Enabling the Innovation Value Chain
The innovation enablement value chain is a combination of
design thinking, The Lean Startup, SAFe, cloud accelera-
tion, DevOps and cloud-native architectures. Starting your
initiatives with the customer empathic approach of design
thinking allows you to narrow your hypothesis prior to
developing your minimally viable product (MVP). In one of
the most popular books on innovation, The Lean Startup,
Eric Ries teaches us the benefits of defining a hypothesis,
building an MVP and rapidly learning, with the goal of a
pivot or preserve decision after hypothesis testing. Imple-
menting SAFe allows a firm to gain the benefits of the Agile
Manifesto at an enterprise level. Leveraging cloud automa-
tion allows a firm to quickly engage technical solutions that
would otherwise be
cost prohibitive. In fact,
much of today’s disrup-
tion concerns are
driven by the removal
of the barrier-to-entry
costs associated with
setting up compute
resources. Leveraging
public cloud providers
allows firms to access
compute resources on
demand, which previ-
ously would have been unattainable due to the long-term
capital commitment required. Combining empathic design,
hypothesis validation, SAFe, and cloud automation, with the
ability to deploy, change and remove solutions quickly
through DevOps and cloud-native architectures, truly
enables your business to innovate.
At a prior firm, I started regular educational sessions on new
approaches to technology delivery. I met an expert in
design thinking who agreed to help educate the firm on its
benefits. Together with an internal expert who taught
design thinking at a local university, they launched the
series. We then reached out to Cloud Technology Partners
to keep our momentum going. Over the course of the
well-received series, we covered many topics, including
SAFe, blockchain/distributed ledger and data analytics. We
leveraged vendors and our network of contacts to find the
right experts to talk broadly to the firm about the possibili-
ties in front of us.
Many industries are looking for technology to take a more
active role in leading innovation. Therefore, explaining the
impact of the entire
innovation enablement
value chain is critical.
Collaborating on the
dynamics of customer-
led decisions through
enabling an innovation
value chain can be
truly impactful. Our
engagements
that
incorporate
close
alignment across the
organization provide
the best opportunities for creating a sustained cloud strat-
egy. A clear shared vision of the value offered by the entire
suite of transformation solutions produces transparency
around how technology is enabling innovation. The term
digital transformation alone does not speak to this innova-
tion enablement.
Starting your initiatives with
the customer empathic
approach of design thinking
allows you to narrow your
hypothesis prior to developing
your minimally viable product.
The Benefits of Building a Common
Understanding
Each of the solutions mentioned above are part of the digi-
tal transformation strategy at many companies. We fre-
quently talk about them independently, or discuss them in
the vague terminology of digital transformation, but it
would be better to explain to our business units that these
solutions together enable innovation at scale -- that the
whole is greater than the sum of the individual approaches.
32 | THE DOPPLER |
SUMMER 2019
Innovation Enablement Alignment
One of our largest and most successful programs benefited
from strong organizational change management and buy-in
from all the key stakeholders and change agents. We set
out to migrate off the mainframe and completed a proof of
concept leveraging a replatforming approach. While the
proof of concept was successful, the change agents in the
organization recommended that we take the time to refac-
tor the final solution to take better advantage of the new
infrastructure. This early collaboration (and the resulting
agreement to refactor the solution) gained alignment from