Digital Success Hinges on Services-oriented Approach

It’s critical for enterprises to recognize that digital is not just about technology, but about how they connect their people with systems and things through platforms and processes. That itself is a difficult realization.

However, the bigger challenge is that even if they recognize the need for such orchestration, enterprises don’t know where to start.

Incrementally appending further digital capability to existing systems becomes a default path forward, and a relatively easy one to pursue at that. In the process, often, it is easy to get bogged down by nitty-gritty of the transformation programs, and overlook the larger digital goals.

What’s the way forward?
Few enterprises realize that their ‘mental model’ could be their biggest bottleneck in Digital. A new study, indicates that when it comes to digital transformation, enterprises that fail to get beyond an incremental mindset – and view technology as a tool rather than an integrated part of a vastly different business future – risk their very survival.

From the study, one key observation is that successful digital leaders avoid episodic, piecemeal changes and instead embrace a cross-organizational approach, with an objective to reinvent business models. Easier said than done, but how they approach it provides a peek into what works on the ground.

Roughly half of these digital leaders have created purpose-built groups to orchestrate and coordinate strategic changes across functions. The focus is on strategic and business outcomes, rather than execution of technological implementation programs.

The first critical step in that approach is to imbibe design thinking. In the broader context of digital innovation, it is important to recognize that technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, blockchain, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Big Data often need to be viewed in combination. When doing that, a business value centric game plan helps move forward and view these technologies as pieces of the overall puzzle.

That’s where it becomes clear: in order to create a composite digital solution for particular business goals in view of a particular process, these technologies need to be available as services for consumption as part of a broader unified platform. What it means is that digital innovation requires orchestration of all organizational resources in a loosely coupled manner.

Enterprises need an open architecture that can rapidly turn valuable data assets from transactional systems into transformational knowledge in real time. And, this requires a Service-oriented approach.

When we think of practical applications of this approach, it becomes clear why this works. A digital large scale fleet operation would involve millions of devices (thanks to IoT) as part of the workforce, along with existing people and systems.

In such a scenario, not only voluminous data needs to be tapped and analysed real-time, but processes also need to be orchestrated accordingly for a successful real-time business operation. The same applies to digital innovations in weather monitoring and manufacturing, personalization of retail sales operations, and even modernization of agriculture farms.

Your digital success boils down to application of design thinking centered around business outcomes. Application of this approach would require your architecture to be open and service-oriented, and most importantly, you would need the capability to orchestrate resources across enterprise in a loosely-coupled manner.

-- Neeraj Athalye, head – S/4HANA I GST Adoption I Leonardo, SAP Indian Subcontinent.