Everybody is aware of the impact of technology in daily life and business. However, this impact is not merely a linear growth, but, due to the acceleration of technology development fueled by digital technology, an almost exponential curve in a way never experienced in human history.
Therefore, digital disruption in many sectors is not anymore a scenario that most businesses can take lightly. Now, Boards in companies of all sizes understand that the disruption induced by Digital Transformation is possible and can come from any expected or unexpected location in this global economy.
Embracing Digital Transformation depends mostly on how companies reinvent their business models to take advantage of their core assets in new paradigms for customer interaction, business productivity and informed decision making, to name a few.
The traditional IT departments are not prepared to cope with this huge transformation, as normally their focus is to maintain the existent systems on ever more tight budgets. To address this problem many organizations have created a separate role or even departments for Digital Transformation, often with the usual tensions between those looking into the future and those that must maintain the business going.
Independently of the organization’s form, all have the same difficulty: providing quick results that allow experimenting. However, they must be sufficiently meaningful and not just toy demonstrations, always very appealing but often ignoring all the difficult issues of production software. The message from Cloud providers that “all is just a few clicks away” is, obviously, a simplification of a much more complex reality, as all Apps are only meaningful in the context of the organization’s processes and data.
The concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a way of providing a quick evaluation that is not just a prototype but also an App that can be put in production, although in a reduced scope or scale.
Link would like to be a relevant part in its customers digital transformation and thus developed an approach to provide MVP’s in four areas, we believe, are core to the digital transformation.
Last-mile connectivity is, for decades, the more visible area of Digital Transformation, but is experimenting a significant evolution due to the possibilities of simple text or speech interfaces complementing the usual mobile interfaces. The evolution of better customer support, offloading call centers, incrementing customer self-services are a few of the possibilities of this trend.
Substituting human labor with little added value. Business productivity is the holy grail of digitalization and many companies had initiatives for automation based on workflows, ERP’s, Case tools, etc. Many of these initiatives implied complex projects and difficult integrations. The tools now available, which integrate through the User Interface like Robot Process Automation and Zero Code platforms for building simplified flows, provide a mechanism that, with a reduced investment and in a relatively short time, show many possible ways of improving the productivity of processes.
Decision making. Many companies have large projects in the areas of business knowledge, but in many situations, the actual Data architectures are legacy architectures, some decades old, strongly influenced by the limitations of physical storage and computation power. Nowadays, one of the areas the Cloud has shown clear advantages is in big data and changing the traditional view of information repositories to an ecosystem that can couple events, streams, different types of storage and exploration tools.
Finally, total reliance in IT must be correlated with better quality in IT, constantly adapting to new needs but more reliable and available. All the Agile approaches and the tools for dev/ops address the problem of faster production cycles. However, being agile and faster does not necessarily improve quality. In fact, sometimes it results in the opposite. The availability of the cloud and tools for automating functional, mobile, security and performance testing, allow cost-efficient MVP’s illustrating possible changes in the companies’ software production, with huge impacts on overall systems and applications quality.
Link has set up a program for creating MVP in all the areas mentioned above. Contact us to know more about how Link can leverage these to help your organization be a disruptor now and in the future.
