The Three Pillars of Modernisation

Digital transformation is reshaping work and experiences across all industries and all walks of life. Acceleration in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation, Cloud, Edge Computing, IoT, Blockchain and 5G has brought us to the brink of a new era of convergence and integration. This, in turn, is driving huge new volumes of data, which, correctly harnessed, are creating new opportunities for the next generation of cognitive enterprises.

But to capitalise on these opportunities, such businesses need to focus on more than just technology. Modernisation requires just as much emphasis on culture, people, skills and shared values.

With every business context different, such modernisation can take many forms. This piece focuses on the three vital pillars that should always be considered to support strategy development and, critically, bring that strategy to life. This will help enable your business to build and modernise applications to maximise both agility and return on investment, whilst also reducing technical debt and the risk of organisational disruption. 

Pillar 1: People and Processes 

People and processes are key to every successful modernisation. Indeed, a lack of IT and business alignment has been identified as one of the leading reasons for IT project failure for many years. Project success is driven not just by our technology and data investments - but by sustained investment in people and organisation too.

So how can we better align our organisation and catalyse its modernisation? One approach is to apply enterprise design thinking to better drive alignment between stakeholders and initiative sponsors across business and IT throughout business units development and operations. Encapsulated by the co-creation, co-execution and co-operation ethos of IBM Garage, which offers on-location incubation for rapid innovation, this proven approach gets to the heart of users’ problems to deliver focused, empathy-driven solutions. It really is people, tech and culture in partnership. 

Pillar 2: Shared Values 

Behind every meaningful and sustained modernisation is a clear and shared purpose. The impact to business and the impact to society must be centre stage.

To come together on purpose and to optimise our capacity for modernisation, we need to think about who is building this future, and, ultimately, who it is for. Inclusion, diversity and belonging are at the heart of creating shared value while also being a key catalyst for innovation, as multiple studies have shown. We can do well by doing good.

And this is not about simply doing “one good thing”. It’s about a sustained and embedded commitment that starts with culture, values and investment in people across a diversity of experience - and is reflected in the technology that is imagined, designed and ultimately created.

Pillar 3: Technology and Architecture 

Finally, it is essential to align and integrate applications, data and systems to create an infrastructure that is agile and responsive to change – and nowhere has the need been more evident than in the IT resilience and business continuity demands triggered by COVID-19.

This requires strategic reflection, prioritisation and balance. On the one hand, it means reducing operational costs and technical debt by, for example, squeezing the cost of maintaining and running current applications. And on the other, it is focused on selecting and introducing new technologies to improve cybersecurity, enhance stakeholder engagement and re-energise and personalise employee and customer experience by drawing on data-driven insights from using AI and machine learning. 

In increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud environments, key success factors will include development time and cost, operational integration, the quality and accessibility of technology support, visibility, security and governance. Trusted partnerships can make a critical difference here, not least through the availability of external expertise and reference architectures to provide a clear roadmap to build, extend and deploy an application.

How does IBM embody these Three Pillars?

Collaborating with Jamie Frampton from IBM to bring together his internal and my broader industry perspectives, it is firstly clear that engagements with technology partners are incredibly important. They should be seen as an extension of your team - people with a clear understanding of where you are heading as an organisation. The investments you make are difficult and need to align with objectives and strategies that make you successful. And the conversations should not start with the technology.

The IBM approach has much in common with the three pillars outlined above - focussing on people, processes and architecture before even getting to the tech.

People

Every organisation wants to modernise or has a business challenge - but how do we get an understanding of what they are or how to impact them? Enter Design Thinking.

Through physical and virtual Design Thinking workshops, a group starts discussing what their issues are, interviewing stakeholders to appreciate the wider context and then develops a problem statement or hypothesis to be reviewed. Use-cases are then prioritised according to which will deliver most value. The fail-fast idea plays a starring role here, enabling you to start small, gain fast value and then scale up at the rate the business requires.

Architecture

So you have an idea, you’ve prioritised your use-case and you know what you’re trying to prove. What next? Modernisation nearly always requires some form of architectural review of your “as is” state. Every organisation has a complex web of applications and systems running on some combination of on-premise hardware and cloud. All of this needs to be understood before moving to your ideal “to be” state. A collaborative approach to this is key: who knows your systems better than you?

Technology

We now come to the specific technology that is going to solve your problem. At IBM the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach is typically favoured, as this allows ring-fencing of a small section of an organisation’s (or the internal) environment to understand the technology in action.

The co-creation element of the MVP build should not be underestimated. Using agile methods and modern development practices (such as IBM Cloud Paks) the path to modernisation becomes clearer, as you and your technology partner walk it together.

For true modernisation, as embedded in these three pillars, you need to think and act differently, with the user at heart. Focusing on your problem statement, investing in skills development, knowing what success looks like, and building a partner roadmap all combine to increase your chances of sustainable success.

When you invest in a continuous innovation culture, you create modernisation that lasts – embedded by design – and leaving you well positioned to adapt and respond quickly to change, wherever it might come from. 

If you’d like to learn more:

·     Visit the IBM Application Modernisation landing page here and sign up for live and on-demand webinars.

·      Visit ibm.com/Wimbledon to learn more about the work and solutions behind The Greatest Championships #WimbledonRecreated here.

About the Author

Prof. Sally Eaves is a highly experienced Chief Technology Officer, Professor in Advanced Technologies and a Global Strategic Advisor on Digital Transformation specialising in the application of emergent technologies, notably AI, FinTech, Blockchain & 5G disciplines, for business transformation and social impact at scale. An international Keynote Speaker and Author, Sally was an inaugural recipient of the Frontier Technology and Social Impact award, presented at the United Nations and has been described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’ - founding Aspirational Futures to enhance inclusion, diversity and belonging in the technology space and beyond.