A recent study by McKinsey & Company, for example, found that many companies’ cloud investments have not helped them to fully reach their transformation goals.
All enterprises have valuable digital assets, whether data or functionality. But these capabilities are only strategic assets if the company can do things with them—that is, if the capabilities can be securely leveraged, reused, combined, and shared with partners, all with little friction.
This enables a shift from large, plodding development teams to smaller, faster, more independent teams. These parallel development teams can more quickly build and release new features and experiences, learn from them, and rapidly iterate, increasing the enterprise’s overall pace of innovation.
A loosely-coupled architecture oriented around containers, APIs, and micro-services can, when properly managed, make it easier for enterprises to leverage their digital assets.
or example: not so long ago, a major U.S. ticket sales and distribution company’s business revolved around phone sales, physical ticket booths, and first-party apps as its primary sales channels. All of these are approaches in which the company carries the responsibility of attracting customers and shoulders the most of cost of expanding its reach. But in recent years, the company has expressed capabilities such as event discovery and ticket purchasing as APIs, allowing its core business to be inserted into digital experiences where would-be customers are already assembled, such as social media platforms.
Amit Zavery, VP and Head of Platform (FORBES)