2019 @Alfresco Analyst Day: vision for the future with @JohnNewton
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
We wrapped up the 2019 Analyst Day with founder John Newton talking about Alfresco’s vision for the future.
Most digital transformation efforts today are focused on external experiences, that is, how a company interacts with its customers. However, there’s more to it than that: the external experience has to interact with employee experiences and operational systems; this linkage is what Newton calls digital operations. Looking at the ubiquitous onboarding use case, digital transformation is not just about the nice app that the customer sees to upload their documents: it’s also about the straight-through processing that manages what happens after the customer does that upload, or request a service. He points out that it’s all about the process, and that content follows the process. This, obviously, is music to my ears.
Customers need to think about their digital business platform, which is not the same as any vendor’s digital business platform: it’s more than that, and it may be made up of more than one vendor’s platform. It needs to handle the digital outside (customer-facing) as well as the digital inside (employee-facing), and the end-to-end processes and content repositories that link them. There are a number of disruptive technologies that are driving digital operations — cloud, microservices, edge computing, blockchain — and there will always be a new one to add to this list.
That took us to their strategic themes:
- Process-first digital operations, including process, content, search, governance and insight capabilities
- Global-scale, multi-cloud digital operations, which removes the enterprise infrastructure concerns such as scalability and global replication
- Artificial intelligence powering digital operations, with the modern range of AI services now widely available from the internet giants being applied to content and process
- Empowering business users with targeted solutions, and improved user experience
- Empowering builders to accelerate solutions, with development and deployment tools
- Differentiate open source and enterprise (note that this is the first mention of open source all day), with add-on capabilities to the open source core services and engines
Always an insightful speaker, and I’m particularly interested in how the layers above the API “surface” (such as the Alfresco Digital Framework and Digital Workspace built on the ADF) are adopted in practice versus direct API usage.
That’s it for the analyst day; I’ll be back tomorrow for the regular user conference.
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