Innovation is a catalyst in your journey to the Renewable Enterprise
There is a lot of buzz around the Intelligent Enterprise now after some real tests done with SAP Leonardo over the last couple of years which have resulted in some real-time customer deployments. During this time, SAP rapidly grew its’ offerings to satisfy the digital hunger of its enterprise customers. And perhaps not many people noticed, but SAP has been investing heavily, and in the past few years has come out with something new every quarter. SAP has found their space in the Gartner’s leaders’ quadrant for Data Management and Analytics and Data and Data Integration Tools and will continue to expand their footprint.
I presume SAP will hold its fort well-guarded with more acquisitions and more investments in product innovations geared towards moving to a multi-tenant paradigm. I believe this will basically grow the API and microservices economy and unleash a plethora of opportunities and business avenues.
Some time ago, I wrote a blog on the “Journey to an Intelligent Enterprise,” which focused on some key steps to build an Intelligent Enterprise. This blog takes a step further to ascertain my views on the need for such an enterprise while also bringing in some key lessons learnt while building such use-cases in the last few months. I thought I will quickly share my learnings and reach out to you for an open conversation for different takes on this topic.
Innovation will play a key role in defining this new digital economy and certainly will have its’ presence carved out in every organization. I feel it has to be embraced in a way to ensure business and innovation become 2 key stakeholders in rewriting their enterprise.
This enterprise, in my view, is a Renewable Enterprise – an enterprise that learns as you transact, earns as you touch upon new avenues, is lean as you carve out, is a continuum and is ready for adaptation of major technology advancements with a pumping digital heart.
Not enough, I guess. Well in that case, let’s have some bulleted ones to ascertain my views on a Renewable Enterprise.
- A journey and not a destination
- Architected on a multi-cloud, multi-platform landscape
- Multi-PAAS approach for custom developments
- Lite-effort upgrades with less or no sanity checks
- Infra-lite and Virtualized
- Scalable at ease with less CAPEX
- Multi-cloud and hybrid
- Coaxed for growth as your data grows
- Nomenclatures on DevOps
- A move from a tactical to Industrialization of innovations
- Most important – “Your end-user is now a digital evangelist – You get more from them.”
You can have a lot more to it as you build. And, if I would go a bit further and bring in examples from a CMO and FMO, then it could look something like the diagram below, “A transformation into a true Renewable Intelligent Enterprise.”
When we look at the trend, we are bound to see technical advancements in the coming years and a need to retrofit them in the enterprise landscapes. Customers need to have an innovation team of their own, or jointly drive innovation with their partner. This should focus on setting up the design thinking process and come up with new ideas to plug into the existing process chains. Again, it’s a collaborative effort, where both the “Innovation” and “Business” teams work together in a kind of “Innovation Council” to focus on delivering some really fascinating ideas. This is not an easy task, but it is achievable if planned and executed in a predefined and proven approach. This requires some investment, but the returns will be faster than in other sources of investments. The wins will be visible in terms of employee engagements, supplier collaborations, and customer satisfaction.
What does this Innovation Council body do?
Capgemini has experience in setting up innovation councils with clients following a process to work towards a goal which defines the Most Viable Products (MVPs) for our customers so they can scale after the pilot is successful.
My role here is to define, design, and deliver these MVPs for our customers. We also build our own MVPs based on our experience, cutting across industry verticals.
How do we do it?
We have a proven process of delivering innovations. Our Innovation Center is a team spread across Europe, North America and APAC with a vision to serve our global customers. We work as a single global team to deliver innovation to clients via tangible accelerators set to enhance and accelerate the digital transformation journey.
We have multiple SAP S/4HANA transformation engagements where our innovation team works along with the account and customer teams to do a detailed analysis of the BPML and then define a roadmap to align the transformations towards a renewable intelligent enterprise. Under the “Renewable Enterprise Assessment Framework,” our deliverables are tuned to achieve process excellence by plugging-in intelligent technology components to fill in the gaps.
Capgemini is equipped with teams focusing on innovations, teams focusing on providing groundbreaking solutions for artificial intelligence and engineering. Our Innovation Center combines these forces to present a cohesive capability showcase encompassing technology and domain expertise.
Our recent announcement to acquire Altran will enable us to focus on creating industry solutions that leverage the expertise of the Altran R&D and engineering services teams to offer solutions closer to the machines (by creating their digital twins). This will further strengthen Capgemini’s capabilities in building a renewable enterprise of the future – today.
You must be curious; how we can bring in Innovation into your existing complex processes so that some of the work can be done by a bot or an algorithm, your data siloes opened up to trigger actionable tasks, your key exchanges recorded in a ledger, accessible any time building a unique trust, and your industrial assets are up and running with less or no downtime. The most important aspect of this process is that you achieve results which provide detailed insights on what you have earned. Makes sense doesn’t it? Meaning you can see each $ earned while exercising Innovation.
How the Journey Starts
The journey begins with the business problem we need to address. That’s where we start weaving a solution to the problem which possibly entails the use of intelligent technologies, microservices, or any other open source integration approach. This is driven by multiple stakeholders. Business and technology teams work closely where business is sensitized with the possibilities and limitations. A design authority governs the overall landscape and ensures that the basic principles of security, licensing impacts, development guidelines, etc. are taken care of during the ideation process, which is carried out driven by Design-Thinking.
Once the idea is on paper along with a landscape architecture approved by the design authority, the work starts with rapid prototyping using tools such as BUILD in SAP Cloud Platform and that’s when the end-user comes into the picture to set expectations and outputs from the idea while interacting with a screen. I think that feedback is the most important part of this journey. It ensures end-user satisfaction when we deliver the solution – so no huge lines of code to write before the consumer of the application is happy.
And then we are ready with an MVP (most viable product) which is further scaled after the pilot run and iterations (if needed) to a live solution for enterprise-wide use.
In this entire innovation process, two things stand out as the most important when it comes to ensuring that all such use-cases or pilots we plan are successful:
- The idea addressing a genuine business problem
- The design authority for the governance.
At Capgemini, we follow the concept shown in the diagram below very closely and we are able to set it up for our customers. The following image provides a brief overview of the process we follow to deliver the innovations.
We all know what the end result will be – a lot of ideas from both business and end users. Ideas galore, and to realize them, there needs to be a process of industrializing innovation. This is where Capgemini’s focus is.
This brings us to the end of my blog. I’ll wait to hear if I can help you setting up this process of innovation as your “Trusted Advisor” and industrialize to renew the enterprise with rapid and agile transformation.
You can reach out to me or David Lowson, if innovation is on your agenda!
Look for me on LinkedIn today and let’s start a detailed conversation.