Enterprise needs a new mindset. We must first acknowledge that we’re living in a “continuous” age. IT strategy must move away from stop-gap measures, annual schedules and magical set-it-and-forget-it dreams. Organizations, like the rest of the modern world, are now real-time, streaming, evolving technological entities requiring ongoing processes of intense study, experimentation and scrutiny.

The culture has to change — and people hate change, so it requires commitment. You can’t deliver on the promise of hyper-converged infrastructure or artificial intelligence or blockchain, or whatever the next big thing may be, without the hard work of first defining how that technology builds on your existing technology and how it should function in your environment — doggedly tackling integration, simplifying and retraining and upgrading in continuous incremental efforts to foment adoption.