Every enterprise must adopt a digital platform strategy to stay relevant and differentiated to their customers. Gartner in its article Every Organization Needs a Digital Platform Strategy makes a point that the digital platform strategy will vary from company to company. Some companies will develop a platform business model that encompasses providers, consumers and employees to create or exchange goods, services, and social interaction. Others might integrate with other organizations’ digital platforms. Regardless of the setup, the strategy must integrate business and IT needs and establish a collective leadership vision.
How to begin your enterprise digital transformation with Platforms
The key objective of the first step is to set an appropriate digital platform strategy based on the context, need and business objectives of the enterprise. Another correlated step for enterprises is to identify a suitable platform type that can be used as a reference for their envisioned platform. Laying out the platform strategy upfront helps an organization understand the expected value as well as risks of undertaking this journey.
The key objective of the second step in the platform journey is to understand and capture the current state of the organization for its business & technology readiness to initiate digital transformation. Assessment of business and technology readiness assessment helps business leaders to calibrate the current situation better and then helps them to set pragmatic strategies of platform-based digital transformation on the time and resources it takes to reshape technology areas or business areas or both. For example, Sonata’s digital maturity assessment helps the client assess the current state of digital readiness. It is a short assessment that explores the capability and maturity of the enterprise. With help of this assessment, we are able to provide our clients valuable insights about how to go about creating a successful digital platform for their company.
What are the key ingredients to building a successful digital platform?
The key components to building a successful digital platform can be broken down to two major things- Business architecture and Technology architecture.
Business Architecture
The key objective of the third step in the journey is to bring new insights on how the business ecosystem and market works, and what role the business owners and others can play in it. Laying out the business design of the platform helps the business leaders to re-organize or even re-structure business operations, and core interactions amongst the participants of the platforms to achieve its goal of building a connected, intelligent, open and scalable platform.
Technology Architecture
Another key objective of the fourth step in the journey is to assess, evaluate and prioritize implementation of the 16 technology enablers to build connected, intelligent, open and scalable platforms. These 16 technology blocks are a combination that creates a holistic framework for building an ideal technology platform. Striking the right balance with these technology elements becomes extremely important.
16 technology parameters that will define your digital platform strategy
Execution
The key objective of the final step is to select an appropriate realization technique to establish the required team organization with an appropriate structure and skill-set, implement the platform technology framework, and launch the platform. Defining the method of platform realization and laying out the development and execution roadmap by defining the key releases, team, and launch plans help business leaders to align with the organization’s digital platform strategy and goals.
Enterprises can choose a proven industry framework to realize this strategy. Sonata’s Platformation™ is such a proven framework that guides customers in setting up their digital platforms. Platformation is a unique approach to digital that helps enterprise becoming open, scalable, connected and intelligent. It embodies the platform development intricacy with its proven framework that helps enterprise accelerate the digital agenda.
Irrespective of the framework that is chosen, as business ecosystems expand, CIOs will have to manage increasingly complex digital platform architectures. To handle such systems traditional IT strategy will no longer sufficient to meet the business needs. Enterprises have to adopt a digital platform strategy to exponentially grow their business.