CIOs Must Define an Event-Centric Digital Business Strategy

Achieving broad competence in event-driven IT will be a top three priority for the majority of global enterprise CIOs by 2020, according to Gartner. Defining an event-centric digital business strategy will be key to delivering on the growth agenda that many CEOs see as their highest business priority.

"Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a key technology approach to delivering this goal," said Anne Thomas, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Digital business demands a rapid response to events. Organizations must be able to respond to and take advantage of 'business moments' and these real-time requirements are driving CIOs to make their application software more event-driven.

Because CEOs are focused on growth via digital business, 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.

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 foster growth by enabling digital business transformation, capitalizing on digital business moments, using modern technologies, accelerating business agility and enabling application modernization.

The events generated by systems, customers, things and artificial intelligence (AI), must be digitized so that they can be recognized and processed in real time. EDA will become an essential skill in supporting the transformation by 2018, meaning that application architecture and development teams must develop EDA competency now to prepare for next year's needs. CIOs should identify current projects where EDA can provide the most value to enable adoption of technology innovations such as microservices, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, machine learning, blockchain and smart contracts.

A legacy application portfolio can be a significant inhibitor to digital business transformation. A digital business technology foundation must support continuous availability, massive scalability, automatic recovery and dynamic extensibility. Digital business applications must also use modern technologies to engage customers, support digital business ecosystems, capitalize on digital moments, and exploit AI and the IoT.