Now that it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, migratory birds have made their way south to their warmer homes. Most often noticed is the goose, a faithful friend who has some interesting things to teach the IT industry.
Geese are interesting creatures. They are generally thought of as beautiful and ornamental (though messy) representations of nature to those of us who live in more urban settings. Their annual journey has me thinking of one of their unique characteristics.
These migratory birds have the ability to perform a manoeuvre called a “whiffle.” By turning their body upside down (but leaving head and neck in their normal position), it causes a sudden drop in altitude without a corresponding loss of control. It’s described as looking like a falling leaf. The remarkable lesson for us in IT is that the goose stays in control the entire time, using it to avoid both avian predators and human hunters. I recently wrote an article about how it relates to IT.
Why IT needs to whiffle
IT should take a lesson from our friends in flight and develop a similar mechanism. We must find ways to avoid sudden threats and still be in control so we can keep our organizations running and resilient—despite constant economic pressures, disruptive markets, and even pandemics and natural disasters. And at the same time, we must keep an eye towards the future so we can put the pieces in place—incrementally if necessary—for transformation that responds to customer demands, new technologies, and pushes the business toward innovation.
Micro Focus functions every day with this run and transform mindset. We help customers set the strategies and implement technologies that simplify their IT operations, keep them secure, develop Agile software practices, and find the insights in their data they can act upon. We developed five specific outcome areas to help our customers run and transform at the same time.
- Accelerate Application Delivery: Scale Agile and DevOps practices across all environments, from mainframe to cloud, to sustain delivery velocity requirements as operations run. At the same time enable organizations to transform by combining value stream principles and enterprise scale to make the software factory more intelligent and efficient.
- Modernize Core Applications: Build on the IT investments your organization relies on, continuously delivering value as you run your business in an evolving environment. Enable transformation by leveraging innovative technology to build even greater value into core business systems across mainframe, cloud, and hybrid worlds.
- Simplify Your IT Transformation: Run IT with a Digital Factory and IT Center of Excellence approach. By simplifying the complexity of operating a mix of traditional and cloud services with incompatible tools collected over decades, organizations can more easily transform to meet new opportunities.
- Strengthen Your Cyber Resilience: Protect what matters most by detecting threat actors, responding to advanced threats, and recovering from an attack as your operations run today. Evolve at the speed of change using security analytics for hybrid environments to help your organization transform.
- Analyze Your Data in Time to Act: Unify analytics without needing to have all the data in one place so you can run your daily operations with better insights. As organizations transform, they need to deliver the performance at scale needed for accurate and actionable business insights.
So as you pursue your IT goals, keep your winged friends in mind this fall. And if you don’t have a “whiffle manoeuvre”, find out more about how Micro Focus helps enterprises run and transform at the same time.
