ABOUT ADAPTIVE.

Today everything is high-speed, high-tech, highly connected, global. Technology innovation advances relentlessly, driving business change. But business change also transforms technology innovation. It is a continuous, ever-intensifying feedback loop.

For most IT chiefs the pressures mount. How do they justify the value of rising IT expenditures meet ballooning needs, choose between often conflicting goals, deliver new capabilities, faster and faster, when quality is an absolute imperative?

The ability to adapt is critical: long-term survival depends on adapting to the ecosystem of dynamic business relationships and shifting business environments.

Today, successful companies exploit their business relationships and deliver better products and services through alliances, shared connected assets, collaboration and outsourcing. Today's innovative business leaders are agile and adaptable: they shrink the core of their business and expand its periphery.

Take Dell, for instance. They don’t make chipsets or motherboards, and so on: they outsource all this. They  expand the periphery of Dell to include its suppliers while shrinking the core (marketing, sales, and assembly). This makes them adaptive: they can shed suppliers, take on new ones, move in just about any direction they want, when they want.

We can characterize how well organizations in general leverage IT by examining two key dimensions.

·         Mindset: how organizations make decisions about IT; and

·         Execution: how well they implement those decisions.

Adaptive IT means having a technology infrastructure that is an "eco-structure" – one that stretches beyond the boundaries of the enterprise to all the partners, suppliers, and customers that make up its ecosystem.

Adaptive IT means that whenever you deploy IT capabilities, you become religious about standards, but agnostic about technology and vendors.

In the world of Adaptive IT, business and IT executives share involvement with the fundamental decisions about what, how, why and who to connect with, about how transactions are conducted. The chasm that once existed between IT and high-level strategy is bridged.

Today, technology upkeep consumes an ever-increasing share of the IT budget; some organizations are spending 90% of the IT budget just to maintain existing systems. With 10% left for new initiatives, there's little flexibility to seize new opportunity.

An Adaptive IT approach creates an IT environment where change can be embraced more cheaply, while ongoing operating costs are reduced. Adaptive IT lowers an organization's incremental cost of change.

For every organization, the roadmap to Adaptive IT will be unique – and the path won't necessarily be a straight-line. But every step will yield value to the organization.

Adaptive IT truly supports the business's growth and profitability goals: managing growing business complexity, placing smart technology bets in a non-deterministic world, and capitalizing on new opportunities by rapidly deploying technology capabilities.

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