The top three priority for majority of enterprise CIOs is the achievement of competence in event-driven IT by 2020, according to Gartner.
CIOs can define an event-centric digital business strategy that will be key to delivering on the growth agenda of CEOs.
“Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a key technology approach to delivering this goal,” said Anne Thomas, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
Businesses should respond and take advantage of real-time requirements because digital business demands a rapid response to events. Business CIOs should know how to make their application software more event-driven.
CIOs should focus on defining an event-centric digital business strategy and articulate the business value of EDA.
According to the Gartner 2017 CEO survey, 58 percent of CEOs see growth as their highest business priority. CEOs achieve growth by adopting new business models, introducing new products and services, expanding into new markets and geographies, upselling to existing customers and stealing market share from competitors.
CEOs view digital business as their No. 1 opportunity for growth. Most CEOs recognize a triangular relationship between technology, product improvement and growth. Technology is the fundamental enabler of digital transformation and digital companies have figured out that EDA is the secret sauce that gives them a competitive edge.
Event-centric processing is the native architecture for digital business, and to enable growth through digital business, strategic parts of the application portfolio will need to become event-driven. CIOs can use EDA to ensure growth by enabling digital business transformation, capitalizing on digital business moments, using modern technologies, accelerating business agility and enabling application modernization.
A convergence of events generates a business opportunity, and real-time analytics of those events, as well as current data and wider context data, can be used to influence a decision and generate a successful business outcome.
The events generated by systems — customers, things and artificial intelligence (AI) — must be digitized in order to recognize and process in real time. EDA will become an essential skill in supporting the transformation by 2018. Application architecture and development teams must develop EDA competency now to prepare for next year’s needs.
The Gartner report said CIO should identify projects where EDA can provide value to enable adoption of technology innovations such as microservices, Internet of Things (IoT), AI, machine learning, blockchain and smart contracts.
CIO should know that an inhibitor to digital business transformation can be a legacy application. A digital business technology foundation must support availability, scalability, automatic recovery and dynamic extensibility.
Gartner said digital business applications must use modern technologies to engage customers, support digital business ecosystems, capitalize on digital moments, and exploit AI and the IoT.