Transforming Towards What?

In our latest Professional Services blog, Micro Focus’ Consulting Manager Joshua Brusse argues that transforming into a Digital Factory is crucial to effective lifecycle management of digital products and services.

Setting Directions

We’ve heard a lot about digital transformation the past few years. But I’ve barely seen any discussion of two fundamental questions: What exactly are we transforming and towards what are we transforming it? Short answer: we are transforming our organizations, with the goal of establishing Digital Factories.

What are You Transforming?

Chances are you’ve heard the expression, “every company is now a software company,” originally attributed to CMMI founder Watts Humphrey.

The truth of this statement is evident in the behavior of rising generations. My children hardly go inside a bank, and my youngest daughter didn’t even know what a travel agency is. And why would they? Their generation grew up with mobile banking and online booking services.

To answer the first part of my question, almost every organization needs to transform into a software company, also known as a digital company or enterprise. However, it’s not enough to just make software.

As Head of Professional Services, Oliver McVeigh, wrote in his blog post, “the generation of digital natives lives online and has developed high expectations for how their digital products and services should function to add value to their personal and professional lives.” Failing to meet these expectations can lead to financial and reputational damage.

What’s the Goal of Digital Transformation?

A digital enterprise provides digital products and services that users can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Therefore, the success of your digital enterprise depends on ensuring that your apps never go down and always function as users expect.

Organizations must transform into a digital enterprise in which lifecycle management of digital products or services—as one important capability—is highly effective and efficient. McKinsey calls this concept the Digital Factory. That’s what we’re transforming to.

Components of good lifecycle management are what our industry likes to call DevOps, SecOps, and AIOps. Many organizations have embarked on transformations to enable these capabilities but with results that are nowhere near acceptable. Plus, these capabilities are still mostly executed by different silos within the digital enterprise, despite DevOps’ emphasis on collaboration.

Hyperautomation and the Digital Factory

Good lifecycle management starts when you integrate DevOps, SecOps, and AIOps and automate as many processes as possible, a term Gartner calls hyperautomation. In other words, you need to establish a Hyperautomated Digital Factory. One where you manage digital products and services from “cradle to grave,” automate tasks that make sense, and produce outcomes that customers expect. Organizations need to transform into Hyperautomated Digital Factories to deliver applications that meet the high expectations of customers.

Making a Difference

Micro Focus enables you to run your day-to-day business while transforming your organization to adapt to future challenges. This mission extends to Micro Focus Professional Services, which helps  organizations establish their own Digital Factories as part of the deep technical relationships we establish with our clients.

The Micro Focus Value Chain Consulting method covers the planning, design, development, and implementation of automated lifecycle management, the backbone of the Digital Factory.

In recent years, we’ve helped banks streamline their business processes, reducing mortgage approval times from weeks to hours. We’ve supported airline and retail organizations by reducing the provisioning of development and test environments from months to minutes. Of course, we’ve implemented a Digital Factory here at Micro Focus to manage the lifecycles of our own products and platforms.

One program, close to my heart, was working with a large non-profit organization that operates in 90 different countries, with a revenue of $2.9 billion. On the technical front, we changed the service management platform to the Micro Focus SaaS platform. Professional Services also worked with many subject matter experts for four intensive weeks to analyze three important capabilities—Service Management, Fulfilment, and Assurance—and to develop a roadmap for improvement. This roadmap now serves as a journey map to transform towards a Digital Factory.

Take the Next Step

However chaotic the transformational upheaval you face, at Micro Focus we have the experience and expertise to help with your Digital Factory, no matter where you’re at in your transformation journey. Visit our page to learn more.

This post was first first published on Home | Micro Focus Blog website by Joshua Brusse. You can view it by clicking here