-mail, voice mail and instant messages, which are uncoordinated and divorced from business processes. The new ecology of agility incorporates a fluid collaboration platform.

Trend #7 – Enterprise mobility: A growing mobile work force and adoption of mobile consumer applications are driving demand for mobile enterprise applications. On the device end, more capabilities for devices, low-latency networks, and emerging technologies such as rich Internet applications will support applications from data access to training-on-the-go. On the back end, process-centric IT will deliver enterprise processes across multiple devices.

Trend #8 – Innovation agility: Until recently, the Web was primarily a publishing medium for large organizations. But the latest generation of Web 2.0 innovation and technologies like Ajax, Ruby on the Rails, and Flash/Flex are enabling a new class of RIA and user-created situational applications. While it’s not yet clear how Web 2.0 will affect the enterprise, Accenture anticipates it may be a powerful external driver for innovation.

The new IT ecology redefines the technology landscape, establishing enterprise agility as the next basis of competition. These eight trends will make achieving high agility through prudent use of technology easier than ever, and will ensure that agile organizations are unencumbered  when they want to embrace innovation and change.

Kishore S. Swaminathan is the chief scientist at Accenture. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .