A PRACTICAL BLUEPRINT FOR GOING DIGITAL
By Phil Wainewright
THE FOUR ESSENTIAL PILLARS
ABOUT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Wainewright is a trusted thought leader in enterprise computing, best known for his long-running Software as Services blog on ZDNet. He is a co-founder of diginomica, the tech media site launched in May 2013 to inform business decision makers about the transformation of 21st century enterprises by digital technology. He is also an advocate for cloud computing, both as a volunteer vice-president of EuroCloud and as CEO of strategic consulting group Procullux Ventures.
ABOUT FUJITSU RUNMYPROCESS
Fujitsu RunMyProcess is a unique cloud platform that enables hundreds of leading companies in over 45 countries to overcome the technology barriers to digital transformation. Its cloud-based platform-as-a-service provides a high productivity development environment to model user interfaces, business processes, integration connectors and databases, along with metrics and reporting to monitor performance.
By leveraging an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop design – coupled with over 2,400 integration connectors and full integration with Google Apps - Fujitsu RunMyProcess customers can rapidly build and deploy highly customized business applications. Accessible on the Web through a browser and based on a pay-per-use model, the Fujitsu RunMyProcess platform is less expensive and more flexible than on-premise solutions, ensuring a quicker return on investment. In April 2013, Fujitsu announced that it had finalized a contract with RunMyProcess to acquire all shares of the company. With this acquisition, Fujitsu added integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) to its cloud offerings to bolster its cloud portfolio as it expands its global cloud business.
Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Over 170,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.4 trillion yen (US$47 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013. For more information, please see http://www.fujitsu.com.
INTRODUCTION
A new breed of digital companies has quickened the tempo of business. Amazon, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and many others like them have sprung to prominence in recent years. By harnessing digital technology and connectivity, they have reinvented traditional industries – from retail to media and from entertainment to recruitment. Their inventive use of the digital idiom has redefined people’s expectations of the customer experience. At the same time, they have demonstrated an ability to innovate, scale and evolve at speeds that are unthinkable in traditional organizations.
Although these trailblazers have mostly targeted consumers as individuals, they have reset expectations for convenience, responsiveness and agility at work, too. These ‘digital native’ organizations provide a model that many others are now copying and testing as they seek to digitally disrupt every established industry. A digital enterprise exhibits these four key characteristics.
Fully exploits the capabilities of connected digital devices to deliver engaging user experiences
Optimizes end-to-end digital processes to efficiently deliver outcomes
Continuous evolution of offerings delivered at scale
Rapid feedback and innovation throughout the organization
GOING DIGITAL
Ambitious enterprise leaders know that to thrive and compete in today’s business environment, they too must go digital. Even when their products and services are too concrete to convert into digital form, the processes that surround them can be digitalized to enhance and add value to the way in which they are delivered and experienced. But there is no easy path to a digital future for established businesses, weighed down as they are by existing, pre-digital technology investments and their incumbent ways of working.
These organizations cannot merely flick a switch and become digital overnight. They must achieve digital transformation step by step – but at a ‘Goldilocks’ pace: neither so aggressive that it brings their existing operations crashing down around them, nor so
Success requires a structured approach. The enterprise must lay solid foundations for building out new end-to-end digital processes that can safely coexist with continuing operations until they in turn become digital.
Many enterprises make the mistake of addressing just one aspect of the transformation to digital. A complete blueprint must comprise four cornerstone pillars that each support the evolution of a fully digital experience that’s connected and context-rich. Together these four pillars provide a robust, end-to-end framework to support durable digital transformation across the entire enterprise.
Unify the digital user experience
The first of these four pillars is to start rolling out digitally connected tools and applications of the right type to engage, enthuse and empower your people. A consistent, repeatable digital user experience is essential to ensure a joined-up strategy as you work through the process of transformation.
Too often, enterprises embark on digital transformation as an isolated experiment. Perhaps they roll out a new mobile app, or a customer engagement initiative that uses social media or cloud connectivity. A recent Altimeter Group report on digital transformation1 found that 42 percent of organizations surveyed had added new social and mobile technologies
without first mapping out how people would use them.
Building isolated projects without considering how they will all interact inevitably creates the problem of multiple inconsistent ‘silos’ of digital innovation. Each remains separate from the other applications people use, and cut off from enterprise processes and data. This may have been how enterprise IT used to operate, but it is not what people expect from a digital experience.
To ensure a joined-up digital strategy, it’s important to deliver a consistent, connected user experience – one that supports your people in achieving their business goals, wherever and however they happen to work. This provides a foundation that other pillars can leverage to drive further digital innovation. There are three core aspects of experience, connection and context to address:
ALL-ROUND MOBILITY: A mobile application should not be tied to a single device; it is the mobility of users themselves that delivers the full benefit of digital processes. Provide a user experience that makes applications available seamlessly across all devices. The applications should adapt to the local capabilities and context of
each device, while maintaining context as the individual moves from mobile to desktop to tablet and back again.
