How to “Get a Handle” on Your Digital Transformation Toolbox (Part 2)

The Four Things You’ll Need in Your Innovation Lab

Your Digital Transformation Toolbox

In our opening to this Digital Transformation series, we talked about the rise of Innovation Labs and the 4 Inhibitors to Innovation. One of these inhibitors was to keep things open – use open source during the proof phases of an idea. We alluded to one thing you might want to invest in for consistency: a Digital Transformation Toolbox. I would call it a Digital Workbench. Do you have a Workbench? Indiana 5G Zone does, and I’ll break down the 4 Things You’ll Need. 

The complexity and diversity of options and people’s creativity will continue to spawn both vertical and horizontal innovation. Rather than spinning the slot machine of technology, you need something at the Core of your innovation lab. Something that can kick start the assembly of your innovation and collaboration among team members. Hundreds of reviews of market segments and technologies have led me to a set of functionalities Gartner calls the Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The sector is flooded with content management for websites and former portal players. However, the critical capabilities they discuss are the closest set of features anyone would want for the ideal base camp for a Center of Excellence or Innovation Lab. Through these assessments, four needs stood out. 

Hybrid Integration

I recently spent time with Carl Lehmann of 451 Research to brief him on our edgeCore platform and its capabilities. He named the set of features that we have as Hybrid Integration. Instead of having an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), API manager, or connecting systems point-to-point, edgeCore could interact through data interfaces, API, command line, and web interfaces. It is helping applications, systems, and data to communicate rather than connect. In Part 3 of this series, we will go even deeper. You’ll be reading about “All Integrations that Are Not Created Equal, and Why Hybrid Matters.” For now, many systems connect, but few were designed to enable software, people, and data to communicate beyond a task level or do so at a level of security that we are comfortable with. 

Open Contextual Visualization

If you clicked out to the Matt Turck mega-map of logos cited earlier last issue, you know there is no shortage of Visualization or Analytics firms. You will find them embedded in solutions or applied to a data warehouse or modern BI system. While they make great visuals from a few variables, they struggle to create a rich context of complex, connected operations that span systems. Demonstration after demonstration, we hear the phrase, “oh, that is what you mean by context.”  In Part 4, we’ll break down “What it takes to build context and how to keep your visual options open” as we investigate the new bring-your-own-visualization options (BYOV).  

Open Digital Toolbox

Coined recently in multiple Gartner papers, the DigitalOps Toolbox is a set of performance-enhancing technologies that automate, augment, analyze, interpret, discover, guide, and enact decisions. Under the multiple market banners of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Process Mining (ProM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Low-Code Application Platforms, organizations are buying lots of new tools with unique strengths and gaps that often repeat functions yet isolate context. In Part 5, we’ll discuss how to bring order to your Digital Transformation Toolbox and have the best technologies available to prove prototypes while pointing the way to the best production deployment. 

Continuous Integration Continuous Development (CICD) Launch Tools

You have built prototypes and labs, and now you have to wait for resources? It is never fun to find out in the middle of being innovative that you burned through your budget. For customers and our internal operations, we have been creating spin up and spin down automation. As a result, you can control costs. In Part V, we walk through the key things you want to deploy. For instance, we will suggest different models to deploy on a budget.

Let’s Tangibly Innovate Something Together

While a series can be interesting, I hate waiting. Guess that makes me a binger of content as well as Netflix videos. Each day, we enjoy building prototypes for difficult challenges or the seemingly impossible. You can always jump the queue and schedule a demo for your innovation team. Find out what we are doing to deliver the four needs. We will help you avoid the four impediments that crush innovation. Our demo will spur you to think of tackling a few thorny problems that have escaped success. 

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