Author Archives: Esther Shein

One of the habits from Stephen Covey’s bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to begin with the end in mind. Putting that in today’s business context, organizations need to figure out what digital transformation means for their business and what their goals are before they go throwing a bunch of new technologies at an ill-defined problem. By focusing too closely on being competitive and innovative and putting the bulk of their efforts into technology, they might be missing the boat.

Technology, of course, is a key driver. IDC estimates $1.2 trillion will be spent on digital transformation technologies in 2017, an increase of 17.8 percent over 2016.

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James Lowey has seen a lot of change during his career, which began in 1992, managing computer labs at several companies and doing what he calls “the pre-Y2K flurry of IT projects.”

Lowey, CIO at genomics and cancer research company TGen, earned his early IT chops working on systems like Windows NT 3.1, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Linux. Since joining TGen 14 years ago, he’s been responsible for the development of two supercomputers. Instead of worrying about how to keep his own skills current, Lowey finds that it’s more challenging keeping up with the pace of scientific discovery and the technology that enables it – which he says often moves faster than most IT technological change.

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One of the first tasks Tom Doria was charged with when he was brought on board as CIO of SeneGence International late last year was to evaluate cloud services for ERP. The global manufacturer and multilevel marketing company for women’s cosmetics is experiencing tremendous growth and its platform couldn’t match the pace needed for the company to remain competitive, says Doria.

“We have been using an ERP package that was designed more for a small or medium business market and didn’t have the extensibility and scalability capabilities that we were looking for to run a Fortune 500 company,’’ he says.

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Building a technology stack from scratch in the cloud can be a dream — if you’re a startup. But if you’re an established company steeped in on-premises solutions, shifting to the cloud can mean unexpected hurdles and headaches beyond belief.

Companies looking to make good on the benefits of moving to the cloud need to go in with eyes wide open. To be sure, the much discussed benefits of the cloud — in terms of time to market, cost savings, the ability to scale resources as needed, and so on — are real. But enterprise cloud adopters say they have been surprised by some of the lesser-documented challenges migrating to the cloud brings, such as the difficulty in changing traditional mindsets, the lack of visibility into the new infrastructure, the cost of data transfers, governance issues and how licensing agreements need to be revised or new ones negotiated.

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