Whether in the cloud or on earth: Intelligence needs simplicity

We all experience the benefit of our long-term memory every day. What has once found its way in there is available to us as knowledge at any time - as if we had just learned or experienced it.

It neither makes us sluggish nor burdens us; on the contrary, it makes us agile and maintains the core of our identity into old age. It can do all this because the brain reserves only certain areas of the cerebral cortex for it and not all of its resources.

In IT, when the topics of simplicity and knowledge storage come to mind, most people nowadays think of the cloud. Information can be stored and retrieved there relatively easily.

In this respect, the cloud really does function like an outsourced memory. But the principle of building separate areas for different tasks does not only exist in the clouds, but also on earth.

Historical data and documents are part of the long-term memory of companies and should be kept in separate environments so that they are not at the expense of agility. In contrast, it is of secondary importance whether these environments are located in the cloud or in the company's own data center.

Separating historical information from operational information and managing its lifecycle separately on a dedicated platform has numerous advantages: Significant cost savings are already achieved in the short term because legacy systems can be completely decommissioned.

As a result, operating costs can usually be reduced by 80 percent compared with continuing to operate the legacy systems. The investments required for this are amortized correspondingly quickly.

On the other hand, this approach also has a positive impact in the long term. This allows companies to clean up, enrich and optimize legacy data before it is outsourced and stored in an audit-proof manner.

This is quite crucial if the promise of data-driven business processes and models is to come true. Decisions made on the basis of data analysis are only as good as the quality of the data itself.

For a historical information management platform to support these and other agile scenarios such as the transformation to SAP S/4 Hana or mergers & acquisitions as efficiently as effectively, the highest possible degree of automation is required.

Ideally, such a platform allows data and documents to be transferred from the legacy systems at the push of a button. Changes to the business objects and data structures in the live systems can be transferred to their connectors as automatically as possible.

The potential of information that does not have to be transferred from the legacy systems in the operational environments is also determined by them in an automated manner to the greatest possible extent.

It provides the filtering rules necessary to migrate the selected information from the entire inventory in a neutral and modern format, so that as many transformation and migration tools as possible understand these rules automatically.

The modern format also ensures that the historical information is just as accessible as the operational information, for example via data hubs for analysis solutions.

Simplicity instead of complexity

Human intelligence depends essentially on the connections that link brain areas specialized for specific tasks. For the conscious mind, neither the complexity in the areas nor the complexity in the connections are visible. Everything runs automatically.

For the Intelligent Enterprise, automation is the key to reducing complexity. Automated management of the lifecycle of historical information and the automated connections of a corresponding platform to operational systems simplify IT environments overall and make information management intelligent. In the cloud as well as in the data center.