Adopting a Digital Platform Business to drive growth

Adopting a Digital Platform Business to drive growth

Today’s modern enterprise leverages a digital business platform as the foundation for digital applications. A digital business platform provides the agility to build and support the dynamic nature of modern applications.

So what do these platforms look like?

A digital business platform is based on three pillars: intelligence, orchestration and automation. It is a primary driver of business transformation, as it will help turn data into insights for making informed business decisions. It gives companies the opportunity to bring together business process execution with analytics to enable a smarter, faster, more streamlined enterprise.

Three pillars of a digital business platform

  1. Intelligence
  2. Orchestration
  3. Automation

The digital business platform is supported by a hybrid cloud-enabled development and operations platform that encompasses:

1. Microservices: Microservices focus on doing one thing well and are contextual to specific business domains, enabling integration and facilitating rapid delivery of new capabilities (for greenfield applications) as well as modernization (for brownfield applications). And, because they are loosely coupled, microservices better enable continuous delivery activities.

Adopting a Digital Platform Business to drive growth

2. Agile development: Efficiencies can be gained by using agile and rapid development that employs iterative and incremental steps and offers improved collaboration and continuous feedback.

Adopting a Digital Platform Business to drive growth

3. Big data and IoT repositories: Leveraging IoT is all about gaining operational and product insights from sensor data but requires intelligence at the edge to process the massive flow of streaming events, as well as purposeful centralization of information. Data needs to be ingested, tagged and aggregated for use in streaming, predictive and preventive analytics insights that can enhance the decision support and “intelligence” of applications.

Adopting a Digital Platform Business to drive growth

4. APIs: Business ecosystems are defined by the relationships among the participants, and information exchange brings the ecosystem to life. APIs provide the common interfaces and formats. Ecosystems based on APIs allow applications built on top of a digital business platform to extend their reach by leveraging internal and external data in an agile manner.

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5. Easy-to-use intelligent automation: The platform will provide an easy-to-use ML/AI foundation that will not be limited to IT. Democratization means that employees everywhere can access the functions and data they need to write new application logic as descriptive business rules and to use ML/AI algorithmic services that improve their productivity.

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6. Virtualization, containers and platform as a service (PaaS): These make it easier to create loosely coupled components for application composition and reuse, and for simplifying the implementing of key nonfunctional requirements of digital applications such as security, resilience and availability. These are game changers, allowing rapid provisioning and scalability of “infrastructure as code” services needed for application development, testing, release and deployment to production.

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Over time, the digital business platform will evolve from human-derived rules to machine-derived rules, and its purpose will be to make data available and publish it (rather than process it). Consumption will be driven by serverless architecture and multimedia interfaces. And the platform will be in constant evolution.

Digital IT support gets smarter, transform employee experience

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When companies prioritize their digital transformation initiatives, modernizing IT support might not be at the top of the list.  But there’s nothing that creates a bigger drain on employee productivity and ultimately impacts business outcomes more than a disruption in an employee’s critical work activities, compounded by an unsatisfactory interaction with IT support and service desks.

The traditional, non-standardized service desk is facing a variety of challenges. Digital solutions are increasing across the entire IT landscape, introducing extensive change and escalating requests for support. When service desks themselves move from manual to digital processes, they will need more skilled expertise (which many enterprises lack), along with a disciplined approach to understanding how to apply and introduce automation – tasks made more difficult by constrained budgets.

Meanwhile, the nature of workforce support is changing in today’s gig economy as companies rely more on contractors who expect an intuitive and agile experience when dealing with the service desk – and as expectations among all employees for superior customer service continue to rise. People want personalization. They want to connect on their own terms, whether that’s getting proactive guidance from a virtual agent, talking to a smart bot, choosing self-service from a system that anticipates their needs, connecting to a human agent, or receiving face-to-face support.  And they want their problem resolved quickly and painlessly – ideally without even having to ask for help.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Forward-thinking companies are increasingly moving to digital service desks that take advantage of AI, machine learning and advanced data analytics to more efficiently and effectively respond to the expectations of today’s workers. Moving to a modern service desk also lays the groundwork for a future in which the service desk proactively detects and fixes problems before they occur, without the employee even knowing about it. And eventually, the service desk will become more like a personal digital assistant, anticipating employee actions and automating low-level functions through technologies like robotic process automation (RPA).

Of course, companies can’t accomplish these goals all at once. The preferred method of transforming the service desk is to take a phased approach that provides quick wins and builds a solid foundation for next steps.

Characteristics of a digital service desk

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Here are the three phases of a good digital IT service desk journey:

  1. Reactive: In this phase, companies take advantage of embedded analytics, AI and machine learning to provide a self-service experience that is intuitive and simple to use, while at the same time is contextually aware and adapts dynamically to the employee’s environment. On the backend, unified support is unified across IT, HR and facilities functions to provide an end-to-end channel that is engaging and fast. An always-on virtual agent or service bot offers an “on demand” dedicated support agent that can converse in natural language to help employees instantly. The agent is plugged into the company’s knowledge bases and ITSM system.
  2. Proactive and predictive: Captured analytics from the employee device provides data that enables machine learning and AI tools to identify issues that are likely to crop up. The system then automatically takes action to resolve the issue. This smart support detects and proactively prevents disruptions before they occur, keeping employees productive and lightening the load on the service desk.
  3. Digital assistant: The final step would be an advanced use of analytics, AI and RPA to understand an employee’s work routine and orchestrate actions on that employee’s behalf. Taking mundane tasks off an employee’s plate gives them more time to be amazing by focusing on what they do best to benefit the business.

There are many benefits associated with transforming the traditional service desk:

  • Providing exceptional customer service in a support desk context is a cornerstone to empowering workers, making employees feel more engaged and valued.
  • The use of automation, AI and self-service channels frees up support staff for higher level activities and helps the IT department control service desk costs.
  • Finally, business outcomes are improved because employees are operating at peak efficiency.

Digital support desks enable enterprises to deliver new levels of employee experience, optimize support and establish a competitive edge – everything today’s enterprises demand.

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