Digital Journey from Evolutionary to Sustainable, Comfort to Being Responsible and Innovation to Operational
Let’s talk Trend:
Today it is no surprise that Cloud adoption, Automation, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Everything and Blockchain are most sought technology. Each one of them have unique positioning in #Gartner Hype Cycle and every enterprise are trying to leverage these technologies to bring efficiency, improved customer engagement, accelerate financial return on investment or disruption in their existing businesses.
While every enterprise attempt to follow latest technological trend, there is a unique adoption path for each one of them depending upon their industry, organization size, innovation budget, organization culture, market, and legacy investments. I will not be critical upon how different enterprise does it but I would like to present my viewpoint on how to drive maximum value out of this technology adoption.
Why are you embarking on a Digital Journey?
Every journey should always starts with a ‘Purpose’ or ‘Mission statement’, this helps us to evaluate all our actions and keeps us in the right direction. Here enterprises need to define what they would like to achieve, how they want these technologies to help them, what are they are aiming for. Ask yourself what you are not able to achieve today which you think these technologies will be able to help with.
Always start with “Business Case”, before identification of Use Case, try to find out the value for customer and your organisation in building new capability. Normally, we do this using AS-IS to TO-BE analysis from business capabilities point of view. Once we have understood what we want to achieve and draft KPI’s around it then it is the time, we drill down on set of new functional capabilities we would like to build in our enterprise. TOGAF framework is quite useful in ensuring that we are carrying out these activities in structured, iterative and sustainable fashion.
Have we thought through the entire journey?
Next comes checking Operational Feasibility in terms of organization culture, business readiness, market, privacy commitment, security obligations, regulatory support, social and environmental responsibilities. Ignoring any of these aspects makes purpose self-defeating and adoption journey too long. These factors alignment may appear misaligned, however they will help you plan contingencies and prepare you appropriately for launch. Business and Enterprise Architects needs to work together and chart out a high-level roadmap in becoming a digital organization. Below is the high-level blueprint of digitalization journey
Let’s Develop Minimum Viable Product
After brainstorming on Business Use Case and Operational Feasibility, organizations will be decisive on what needs to be achieved and high level approach to start on the digital journey. Now is the right time to involve solution architects and digital evangelists to define granular steps and map technical capability with identified business/process/functional capabilities. We can call this step Technical Feasibility step, as at this stage we will explore technology options, evaluate its maturity with respect to ready to use, define skillset that would be required to implement Minimum viable product (MVP) and later on enduring solutions, community support and technology evolution roadmap. If some technology is too new and has fewer promoters, then probably enterprise would opt for proven technologies which are mature and widely supported by larger communities. During all these stages, it is also important to draft guiding principles for overall digital adoption journey (as this is going to be journey and there is no final destination assumed). These principles would help everyone who are part of this journey to align with common goal and will facilitate in taking right decision in situation of options evaluation.
Plan iteratively
Now it is the time to put a plan in place, estimate high-level Total cost of ownership and Run the Business cost. Program manager along with project manager will create execution plan, identify stakeholders and secure their availability. It is not necessary that all the required skills will be available in-house and hence management needs to take a very important decision to hire, collaborate or out-sourcing. There is no right answer to this question; it completely depends on organization culture, maturity, processes and their partner ecosystem. Management needs to secure funding for building and validating Minimal viable product. Enterprise architect and management also needs to ensure that envisioned MVP contributes to intended KPI’s and abides to regulatory frameworks it is destined to operate.
Minimum viable product needs to encompass all phases of technology adoption, namely story building, design, build, validate, deployment to production and run in production. Run in production will include to keep build relevant in production through change management and new feature building. In case of machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases, model once deployed needs to be trained and validated with new generation data.
Automate learning and best practices
Define, streamline, automate and continuously improve “Build to Run” lifecycle, ensuring each step is guided with principles defined in earlier stages and they still hold good in evolving world. DevOps practices comes handy in achieving these goals. Minimum viable product (MVP) needs to address and emphasize on scale, security, transparency and data privacy alongside new functional capabilities. Once MVP proves to be successful, it is the time to scale the proven operating model. Again, business, architects, management and technical evangelists needs to meet to refine journey ahead.
Go back to Basics - Data and Enterprise Integration
Whichever technology we adopt, data always takes the centre stage for any transformation journey. Data has hidden directions for future success stories. So it becomes important to get data ready for employing new technologies/framework/tools to drive insights, probabilistic predictions and actions.
How any enterprise stores data and circulate it among different process, decides how easy or difficult it would be to put in use for futuristic use cases. A mature Data Management Platform, which has capability to store and provide efficient access to master data, transactional data, and historic data, makes it easy to build effective digital capabilities and measure success against defined KPI’s. Another aspect around data is distribution, which requires flexible integration platform capable of exposing data as a service through batch files, SOAP and REST.
Conclusion:
Now a million-dollar question is if everyone will take prescribed route for safe, value driven and proven technology adoption then who is responsible to disrupt industry with new technologies. Answer to this question is “Everyone but with measured commitment”. Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other technology start-ups will continue to bring new technologies to the world and Business houses need to invest some percentage of their revenue in vision of these technology companies to encourage them in their invention (NB: I do not mean that these tech-savvy companies are not solution and product companies).
In summary, Design Thinking and Data driven practice will help in selection of valued use-case in human-centric way, TOGAF will provide guideline to execute innovative program in sustainable fashion and DevSecOps will facilitate optimizing delivery value stream.
Varun Singh (Principal Digital Consultant)
Wurth Information Technology India Pvt. Ltd.