Leveraging Solution Accelerators to Drive Ideas into Business Outcomes

The other day, I had a great conversation with a Microsoft executive who shared learnings and insights on how her team was helping customers solve complex problems with technology. Our conversation sparked an intriguing exploration into a topic that often raises questions among both seasoned professionals and newcomers in the technology sphere: the distinction between use cases, demos, and solution accelerators.

As the demand for swift and effective problem-solving continues to surge, the landscape of pre-built tools and frameworks has become increasingly intricate. Considering this, I think it's crucial for organizations and decision-makers to take in the differences among these concepts, comprehending how each contributes uniquely to driving innovation and yielding tangible outcomes.

This article sets out to unravel this vital distinction, demystifying the realm of Solution Accelerators and highlighting their remarkable role in propelling ideas into pragmatic business achievements.

What is a Solution Accelerator?

A Solution Accelerator (SA), often referred as a "solution template", "application starter" or "suite", is a pre-built set of tools, templates, best practices, and guidelines designed to help organizations speed up the development of specific solutions or applications. These accelerators are intended to provide a head start by offering reusable components, standardized workflows, and recommended configurations (including deployment guidelines and tools) for solving common problems and/or addressing business needs.

Solution Accelerators have the potential to cut down hours spent on discovery, design, development, and testing for organizations. The aim is to ignite development efforts and facilitate the rapid acquisition of expertise in the employed technologies. It also dramatically reduce complexity, and risks.

Take Databricks Solution Accelerators , for instance. They consist of fully functional notebooks and incorporate best practices that significantly expedite outcomes for both typical and impactful use cases. Another example is the AI Solution Accelerators created by the Microsoft AI Rangers which are repeatable Intelectual Property (IP) meant to provide developers with all the resources needed to quickly build an initial solution. Each approach allows us to transition faster from an idea to a Proof of Concept (PoC) or a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in just weeks.

It's important to note that while Solution Accelerators can greatly expedite the development process, they might need customization to fit specific requirements. They can also become outdated as technologies evolve, so regular updates and maintenance might be necessary to ensure continued relevance. Therefore, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a starting point that can be customized and integrated for specific business needs.

From my perspective, it's prudent to allocate resources toward creating Solution Accelerators for patterns that exhibit high frequency across diverse industries and remain applicable to a multitude of real-world use cases.

Can they serve as a mechanism to empower technical professionals?

Yes, Solution Accelerators can and should be used for learning purposes. In fact, they can be excellent educational resources for individuals and teams looking to understand how certain solutions are built, structured, and implemented. By studying components and design choices in a solution accelerator, we can gain insights into best practices, architecture patterns, and real-world application development.

?Here's how Solution Accelerators (SAs) can be used for learning:

• Architecture Understanding: SAs often come with well-defined architecture. Studying these architectures can help us understand how various components interact and how the solution handles scalability, security, and performance.
• Coding Patterns: Examining the code provided within a SA can help us learn coding patterns, coding standards, and how to structure code for maintainability and readability.
• Hands-On Experience: SAs should come with hands-on exercises or examples. Working through these examples can provide practical experience in implementing specific features or functionalities.
• Best Practices: SAs are typically built following best practices and industry standards. By analyzing these practices, we can gain insight into the recommended approaches for different tasks.
• Customization: Learning to customize and extend a SA can provide us valuable experience in tailoring a solution to specific requirements.

In other words, Solution Accelerators are valuable tools for both learning and potentially speeding up development in production environments. However, thorough evaluation, customization, and consideration of specific needs are essential before using an accelerator in a production setting.

Benefits from Solution Accelerators

Based on my experience, Solution Accelerators (SAs) can bring us the following benefits:

1. Time Savings: SAs provide a starting point with pre-built code, architecture templates, and design patterns, allowing developers to focus on customizing and extending the solution instead of starting from scratch.
2. Best Practices: SAs are often designed based on industry best practices, ensuring that the resulting solution aligns with established standards and guidelines.
3. Consistency: SAs promote consistency across projects by providing a common framework and set of tools. This can lead to more predictable outcomes and easier maintenance.
4. Reduced Complexity: Complex tasks or processes are abstracted into reusable components, making the development process less complex and more manageable.
5. Learning Resources: SAs typically come with documentation, guides, and examples that can help developers better understand the solution's architecture and implementation.
6. Rapid Prototyping: SAs can be particularly useful for quickly prototyping ideas or concepts to assess feasibility before committing extensive resources.

Solution Accelerators at Microsoft

At Microsoft, we have been using Solution Accelerators for years to solve targeted, repeatable, customer-validated problems across industries.

In my case, during my tenure in Corp, I had the pleasure of collaborating in the definition of the Internet of Things (IoT) related Solution Accelerators as an investment to accelerate the adoption of Azure IoT with quick starter for specific scenarios and business needs. This includes solutions such as Remote Monitoring, Connected Factory and Predictive Maintenance. In addition, I also contribute to develop Azure Blockchain Workbench , and the Azure Blockchain Development Kit , accelerators to reduce application development time from months to days which translates in organizations getting started quickly by automating infrastructure setup, so developers can focus on application logic, and business owners can focus on defining and validating their use cases leveraging the Blockchain technology.

Solution Accelerators have the following Bills of Materials (BOM):

• A clear definition of the problem or challenge we are trying to solve – including industry views, potential use case.
• Self-learning content (including training videos, demos, etc.) to enable employees at the time we get ready to serve our customers. Here we typically include customer-ready pitch decks ready to be personalized based on the customer’s needs.
• Propensity Tool: Guidelines to identify organizations potentially interested in getting value from it.
• A production-ready reference architecture.
• A set of packaged code, typically available at GitHub, with pre-built business application components, deployment instructions (including scripts), dummy data for test purposes,
• Instructions to help employees to tag opportunities in customers to monitor adoption, get pre-sales support, and help SA’s owner to understand how organizations are adopting (and evolving) them, their feedback, their requests, etc. This also help us to capture and publish success stories to inspire other customer.

In conclusion

As mentioned during the article, the implementation of Solution Accelerators can offer numerous benefits, including time savings, adherence to best practices, consistency, reduced complexity, and learning resources. These accelerators serve as valuable tools for both learning and speeding up production development, but their suitability should be evaluated based on specific needs.

As we consider the potential of Solution Accelerators, it's highly recommended to invest on patterns that span various use cases. By understanding the role of solution accelerators in learning and production development, we can harness their power to propel innovation and drive successful outcomes.

To finish, before embarking on the costly journey of custom code development for your cloud application, I strongly recommend taking a moment to look and explore the existing Solution Accelerators. These pre-built toolkits can save both time and resources, providing reusable components and proven best practices that align with your goals. By leveraging these accelerators, you can expedite your development process, reduce complexity, and ensure a more seamless path to success. Remember, the solution you seek might already be well on its way – waiting to be discovered within the realm of Solution Accelerators.

Happy Accelerating! ??