Spinning the Digital Thread
Beyond technical factors, recognize dependencies on culture and leadership.
"Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Often the legacy on which application of the concept of Digital Thread intends to improve has evolved and optimized within structural, budgetary and technological constraints that persist in a metaphorical warp of the business fabric. The Digital Thread is the weft which strives to interweave processes and informational assets spanning organizations. Without senior executives addressing incentives and cultural mores, organizational silos will strongly and consistently prioritize investments with locally-focused impact.
Implementation
Because the inherent value of Digital Thread manifests through integration of business processes, successful implementations rely upon cross-functional engagement and the appropriate level of executive sponsorship to drive requisite process design and optimization coupled with functional and cultural adaptation to reorient KPIs and incentive models across the business.
From the technical perspective, storage and enterprise access to valuable data embody the essence of the Digital Thread. Therefore, foundational pre-requisites include the systems of record (CRM, ERP, MES, PLM) which underpin existing cross-functional processes such as supply chain management and model-based enterprise (MBE – including MBD, MBM, MBSE, etc.) Additionally, businesses embracing data lakes/data warehousing toward maturing data science practices have a leg up compared to those just beginning that journey.
The next steps rely upon basic IT hygiene as crucial in establishing an ecosystem of tools and processes for robust data management. For example, formalizing taxonomy for indexing and data quality toward improving correctness, completeness and consistency ahead of publication of datasets and workflows to a reliable, common & current enterprise directory. To mitigate prominent risks associated with Digital Thread, governance strategies should employ trustworthy but flexible access controls, integrity assurance and change management to safeguard against data corruption and intellectual property loss.
Absent clear supports for inter-org projects, intra-org scope will merely thread together previously disconnected processes within the same function.
Obstacles
Digital Thread initiatives will often inherently disrupt the status quo, and thereby prompt resistance due to change aversion, misaligned incentives or lack of buy-in. The techniques and methods for overcoming these obstacles are not unique to Digital Thread programs, but it is important to recognize that managing expectations and incentives will be crucial to success and acceptance.
Intuitively, the primary value of Digital Thread would be realized spanning organizational silos; such as manufacturing genealogy data shared with repair services. However, incurring costs in one org to benefit other orgs (perhaps even competing executives) requires sufficiently senior (function-spanning) sponsorship and/or multi-silo shared credit for the resulting impact. Absent clear supports for inter-org projects, intra-org scope will merely thread together previously disconnected processes within the same function, limiting both available budgets to invest and potential impact. Downstream-silo consumers who serendipitously discover Digital Thread-delivered assets from upstream-silo sources may lack incentives to recognize and share that benefit. Despite a net-positive enterprise impact, the source-silo may be overlooked for cost-recovery or budget for further investment, while the consumer-silo takes the assets for granted or as an entitlement.
The most prominent technical obstacles will most likely be access to relevant data and ensuring data quality. The most precious data may also be considered sensitive and stored with tight controls, an impediment to leveraging more broadly. Requisite precision, accuracy, frequency or recency of legacy data may be insufficient for newly-conceived application opportunities. Recognize that data hygiene cannot be a one-time task; many data lake initiatives launch with great fanfare, only to deteriorate, just as in nature, into data swamps. Involving relevant team members from Information Security early will help to remove some of these obstacles.
Devils in the Data
Many enterprise systems of record rely on proprietary file types/systems and fragile APIs. For many companies, the creation of a data lake to act as an intermediary for these systems is an important part of enabling Enterprise Digital Thread activities. The prevalence and complexity of this endeavor is why Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc. succesfully employ large consulting and contracting services arms.
The truth is that some manual processes may remain desirable as they enable a level of flexibility and interpretation that are not necessarily feasible or possible once the data resides in a system of record. There is a good reason that Excel is still the #1 tool for Data Science. That said, where manual data procesing must exist, it is important to evaluate use of machine automation and taxonomic controls to ensure data integrity, improve consistency, and manage high data volume, velocity, and complexity.
Advances in machine learning and semantic tools will better automate key aspects of data curation efforts such as harvesting structure while tolerating its absence or inconsistency in the underlying sources.
Infrastructure Investment
Legacy data evolve organically within an environment constrained by budgets, technological capability, organizational structure and maturity. To elevate data and related workflows for Enterprise Digital Thread will incur tangible costs in data storage/transfer, as well as processing and software to index, publish, manage quality and assure integrity. Senior leadership must gain sufficient confidence that the speculative value of these data being leveraged across functions will surpass the investment costs. The enabling trends in technology shifting these economics include abundant and affordable IT (storage and computing), enterprise/global connectivity (including “cloud” platforms) and maturation of machine learning and automation techniques.
Investing in high-performance computing (HPC) Digital Thread infrastructure unleashes the potential to far surpass the value and capabilities of those legacy applications toward such advanced scale as
- analyses of as-designed vs. as-manufactured vs. as-operated data,
- design/decision space exploration, mapping, and trade-off analysis,
- generative design and topology optimizations,
- predictive health maintenance and
- embedded intelligence in products.
Benchmarking studies show that a dollar invested in HPC resources can return >100x over a dollar invested in traditional product design practices.
Edge to Enterprise
As with most digital solutions, it is likely that each Digital Thread initiative will incorporate a mix of on-prem and cloud resources. The Digital Thread mindset for thinking holistically about data reaches from OT (operational technology) - often in the factory, at the customer or in the product itself to enterprise IT (information technology) traditionally oriented to back-office systems. Thus, a Digital Thread implementation may well extensively span systems embedded on the Edge/IoT (internet of things) to far-reaching and centralized Enterprise (elastic cloud or HPC data center).
Unless the company in question has already become entirely cloud-based, one key cautionary consideration associated with commercial cloud adoption is the cost of data migration (out of the cloud) so cloud-based Digital Thread initiatives must by-design minimize the need to move data out of cloud-based repositories.
Any practical discussion of the Digital Thread must necessarily acknowledge three vexing but genuine and substantial impediments to success:
- Process, software and infrastructure investment for data scale, quality & integrity
- Justifying those tangible/measurable costs vs. speculative value unlocked
- Organizational incentives & cross-functional recognition.
Very much aligned with TPS LEAN concepts, the Digital Thread aims to reduce cost/waste and increase productivity through wider enterprise transparency and access to data and processes. Executive leadership must provide cultural and financial supports as a fertile foundation for empowering workers in every phase of the product or service lifecycle: a top-down strategy to discover and nurture bottom-up innovation opportunities.
Written in collaboration with Eric Tucker in February 2020 responding to inquiries from Tom Kevan for his article "Making Digital Thread Work For You" (published in Digital Engineering, March 2020).