Pages

Friday, August 14, 2015

BMC – Preparing Businesses for Digital Transformation

By Rich Ptak


As enterprise executives increasingly focus on digital technologies and changing market influences, they feel unprecedented pressure to adapt or risk being left behind. Rapidly evolving technologies are driving fundamental change in business operations in reaction to radical alterations in the ways of doing business.

New, digital start-ups can abruptly shift markets to drive larger established firms out of business. Examples like Netflix vs. Blockbuster Video come to mind. Familiar, well-established modes of competing and conducting business no longer work or serve to maintain competitive advantage.

Driven by consumer experiences with mobile, gaming, and shopping, user expectations rapidly bleed over from personal to business interactions. These irrevocably alter client/customer purchasing behaviors, expectations and relationships; impacting internal, as well external enterprise operating ecosystems and cultures.

One result is the flattening of traditional hierarchies as nimble project teams replace rigid departmental functions. Also, market globalization lowering the barriers to entry (to markets for many services), forces enterprises to deal with numerous agile, adaptive and continuously evolving competitors. Customers expect highly responsive services tailored to meet their individual needs. This drives the necessity of product creation and delivery models that adapt to meet these new demands.

To survive, enterprises must transform themselves to be able to rapidly adapt to changes (whether to costs, pricing, technology, etc.) in their environment. They must learn to compete as providers of consumer-like digital services. Doing so can involve redesigning the work-place to simplify processes, modify workflows, etc. In short, they must become a digital enterprise.

What does it mean to be a digital enterprise?
A digital enterprise is a provider of digital services, able to rapidly create new services in response to changing user demands. A digital service provides an optimized, exceptional experience, whether delivered to internal (employee) or external (partner, client or customer) consumers.

A digital service is personalized, automated, scalable, and self-service, responsive to and controlled by the customer (like a mobile phone app). The service is self-contained, able to automatically perform at every step from initial access thru to delivery. It includes a path for help with access to self-service remedial support along the way if needed.

Digital enterprise operations must function at the speed of business change. The digital enterprise depends upon the fully integrated, coordinated efforts of IT and business. For a digital enterprise to compete, they must be able to continuously function at a scale and speed that matches the rate of change demanded by users. This requires technology integrated into an agile infrastructure robust enough to support the continuous delivery of new services.

Transforming into a Digital Enterprise
The process of reinvention is not new. Every business aspect has been changing and evolving since trade began. What is new is the scale of the change, the speed at which it is occurring and the shortened cycle at which the process repeats itself.
Transforming to a digital enterprise includes reorganizing operations. Products, processes, procedures and the workplace itself have to become completely service oriented and user-driven. The organization has to support rapid design and delivery to satisfy user demands for:
1.    Intuitive solutions – that provide an exceptional, optimized, personalized, self-service experience to consumers (whether employee, partner, client or customer);
2.    High-speed innovation – ongoing and consistent development, leveraging expertise, technology, partnerships and the latest processes; such as agile software development.
3.    Standardized solutions – that are consistently delivered across infrastructure modes whether mainframe, mobile, virtual or cloud (private, public or hybrid).
The goal is to provide the best possible user experience, automatically optimized in real-time even as changes occur. This requires the ability to rapidly integrate continuously evolving elements into an environment that is increasingly automated, adaptive and virtualized.
Digital transformation is a continuous process. Therefore, an appropriate architecture for management and control of operational processes and structures during and post-digital transformation is needed. BMC designed Digital Enterprise Management to be that architecture.
Digital Enterprise Management- Architecting the Digital Enterprise
An architecture for successful transformation must facilitate the ongoing integration of leading edge technology. Integration is critical, as much existing invested capital (physical and intellectual) remains too valuable to ongoing operations to be discarded. A good example is mainframe code, reliably delivering services for decades. Critical to operations. Too valuable to discard. Far too expensive (and risky) to replace. Old and new must be blended for smooth operations. While point-in-time, one-off approaches can work, the better, more reliable solution lies in a well-defined architecture designed for long term management of digital services, infrastructure, processes and policy.
BMC’s Digital Enterprise Management (DEM) provides IT an architecture and suite of solutions designed to facilitate seamless, optimized digital transformation. It enables on-going improvement thru continuous innovation. It defines a structured approach to managing and optimizing technology, processes, and policy. It is for environments operating in real-time, with infrastructure ranging from mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond. To accomplish this, DEM’s architecture and associated solutions/services focus on four disciplines and a shared foundation:
  1.    Digital Service Management – blends modern digital services design with ITSM principles & platforms to reinvent how business gets done and enable breakthroughs in human productivity.
  2.   Digital Enterprise Automation – an integrated and strategic approach to automation, enabling business to accelerate the delivery of digital services while improving quality and control.
  3.     Digital Service Assurance – integrates data from multiple external sources, including social human sentiment to allow businesses to take action quickly based on customer online posts and complaints.
  4.     Digital Infrastructure Optimization – helps businesses avoid wasted capacity and licensing across a business’ entire technology portfolio.


Analytics, Orchestration, and Policy provide a common foundation for configuration data, automation, orchestration, analytics, and policy, enabling businesses to share a single, real-time view of their infrastructure across teams and processes. See Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 Digital Enterprise Management: Four Disciplines and the Foundation      Courtesy BMC Software

This is a high level outline of Digital Enterprise Management from BMC. Services and products exist with more coming. The latest details are available from BMC and at their website http://www.bmc.com/dem .

Conclusion/Next Steps
Competing in the global marketplace as a digital enterprise promises to be a challenging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience. The actual process of transformation to a digital enterprise contains more potential pitfalls than business as usual.

The dynamic nature of the enterprise, and today’s marketplace prevents a one-size-fits-all solution. Nor does a complete solution suite exist today. The complete path forward will be realized only with time and experience. As understanding grows, more complete solutions will develop. Therefore, successfully navigating the path through the initial transformation and preparing for what lays ahead requires careful planning and, for most, the help of a trusted, knowledgeable partner.

Einstein is quoted as saying that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution. BMC has taken the time needed to clearly define the problem. They have a track record of success along with accumulated expertise. They combined all of that to develop Digital Enterprise Management with the services and products necessary for its implementation.

They recognize the path to a digital enterprise is truly a journey not a destination. We believe BMC has the knowledge, insight and expertise to be an excellent partner for any enterprise embarking on that journey. We recommend a visit to http://www.bmc.com/dem so you can see for yourself the benefits of their solutions.