Enabling Agility in eCommerce

Legacy IT

The days of the Monolithic e-commerce platform are truly numbered and are rapidly approaching the point where their affordability is unsustainable. Enterprises must adapt the innovations of the IT industry if they wish to remain relevant, let alone profitable.

 

What does this mean?

 

IT decision makers (ITDMs) need to understand the technological kaleidoscope of solutions available from a capabilities perspective and empower their technical teams. These teams must leverage these technologies intelligently and ensure sound architectural best-practices are employed when delivering.

 

Where to begin?

Let's start with where not to begin. Do not start with technology. Premature decisions on issues of technology will only exacerbate organizational shortfalls. Many business processes will have to evolve in order to extract the maximum ROI of any platform. Getting personnel to realize this early on will pay dividends throughout the migration process. Organizational mindsets first have to change before any platform analysis are conducted. This involves effectively communicating up and down the business value-chain across the enterprise. It is here, where the intersection of business and technology occurs that sets the business's agility speed limit.

 

The usual, and not so usual suspects --

 

• Cloud Computing
• Big Data
• Enterprise Internet of Things (IoT)
• Microservices
• Enterprise APIs
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Blockchains

 A Google® search of any of the above terms with return a plethora of results; Microservices alone returns 2,170,000 results as of the writing of this article. Add a few more searches for the additional terms and you get the point, it gets down right overwhelming. While it's perhaps true, implementing any one of the above referenced technologies effectively can potentially raise your agility speed limit, however, is there a technological sweet-spot where enterprises can exceed their limit?

 

Cloud Computing

Adoption of cloud-based e-commerce services has well surpassed critical-mass, so much that it is nearly impossible to keep track of the almost daily announcements on the subject. But what does it really mean for IT decision makers who are subjected to a cacophony of opinions from all sorts of vendors all trying to win their business?

 

Cloud computing is certainly changing all-manners of e-commerce. With its promise of increased scalability, reliability and most appealing of them all, Pay-Per-Use pricing, executives who understand how cloud computing changes their organizations' cost models are ever more willing to consider these platforms. Furthermore, executives who understand how to leverage the right strategies with the appropriate technologies, stand to reap the most rewards in the form of their enterprises' ability to adapt to ever-changing competition, regulatory and compliance forces and ever changing levels of sophistication in their customers choices.

How large is the Cloud? Lets take Amazon's AWS as an example. For Q1 2016, revenues rose 63% over the Q1 2015; $2.56B USD to be exact. This suggests there are an awful lot of organizations who see the value in provisioning resources using this model.

Cloud Computing enables agility in e-commerce by allowing executives to focus on strategic business initiatives that grow the enterprise vs. having to manage day-to-day IT operations.