A COMMON POINT OF ACCESS: Provide a single, device independent location where people can easily find and access all of the digital tools they need to interact with the business. A common, connected library helps ensure a consistent view of functionality, configuration, context and notifications. This central ‘enterprise store’ of available applications can provide a single point of access along with increased visibility and consolidated governance for the whole enterprise.
‘SURROUND SOUND’ WORK CONTEXT: Building on the common point of access, enable users to gain a dynamic, 'at a glance' view across all of their ongoing interactions, visualizing their total backlog of work holistically rather than forcing them to engage with disjointed, static views within separate applications. This puts the user in control of their priorities and actions instead of having to follow arbitrary, application-centric workflows. At RATP Group, the state-owned public transport operator for Paris and its suburbs, a mobile incident reporting app allows inspectors to file a complete incident reports for the bus lines from their phones in less than a minute, giving maintenance teams immediate access to details and photographs of the bus repairs required.
Connect the digital supply chain
The second pillar is the delivery of digital value-chain connections that bring the right resources to bear when and where they are needed.
There is no point in designing great user experiences without creating the digital process flows to fulfil them. New digital applications must connect to people, information and infrastructure both within and beyond the enterprise. Continuously evolving connections, not only within the business but also across the enterprise boundary out to customers, partners and other stakeholders, are an integral part of a digital strategy.
The old style of one-time integration is not sufficient for this task – digital processes need to keep pace with continuous change across the digital ecosystem. But existing systems inside the organization often can’t keep up with the demands of these highly valuable activities being initiated at the enterprise boundary. This second pillar has a critical role to play in enabling connections across the emerging digital infrastructure at the same time as coexisting with and linking into continuing operations. The core aspects of experience, connection and context each contribute distinct elements to this role:
including sensors from the Internet of Things. The IT function must orchestrate connections to this digital landscape, accessing and monitoring on-demand resources and services that become an integral component of business operations.
EMPOWERING ECOSYSTEMS: Prepare to compete in the emerging digital economy by beginning to expose the services of your business via APIs. Become a platform capable of realizing new market opportunities by participating in a digital ecosystem. The inherent ability to connect value across organizations will act as a catalyst for innovation. You place your unique business IP in a context where you can bring the power of many organizations to bear on the task of realizing its full value.
An Italian personal care products manufacturer has implemented a capital investment management process that automates the workflow for signing off new equipment acquisitions. It ensures that approvals and purchases in the SAP procurement system are intrinsically connected to the supporting documentation and associated workflow in Google Apps.
Prepare for change at digital speed and scale
The third pillar provides the operational pace and scale to drive participation in the emerging digital ecosystem – not only at a technology level but also in fostering a more agile, innovation-ready business culture.
When people can access from anywhere on any device and the business begins to open up its service offerings digitally, the scale and elasticity of operations inevitably increases. The digital world will not wait for slower, incumbent systems to deliver a response – the enterprise has to present a global, elastic platform capable of delivering rapid, industrial-scale IT.
The pace of change moves at a faster rhythm, too. To survive in a digital environment, outward-facing teams must constantly build and test new ways of interacting – business models, offerings, channels or experiences – to discover and refresh what works best. Those that don’t work are rapidly discarded, while the successes must be ready to rapidly grow to Web scale without skipping a beat. The old batch model of passing a proof-of-concept across to IT for months of re-engineering does not fit this new world of on-demand delivery and continuous refresh.
This pillar has three separate design components that address the need for digital experience, connection and context:
RAPID OUTCOMES: The digital face that an enterprise presents to the world must flex and adapt to changing requirements. This requires a platform that supports an agile development methodology for high productivity business change. The ability to rapidly model and test a new process and then immediately roll it out at scale is key to shortening release cycles and shrinking the application lifecycle.
connectors and manual workflow. A pragmatic, loosely coupled approach allows us to progress quickly with new digital processes while leaving back-end systems to work at their own pace until they can be upgraded or replaced.
SCALING TO A DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE: The digital context requires consistently reliable performance at all levels of operation. As the journey of digital transformation progresses, an end-to-end digital infrastructure spreads throughout the entire organization that supports rapid change and operates at industrial scale.
I HEART Studios, a rapidly expanding digital content provider based in London, developed a business workflow system to automate and manage its product photography services. This enabled the company to grow revenues 600 percent in just one year, while staff expanded from 12 to 102 employees in just six months. In 2014, I HEART again refactored its business processes to handle even higher volumes of work.
Empower business innovation
The final pillar democratizes access to business automation. It fosters collaboration across functional siloes to bring the right people and resources together as needed to constantly optimize and improve digital processes across the organization.
