Better technology means better business, right? Companies should just gather all the scraping-edge tech their arms can hold. Cloud-native, microservices, artificial intelligence — can they go wrong with such sophisticated weaponry?

They can if they don’t have an attack strategy planned out at the business level, according to Jim Comfort (pictured), general manager of global technology services cloud development and delivery at IBM Corp. “I have not seen many build it; they will come strategies succeed,” he said.

Business is still business even in the software-driven age. Companies must ask what they want to achieve in terms of business drivers, topline revenue growth, new markets, new insights, etc. “And from that, can you derive a technology strategy?” he asked.

Comfort spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. They discussed the need for business to inform information technology and for clear lines of communication between them. (* Disclosure below.)

Constant contact for IT and business

A significant redesign of business objectives will touch everything in IT — infrastructure, applications, development, data governance, security, etc. “That’s the scope that you have to comprehend,” Comfort said.

It requires a constant transfusion of ideas and feedback between line of business and IT. They need to understand their legacy technology so they can compare it to new technology they might adopt. Is it worth the investment? Does it contribute to business goals? Does it have real value? Is it overhyped?

Don’t attempt to overhaul IT from top to bottom in a single throw, Comfort also advised. “Start small enough, and get to the end of something so you know what reality is,” he stated.

Often, digital transformation boils down to some new insights that help the business. Continually asking, “What insight am I looking for?” is a good way to guide companies through each iterative step to transformation. Selecting technologies from a confusing jumble gets easier with that question answered.

“I often joke that the blessing and curse of IBM is the breadth of our portfolio,” Comfort said. 

IBM customer American Airlines Inc. began with a goal of providing a more streamlined experience for customers. It converged its mobile, kiosk and web experiences and modernized them with IBM technologies. The speed with which the company can serve customers through the new converged system is phenomenal, Comfort concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE