LEF perspectives: Industrialized learning for competitive advantage

The world’s largest and fastest-growing companies, such as Amazon, Netflix and Alibaba, increasingly automate operational and managerial decisions. They are industrializing learning using intelligent, autonomous (self-governing) digital platforms to translate their market and operational insights into an immediate competitive advantage. They can evolve constantly.

This constant evolution requires automated delivery at scale. It means eliminating the dependencies that create friction within and between teams, platforms, code/test/integration, data, infrastructure and, crucially, decision making. When these advanced firms add digitally enabled business capabilities, they do so in a way that mitigates or removes these interdependencies.

Citizen/customer-facing business operations are adapted on the fly, while back-office systems and infrastructure change more slowly. These advanced firms organize differently from traditional firms; customer experience processes and systems that have digital business capabilities are developed and operated by Pioneers and Settlers, the rest by Town Planners. (The Leading Edge Forum’s Pioneer-Settler-Town Planner model is a three-tier operating model for IT organizations.)

This reengineering exploits all the automation opportunities throughout the IT life cycle. Typically, autonomic platforms and self-service automation are used in parallel:

• Autonomic platforms build upon two important trends: software-defined everything, and the overhaul of IT operating and delivery models under the DevOps movement. With more of IT becoming expressible as code, from underlying infrastructure to IT department tasks, organizations now have a chance to apply new architecture patterns and disciplines. In doing so, they can reduce friction by removing dependencies between business outcomes and underlying solutions.
  
  Advanced companies add into the platform the ability to dynamically manage resources while integrating and orchestrating more of the end-to-end activities required to build and run IT solutions. This new class of autonomous platforms is also self-configuring and self-healing, reducing the interruptions to data flows; and its machine learning also adapts internal workflows and external services to the personal experience of customers.

• Self-service automation is where users access IT resources from a catalog of standardized service options. The automated system controls the provisioning process and enforces role-based access, approvals and policy-based controls. This capability is particularly useful to agile innovation teams that are under time pressure to create and test a minimum viable product or service.

The leading-edge firms, platform organizations, go further; they extend their autonomic platforms to deliver real-time insights into consumer and producer behavior directly into action-oriented systems, such as supply chain systems, interactive web pages and alerting systems embedded in customer-facing systems. They link their ecosystems directly to decentralized decision engines, enabling them to learn autonomously and optimize their services for changing operational or market conditions.

Continue reading the position paper, Design for operations to deliver on digital transformation.

Leading Edge Forum (LEF) is DXC Technology’s independent cross-industry think tank.