In the pre-digital enterprise, work was divided up into functional units that used documents, forms and messages to pass tasks and transactions in batches from one department to the next. Today’s digital connections break down these redundant barriers to facilitate collaboration and deliver more effective business outcomes.
The IT function must also break out of its own functional silo, proactively providing the tools and frameworks to bring people, information and resources together digitally to drive rapid innovation in the business. Once business users have created new processes, IT can work with them to adopt, connect and scale these new ways of working.
This pillar is the crucial final cornerstone, completing the organization’s ability to deliver, disseminate and scale innovation. It contributes its own elements of experience, connection and context:
DEMOCRATIZING CHANGE: Accelerate innovation and reduce the burdens on IT by providing tools and collaborative support to help business users deliver new apps in shorter timescales. Leverage the simplified configuration, development and distribution possible in new platforms to help users leverage their knowledge into new customer experiences, efficiency gains or innovation opportunities at the edge of the organization.
SHIFTING TO A DIGITAL CULTURE: By acting as a platform for innovation, the IT department can enable large scale testing and experimentation across the business while keeping a watchful eye for data-based opportunities to industrialize successful approaches. Building across all four pillars, this industrialization will fully connect new systems into enterprise IT, gradually completing the process of digital transformation by driving customer-centric change deeply into the core of the organization.
Zodiac Marine & Pool is a fast-growing, global supplier of swimming pool equipment that operates a variety of IT systems due to acquisitions. In order to bring consistency while driving innovation across its operations, it has implemented a series of workflow processes across engineering, finance, data management and administration, each with a typical time to develop and deploy of 10-15 days.
GETTING STARTED
Taken together, the four pillars provide a proper foundation for completing an orderly, end-to-end digital transformation of the enterprise. It becomes possible to achieve large-scale change by beginning in small increments, rapidly introducing digital innovation as early as possible. All the ingredients form part of a long-lasting strategy that will continue to deliver for many years to come.
Begin with the following methodology to launch digital transformation on a path to success across the enterprise.
ACHIEVE QUICK WINS: Choose early projects that rapidly deliver very specific outcomes. For example, use digital tools to transform a user experience or to provide better context to collaborators.
TARGET REAL-WORLD OUTCOMES: Empower business users to set the agenda and direct projects to solve real-world problems, with IT engaged as a change agent.
THINK LEAN: Aim to maximize customer benefits while minimizing wasted effort or resources. Don’t try to make digital versions of existing applications. Instead, take on problems that have traditionally been seen as too complex, too expensive or not a priority for action.
ITERATE FAST: Each project should be discrete and be able to move in relatively small, fast iterations. Be prepared to include makeshift or temporary components as needed to get by until a later iteration.
BUILD OUT SUCCESS: Expand on successful projects to drive the results more deeply into the heart of the organization, realigning other resources to optimize these emergent processes. Each incremental step builds out and strengthens the ongoing process of digital transformation.
This is in line with advice from McKinsey & Co, which recommends2 bringing the new digital-speed IT into place in targeted
projects that can achieve quick wins, while putting workarounds in place to connect back to the slower-speed incumbent systems until the ethos can be rolled back through the rest of the IT function.
Reinventing the IT function requires far-reaching changes, from talent to infrastructure, and takes multiple years to complete. Fortunately, companies can adopt an approach that delivers results quickly while still reshaping IT for the long term.
MAKING IT REAL
With the help of Fujitsu RunMyProcess, many businesses, including the case studies cited in this paper, have been able to rapidly introduce a scalable, connected library of digital tools and applications to begin their digital journey. Its unique cloud platform simultaneously delivers, ready for immediate deployment, all of the four essential pillars of digital transformation outlined in this white paper.
UNIFYING THE DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCE: RunMyProcess unifies user experiences, enables new work styles and supports new mobile business models by delivering applications that seamlessly follow people across all of their devices as they go about their day – all accessible via highly customisable Enterprise Process Stores.
CONNECTING THE DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN: RunMyProcess accelerates business outcomes and improves satisfaction by connecting people, systems and data in real time – all thanks to sophisticated API management and a library of over 2,500 connectors spanning on-premise and cloud environments.
PREPARING FOR CHANGE AT DIGITAL SPEED AND SCALE: RunMyProcess empowers organizations to deliver and adapt their IT systems at the speed of business change, using a combination of high productivity development and industrialized operations to reduce time to value and support continuous, data-based improvement at Web scale.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS INNOVATION: The RunMyProcess platform accelerates organizational transformation by empowering business users to deliver, test and reshape digital processes at the edge of the organization – all powered by a single governance, development and scaling framework used in collaboration with enterprise IT. By providing the four essential pillars to overcome both the technology and cultural challenges of digital transformation, Fujitsu RunMyProcess enables the IT function to guide the enterprise towards realizing all the potential of these powerful new technologies and ultimately to thrive in the emerging digital economy.
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