Husqvarna Group

Ulf Axelsson Lejon

Digital Platform Champion

By conceptualizing a combination of Enterprise Architecture and Digital Service Platform,will not only empower organizations ability towards agility and disruptive innovation, this will also strengthen the position to become a frontier in Digital Transformation.

To master digital transformation as a corporation, we need to excel in both technology adoption as well as digital leadership. Corporations struggle to define their digital vision and future opportunities. Often we start to explore through Proof Of Concepts in silos, or based on existing enterprise legacy IT infrastructure. Most of these PoCs are executed by external resources without domain knowledge. Not seldom this leads to failure or slow progress for many reasons including inability to absorb and retain the learning and knowledge created.

If an organization want’s to adopt future relevant digital technologies, it must understand that digital transformation is not only about redoing the same things we already do but with new technologies, whereas, it is all about using new technologies to do things in new ways:

• Optimizing and personalizing customer interaction & experiences

• Creating New Revenue streams based on New business models

• Disrupting internal processes and providing operation excellence

• Exploring new Ecosystems to find relevance in adjacent and new business areas

To explore new innovative opportunities, corporations need to build internal leadership to explore opportunities in multiple concept development sprints, be prepared to adopt new eco-systems and onboard new customer segments. Exploration needs to involve start-up ecosystems and academia to ensure innovation, speed and relevance in future technology and business model adoption. This exploration needs to be done while ensuring cyber security, fulfill privacy regulation and ability to scale. Without a clear digital service platform vision and strategy,digital initiatives will either fail or end-up in lock-in effects which does not provide full value to the organization.

“AI Is Not A Development Based Approach, It Is Research Based Where Everything Always Starts From The Data And Good Problem Statements.”

To enable your corporation for the Digital Transformation,it is instrumental that we early-on establish a cloud based digital service platform, which is loosely coupled to the enterprise legacy IT landscape. It is also important to understand that a digital service platform is not equal to an IoT platform, which normally only manage the connectivity and aspects related to analytics on collected data. To cover all aspects of Digital Transformation, the digital service platform additionally needs to cover areas such as (but not limited to) customer management, device identification, content management, agreements and consent, subscription, payments, open APIs, advanced business analytics, AI frameworks, etc.

There are four main pillars to ensure solid foundation for the platform:

• Micro Services Architecture with open APIs to ensure partnership, eco-systems and crowd innovation.

• Cloud based solutioning (containerizing on public cloud) to ensure scalability, speed in implementation,agility in adoption, and independence in technology choices to be able to migrate between cloud providers.

• Internet Of Things, to connect everything and ensure quality data capturing, intelligent products and enabling new business models such as consumption based offering and multi-share and circular economy solutions.

• Artificial Intelligence capabilities to ensure data storage infrastructure, labelling processes, data engineering frameworks, advanced analytics and Machine Learning capabilities to enable true smartness and personalization.

A Digital service platform is foundational to become a digital mastery organization, and the vision of the digital service platform have to ensure an eco-systems or system of systems approach. It also provides the ability to interact with external platforms or eco-systems as well as combine existing go-to market solutions into new business offerings.

The shifting position and focus for Enterprise Architecture Enterprise Architecture have traditionally been more inter corporation focused, often based on waterfall governance thinking and designed for environment that is stable and with slow phase of changes. It generally puts frameworks and controls in place to ensure legacy backbone and full proof processes for the organization. As Digital Transformation will change speed of adoption of new innovations requiring frequent changes, Enterprise Architecture needs to adopt and move towards Product & Service Driven Enterprise Architecture to stay relevant. The need of Enterprise Architecture will become even more important to ensure clear vision and strategies, but it is important to understand that traditional Enterprise Architecture approach needs to change and the new ways of Product & Service driven Enterprise Architecture needs to be applied.

The new Enterprise Architecture approach not only needs to ensure traditional IT supply focusing on cost reduction, internal processes and providing stability in service delivery, but at the same time spearhead adoption of digital opportunities. It is great challenge to have this ambidexterity created and maintained, but the success of future Enterprise Architecture would be dependent on deliveries towards business driven needs, based on customer centric innovations and with focus on perceived values and revenue creation offerings.

What we need to achieve to obtain digital mastery is:

• High level of digital and leadership capabilities

• Strong overarching digital vision & digital culture

• Excellent governance across organization, and

• Have several digital initiatives that generate business value in a measurable way.

Enterprise Architecture have an important and central role to reach digital mastery for an organization.

A Digital Service Platform, an enabler for digital transformation With a micro service enabled Digital Service Platform, this with event based architecture and serverless cloud infrastructure that ensure agility and speed, Enterprise Architects have to be integrated into the DevOps teams way of working, and if possible combine this with scrum Product Ownership role, owning the DevOps backlog.

• To ensure relevance with Enterprise Architecture it needs to be value and outcome driven, agile in ways of working and actively involved in disruptive innovation.

We are heading into an Artificial Intelligence (AI)era, with data driven services and operation. AI will change almost all (ways of working, decision making, kind of offerings, etc.) we do today. Digital Service Platforms will be even more important to enable data capturing, ensuring data quality, compliance and ML/AI-model generation. AI is not a development based approach, it is research based where everything always starts from the data and good problem statements. Hence, Enterprise Architecture needs to evolve Information Management to ensure Data awareness is spread throughout the organization with responsibilities and accountability for various data capture, retention and quality. Enterprise Architecture needs once again to adopt and adjust, and when doing so:

• Focus Enterprise Architecture on revenue generation rather than cost reduction, as well as enable the organization to consume AI as much as produce AI.

To be successful in their digital leadership journey, corporations need to embed Enterprise Architecture skills and competencies within the organization, involve these capabilities in establishing an agile way of working, building loosely coupled digital service platform as front-end to the legacy IT environment and finally adopt agile Enterprise Architecture thinking integrated with SW DevOps and AI research teams.

• To stay relevant as a future digital organization, corporations need to adopt its EA capabilities into enabling rapid changes and disruptive innovations. That is what a successful Digital Transformation demands!