Collaborating for Innovation Success

DXC’s Applied Innovation Hub is realising significant benefits for DXC customers through collaboration with startups offering ground-breaking and emerging technologies. Facilitating collaboration, the Applied Innovation Hub supports startups and scaleups in developing and commercialising new solutions for customers, reducing the time to market for innovation in emerging technologies, and allowing direct interaction with larger enterprises.

Solving business problems is the goal

One of DXC’s long term customers recently presented an important business issue they needed addressed. The customer, currently in the early stages of a substantial digital transformation, will make significant changes to business operations. Everything about the way the customer currently does business is changing with most of their existing processes being affected. And as is often the case, the customer needed to deliver a quick win in the early stages of their transformation.

The use case in question lacked visibility of premium transaction information for key external stakeholders. These stakeholders are primarily important customers with large dollar value premiums, who needed answers to premium payment and value questions. Since the information was locked away on mainframe systems, the required approach by customer service personnel to gain answers was manual, complex and lengthy.

Incubate and innovate

The startup partner selected to address the customer’s business issues was Mainframe Cloud, a provider of mainframe solutions for the digital generation. Mainframe Cloud creates solutions that expose mainframe data and other business critical information via a RESTful Gateway. By natively exposing underlying data, digital applications can be developed rapidly in modern languages which negates the need for legacy code.

The usual Applied Innovation Hub approach involves issuing the challenge to the community and selecting a startup to proceed. The startup then works to solve the problem during an agile program up to 12-weeks of open ideation, design thinking and rapid prototyping. In this case, the customer needed to see very quick wins, so the partner was given a deadline of just five weeks.

In response to the customer’s issues, Mainframe Cloud developed a solution to unlock mainframe data and allow application development in modern languages using programming skills readily available in today’s market.

Learn fast and iterate

DXC and Mainframe Cloud worked together within the Applied Innovation Hub to collaboratively focus on the task. The team worked in an agile environment with a number of defined sprints and daily stand-ups to track progress against milestones, and re-plan where necessary.

As a clear definition of expectations was established up front, it meant that all parties understood exactly what success looked like. If designs throughout the program didn’t meet the success criteria, they were quickly closed and re-assessed, preventing prolonged investment and time wasting.

By collaboratively focusing on the task, the team were able to achieve the tight deadline and were very quickly able to showcase how the technology would work in the customer’s environment. This gained the customer’s confidence that the tech was viable and enabled the customers to quickly leverage new technology to solve a significant business problem. It also highlighted the potential for a range of other similar projects designed to cost effectively expose mainframe data.

Applying innovation and achieving a very quick and significant win for the customer has demonstrated that this methodology can solve complex customer problems. The initial engagement and success has confirmed that the Applied Innovation Hub has addressed a gap in the marketplace.

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