Although many professionals think the cloud is a change agent and business disruptor for corporate IT, I would counter that it is the culture derived from this new technology that has truly redefined what’s plausible. The ability to scale an enterprise application based on demand was a game changer for many companies. But, to automatically configure upstream and downstream systems holistically based on the evaluation of a changing business environment is evolutionary and defines the promise of digital agility.

Organizations that incorporate new technologies into their enterprise often find limited success or impact to the overall business. The promise of digital agility cannot be achieved by applying new technologies to an old paradigm. Business leaders need to evaluate processes, staff, governance, and culture to obtain the desired competitive advantage that consumes and reconfigures business execution on demand.

True automation at scale models that embrace new technologies will force corporate IT to focus on process efficiencies across all systems in an enterprise and reduce costly manual intervention and complex governance processes.

Stratascale enables organizational evolution

When it comes to technology, companies get bogged down with what they have. They don’t focus enough on why they have it, or how they can develop new solutions, tools, and processes to create that evolutionary step forward toward their true destination.

To automate effectively at scale in a public or private cloud environment, organizations need to develop an assessment methodology that will monetize the value of software, competencies of staff, effectiveness of governance, and ROI of physical technology investments. When going through this exercise, IT leaders need to question everything. Any place where an executive can’t answer simple questions on why a technology or process is in place is where further time should be spent. And that is where Stratascale comes in.

SHI President and CEO Thai Lee perfected the way companies buy software and hardware at competitive costs with maximum value. Now, through our new company, Stratascale, we are taking that same approach and utilizing SHI’s capabilities to create process efficiencies and reduce operational costs for our clients.

What differentiates Stratascale is our ability to provide a realistic view of a client’s organization by evaluating its cloud and physical IT infrastructure and grading the effectiveness of its processing models -- including governance and administrative overhead. This enables a client to make not just the most cost-effective technology selection, but the best effective business decision. For example, if a client spends $5 million on its hybrid cloud infrastructure, we can show them how to save 20% of costs through automation and standardization. We can go even deeper and identify repeatable processes they should put in place to increase their efficiency and profitability by driving continuous improvement.

Stratascale professionals assist clients to establish processing baselines that enable the creation of metrics that support critical business decisions. Using manufacturing principals, we measure events and create value clauses for software, staff, and processes. We also establish service level agreements (SLAs) for processes, groups, and organizations that formalize expectations and transform our clients’ enterprise into a group of service providers. This concept of treating functions in a pipeline as services that the staff consumes and from which they expect a value, drives new levels of efficiency for the enterprise.

Stratascale’s digital agility methodology also provides a huge advantage to our clients by allowing them to pivot when necessary to deliver IT capabilities faster, under different conditions, in different directions, and at different times. In the end, the real value associated with digital agility is the ability to ensure the client is competitive against its peers in their industry and the process model is flexible and agile.

Stratascale’s Innovation Labs is another differentiator. Our research analyst team leverages our technical advisors and Customer Innovation Center to bring industry-leading insights and real-world wisdom and experience to our customers. Through this offering, we put the client in its own magic quadrant and bring an analyst relations experience that is calibrated to a client’s specific needs. Plus, we provide a setting in which clients can test drive and validate technologies and processes.

How it will all work to your advantage  

Taking an automation-at-scale approach will allow companies to adapt to the cloud and utilize all its benefits culturally and technically. With Stratascale’s help, organizations can set the expectation and direction of technology innovation with objective measurements that can expand reaction time of functions. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Through digital agility, Stratascale’s trusted advisors are focused on uncovering potentially fragile processing components in the enterprise, and by using stress and validating impact through metrics, we ensure there is further focus on how to increase processing scale through automation.