The Digital Transformation Platform

Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology and applied Artificial Intelligence to continually transform and improve business processes. The Digital Transformation Platform (DTP) is an intelligent, event-driven, enterprise architecture for humans to interact with and act on events flowing from the physical world. The "transformation" is not a destination. It is an ongoing process of humans teaching machines how to improve the process.

"The Digital Transformation is a closed-loop learning process that leverages AI to teach the process as it matures from little-to-no automation up to a fully autonomous process or somewhere in between."

I call this Process Teaching:

• The DTP's AI first connects to and understands the interconnected physical world. These connections are persons, places, or things. A "thing" might be a machine on the shop floor, a medical device, a thermostat, your smart watch, or a robot.
• The AI then monitors the process and makes recommendations on how to respond to events. An event is any type of action, incident, or change that's identified or recorded by software or applications that are part of a business process. For example, a payment, a website click, or a temperature reading, along with a description of what happened.
• Humans review the AI recommendations and make decisions using simple voice commands, much like you do with your Alexa device in your home.
• These decisions trigger enterprise-wide orchestrated event flows that drive change and action by both humans and machines. These event flows are digital models of your business process and they can be used in simulations or real-world intelligent operations.
• The DTP then updates the AI based on these actions and the learning process continues. Humans "teach" the process through their ongoing knowledge capture.

The DTP is a human-in-the-loop AI platform. The human stays in complete control and is only assisted by the AI machine. Humans and machines work together to transform operations in real-time.?

I don't have time to go through all of the details of the Digital Transformation Platform with you here today, but I will leave you with a few teaser diagrams on how this simple learning process gets translated into a practical, enterprise class architecture for bridging Operations Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) architecture, which I call Real-time Intelligent Operations (RIO). Together they make up the Digital Transformation Platform.

The Digital Transformation is a closed-loop learning process that leverages AI to teach the process as it matures from little-to-no automation up to a fully autonomous process or somewhere in between.

If you turn this process on its side, it becomes the process driving the architecture. Read it from the bottom up to see how it connects the physical world to humans via real-time business processes.

An example of how the process works as a relative humidity change event flows from the physical world of agriculture to the farmer for each step in the business process

This process translates to a more typical layered architecture that implements the platform