Introduction
Many big companies have legacy IT that stifles innovation. This affects day-to-day operations, but goes further. In a digital world – it also affects their ability to develop and launch the new digital products that are such a critical part of modern business.
Nearly every company now has digital offers. Even those firmly rooted in the physical world – planes, medical devices, energy – have digital products ranging from entertainment, to telehealth, to as-a-service offers. Most aspire to grow their digital offers in both scale and sophistication.
Building, launching, and maintaining those products requires corporate IT infrastructure to design, host, and manage them. However, many such companies have sprawling legacy IT systems that have grown over decades, and are not fit for this purpose.
Newer digital native businesses were built around a much more agile coreless architecture, which – as we will discuss – is much better suited to digital innovation. Global companies cannot just rip out their IT systems and start again - the downtime would crush the business. But, if they carry on as they are, they will gradually be outmanoeuvred by more agile startups and competitors.
This paper discusses the benefits of a coreless architecture, what it looks like, and a low-risk approach to evolving centralized legacy systems into a coreless architecture that supports innovation.
