As businesses advance their digital transformation efforts, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are evolving — arguably as significantly as the shift from materials resource planning (MRP) to ERP. Just as businesses reimagined operations by leveraging advances in hardware and software in the 1980s, they’re now turning to next-generation ERP.

Analysts have found that roughly 50% or more enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects fail, and approximately half of all projects are considered challenging.

In the wake of COVID-19, we saw a significant shift toward as-a-service offerings, something we haven’t seen in years. From conversations with CIOs over the past 12 months, we know they are looking for the flexibility, efficiencies and cost savings they get from the as-a-service model. This is especially important to them as they evolve their business models in a hybrid IT direction and become consumers of IT.

The era of manual data management and governance is rapidly coming to a close. The size of the trove of data at nearly every company has become so enormous that it cannot be maintained using manual cleaning, cataloging, governance and search methods. The release of Lumada Data Catalog 6.1 breaks new ground in automating data management, cleaning and governance processes, making it easier to find data and grant access to those who need it.

Ransomware has become a familiar front page news topic thanks to recent high-profile attacks against a major meat producer and an East Coast operator of a critical oil pipeline. Also, consider the attack on a provider of software tools to IT outsourcing shops that let hackers paralyze hundreds of businesses on all five continents. No doubt the ransomware threat is serious, and now Washington is mobilizing to wipe out a scourge it formerly treated only as a criminal nuisance.

In our modern world, accelerating the process of extracting insights from data is a complex challenge. Exacerbating this task are colossal data volumes, the expansion and use of multiple cloud platforms, and the increasing demands for self-service in a way that maintains compliance. Enterprises attempting to tackle the problem encounter various forms of friction everywhere they turn.

As enterprises seek to accelerate the process of getting insights from their data, they face numerous sources of friction. Data sprawl across silos, diverse formats, the explosion of data volumes, and the fact that data is spread across many data centers and clouds and processed by many disparate tools, all act to slow the progress.

The arrival of more and more data in all segments of the enterprise started out as an embarrassment of riches, but quickly transformed into something close to a nightmare of dark data. However, a raft of new technologies and the processes embodied in DataOps are charting a path forward in which a much higher percentage of data becomes useful. The challenge most companies face is how to manage and get access to all the data flooding in from all directions.

Amid the rapid pace of change felt by organizations this year, it’s no surprise that digital transformation projects have been high on the agenda for CIOs across the globe. To achieve both their organizational and transformation goals and become digitally agile as a result, CIOs are often tasked with creating the conditions needed to enable an intelligent and flexible digital core.

“40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in CIPS [cloud infrastructure and platform services] by 2023, up from only 20% in 2020.”.As the cloud permeates every aspect of business, decision-makers must make critical choices regarding infrastructure at every turn. Their answers will ultimately determine if every part of an organization is empowered to move forward in a cohesive way to reach business outcomes.