Enterprise Cloud Transformation through Co-Creation
The following was authored by Ndu Emuchay, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Cloud Engagement Hub and Praveen Dharmavaram, Cloud Transformation Advisor, Cloud Engagement Hub
“I have to tell you a couple of things we’ve learned. On one hand, the ‘what’ you’re doing is really important, but I think you’re going to find the ‘how’ is almost more important. This is going to be an era of Co-Creation.” — Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and CEO
Chapter 2
Chapter 1 of cloud was application centric and opportunistic. That chapter was focused on native-cloud net-new workloads, workload virtualization and relatively simple workload disposition on cloud. It was largely about developing or moving a lot of new and customer-facing applications to off-prem clouds in order to gain variable cost model benefits and agility.
Chapter 2 is about the hard stuff. It is about scaling artificial intelligence and creating hybrid clouds; It is about bringing the new cloud operating model to all those mission-critical apps and enabling clients to manage data, workloads and apps, and moving them safely between multiple clouds and making decisions for where work and data are best placed. Chapter 2 of digital transformation is about moving from experimentation to true transformation — in the enterprise context. It is about gaining speed and scale and safety — and doing so within a regulatory agenda.
In Ginni’s keynote at the THINK conference earlier this year outlined IBM’s vision of Chapter 2 which centers around hybrid cloud multicloud, open, secure, and consistently managed environment.
Our experience working with clients has proven that Chapter 2 is much more than application disposition and customer-facing applications, it directly relates to transformation involving organizational culture, talent and skill, process, information and data, and yes — technology. Co-Creation is that approach of meaningfully involving clients in all aspects that impact such transformation, from idea-conception to idea realization — done in an agile context.
Co-Creation
The most successful companies know what their clients need, and these companies also anticipate what the client need is, projecting into the future to intersect with future need. Having said that, it can be difficult, to know in the minutest detail what clients or specific segments of the market need.
Co-creation works because it: considers the big picture, addresses areas of contention and injects new practices of new ways of working which offer speed and flexibility to the idea-to-delivery lifecycle. Let us examine each of these aspects of the above in the context of co-creation:
The big picture
Co-creation assures that the process of creation involves the right people, establishing transdisciplinary teams who can collaborate and share a diverse set of perspectives. By involving the right people in the organization, we are able to align business and technology, meeting the client where they are, taking a holistic yet pragmatic approach across all the topics of inquiry.
In that context, we are able to operate from an outside-in, client-centric and client-experience perspectives assuring that these important considerations are taken into account, and we open the door to new possibilities. Involving the right people establishes the success criteria — what is seen as important and articulable by the client in measuring success from their perspective.
Addressing areas of contention
Decisions on transformation, app modernization and migration, talent and skill uplift can be tough to justify and to prioritize, balancing effort or cost with the value to be derived from such decisions. Through co-creation decision making frameworks can be developed with help in those as well as others that go to the core of culture upgrade, changing tools, developing on and operating hybrid multicloud environments. Other areas of decision making include integration and security on- and off-premises for application and data — where applications should run, where data must reside to comply with regulatory frameworks, and what landing zones make sense while supporting the agile business agenda.
New practices offer speed and flexibility
Co-creation enables us practice new forms of agile engagement and organizational alignment, re-imagining the client relationship, establishing new foundations for transformation and taking concrete steps along the Cloud Transformation Journey. What we have seen working with clients is that by building in quick wins and showing progress against the backdrop of the long-term Transformation Journey we are able to generate momentum, technically validating topics of importance and value to the clients. Co-creation helps us balance disruptive innovation with sustained innovation. Specifically, tools such as Transformation Advisor can be used to demonstrate in a practical way how application modernization can be executed, in the broader organizational transformation context. The organization can then reasonably focus between sustained innovation of transforming existing applications to native-cloud models or taking a native-cloud approach from start.
Co-Creation in action
Our recent work at a large bank in Europe is similar to others driven by techniques found in IBM Enterprise Design Thinking and IBM Garage Method. We engaged with the client in a co-creation program that spanned three months from May to July 2019. We had the right levels of organizational sponsorship, we engaged parts of the organization IBM (given our specific infrastructure relationships), does not typically engage with at the account, we delivered with excellence pulling the best of IBM thinking from across the company to form a one-IBM view. Specifically, as part of this program we collaborated with over 60+ colleagues from the client, we unearthed more than 350+ client pain points, we captured more that 175+ statement of desired state, we examined more that 57 Services in the clients environment across what the program determined to be 6 Maturity Self-Assessment Axes. See figure 1: Clients Co-Creation Outcomes
By themselves these numbers are impressive but are not the whole story. Also, this is not where the story ends. In our view, this is the second innings of the story — Chapter 2. For this client and others such as this client where we have executed meaningful co-creation, IBM is in a strengthened position to engage on new transformational opportunities that otherwise we would not have ‘permission’ to engage on. Co-creation has significantly reshaped the playing field and has importantly improved IBM’s chances of sustained transformational engagement and success. The foundational co-creation work does not obliviate the need for execution excellence but instead requires it — enabling the client and IBM raise the bar of what can be possible co-creating, co-operating and co-executing in our partnership.
Summary
Co-creation is increasingly becoming an enabler to customer-driven outcomes as a fundament to digital transformation. By collaborating with a trusted advisor to holistically consider the technical and business impacts of change, organizations are able to bring in transdisciplinary teams to provide perspectives that go to the core of enterprise problem solving. In contrast to detached methods of working, the approach enables for place-based collaboration that encourages teams to co-create, co-operate and co-execute on aligned objectives.
This model is only possible with the appropriate sponsorship and a flexible yet structured framework that enables teams to plan and execute projects using proven approaches such as IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, IBM Garage Method and Cloud Adoption and Transformation Framework which utilize user-focused research, vendor-agnostic assessment models, and qualitative and quantitative techniques to develop a roadmap for success. IBM is uniquely positioned to act as the trusted advisor for clients based on our deep expertise and breadth of industry experience developing technology and helping businesses thrive in this era of hybrid multicloud. When we succeed in co-creation with the clients, we believe the clients finds IBM to be the undisputed trusted partner who can walk the Enterprise Cloud Transformation Journey with them in Chapter 2 and beyond.
Useful resource references
IBM Design Studio: https://www.ibm.com/design/
IBM Garage: https://www.ibm.com/garage/method/cloud
Red Hat Innovation Labs: https://www.redhat.com/en/services/consulting/open-innovation-labs
Contributors
Thank you Ravesh Lala, VP Cloud Engagement Hub for sponsoring this work, especially the Cloud Engagement Hub active involvement; to the Account team for guiding the way on this effort; to the Growth and Market Development team for supporting the Account; thanks to the IBM Garage and Solution Engineering team for their contribution in supporting the program through their input on the IBM Garage Method and IBM Enterprise Design Thinking.
