HOW SHIFTING TO A PLATFORM MINDSET BOOSTS INNOVATION

October 2023 | TAGS: DIGITAL ACCELERATION, PLATFORM FIRST

In our digitally amped, AI-infused world the sentiment, “innovate or die” has never felt more like an in-your-face, ever-present, cautionary imperative.

Don’t despair. We’re here to assure you that innovators of all stripes have a secret weapon: the platform mindset.

Just to level set, in the broadest sense when we say "platform mindset” we’re referring to the embrace of (and belief in) an ecosystem where multiple parties—developers, consumers, and businesses—can interact, share, and basically co-create magic. Platforms are the digital age's agora, the modern gathering place where customer-delighting innovation is the shared intent. And in return, these innovations—these apps—often enhance the ecosystem, making it more valuable and more likely to spin up additional innovations. It’s a truly symbiotic relationship.

Enterprises embrace platform-enabled operational excellence at scale

Two great examples of incredibly popular, high-value platforms in the enterprise space are ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Both are comprehensive solutions offering a wide range of modules and integrations aimed at driving ongoing operational excellence. By facilitating a smooth transition to the platform, both ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365 focus not just on supporting the technology, but also on the people who will do their work and commerce within it. Like clockwork, the ecosystem becomes more valuable with each passing day.

Key takeaway: When workflows actually flow and insights are truly actionable, a corporate culture can’t help but deliver sustained competitive advantage.

What’s next: Platforms become the ultimate expression of a culture of innovation

It’s no secret that today innovation is an ongoing process. The pace is rapid. Sitting on laurels is no longer a thing. What hasn’t changed is the drive of the most impactful innovators to eschew incremental progress in favor of completely reimagining what’s possible. Platforms support this grand design by deploying armies of bots, machine learning, and AI to inform the collaborative visioneering of cross-function fusion teams. All this allows fruitful ideation about how to enhance user experience and provide delight along every touchpoint throughout and beyond an enterprise. All while giving the competition an extreme case of whip-lash.

Azure, VMware Cloud, and other platforms directly enable this future-proofing innovation by allowing businesses to integrate AI, machine learning, or data analytics without having to rebuild their entire IT architecture and by offering a range of services that allow organizations to experiment, build, and scale new solutions rapidly.

It all sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it?

Moving down a layer, when an enterprise places a platform at the heart of network transformation and operations it greatly enhances that organization’s ability to dynamically innovate.

How? Because a platform-first approach prioritizes business and experience outcomes over uptime, achieves “Automated Ops” to drive order of magnitude benefits instead of the incremental benefits of process automation, and deploys legions of bots or lines of code to address issues versus depending upon a human response.

And while the innovation process itself can be wild and chaotic, the network that is its playground should run as smooth as silk — easily integrating new technology and supporting dynamic capacity allocation with a single pane of orchestration and administration.

It’s a bit of a trick.

Delivering network transformation and operations consistently via a platform requires connecting siloes in a hybrid, multi-tenanted world — so there are no vendor overlords allowed. In fact, the more vendor-agnostic the platform, the better.

As we’ve noted, innovation demands collaboration across fusion teams and the network must keep up with their wildest imagining — which means built-in workflow integration, and frictionless navigation and management. Maintaining modularity lets the network handle whatever user or task-specific elements are required to support a new product or experience — without cascading a need to rebuild.

Similarly, the network-level platform is open and extendable (all the way to the edge) embracing new technology in honor of innovation. Finally, visibility and transparency are required as the hallmarks of resilience: actionable insights drive a continuous cycle of service improvement.

An orchestrated platform means end-to-end accelerated self-healing, automated self-service, and AI/ML-powered analytics all seamlessly integrated into a single, comprehensive view

The platform mindset: when you aspire not just to succeed but to lead. (For a long time.)

To bring this all home, enterprises that adopt a platform approach at both the network and software and services layers will benefit from accelerated innovation cycles and more significant impacts of innovation thanks to a platform environment that is dynamic, scalable, and most importantly adaptable. In a sense, platforms are the ultimate expression of a culture of innovation. They're not static; they evolve. Every new app, every new service, every new interaction is like a life form in a digital ecosystem, making it richer, more robust, and more capable of delivering an exceedingly satisfying experience.

What’s not to love?

A lesson learned: the UX and innovation connection

While our technologists at Microland were deep into their quest to develop the ultimate network platform, they learned some critical lessons about how potently user experience fuels enterprise capacity for innovation as well as how intricately network performance and user experience are linked.

Microland’s Intelligeni NetOne is informed by these insights.

The first learning was that the team’s laser focus on business outcomes had a knock-on effect of elevating user experience to the core of what Microland was trying to build and deliver. This was a shift from the initial impulse to place business process integration at the core of our platform solution. While business process integration is still quite important, the team came to realize that the most direct effect on business outcomes happens when the end user experience is 100% dialed in. And thus, the shift in highest-level focus.

The second key learning was specific to the potency of advanced monitoring and observability’s capacity to understand the entire ecosystem and therefore provide a more nuanced, detailed read of the effect of network performance on user experiences. Such insights can drive the design and maintenance of the optimal user environment for innovation.

The third lesson learned was kind of an “oh, wow” moment around the per-client customizability that results when a platform is correctly built. Sure, platforms provide the foundational structure of capability, but correctly engineered, they truly can be quick and easy to change — adding distinct value and flexibility to the network. The Microland team is incorporating user-centric designs that allow for personalization based on the user’s role, preferences, or needs.

Perhaps the most germane takeaway is that well-designed platforms enable a sublime user experience which – at scale – increases organizational capacity for innovation.

What’s inspiring us right now.

Satish Sukumar, Senior Vice President, Global Head Platforms replies.

The whole theory of intelligent systems is what’s inspiring me right now. I am trying to deeply understand GenAI but specifically learning about what defines a truly intelligent system. I’m reading a lot about Cognitive Neuroscience and how the brain works. I just finished reading On Intelligence and A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins and am re-reading How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. And a whole bunch of papers – many of which go over my head.

A second thing that inspires me is the smart, dedicated folks I get to work with. It is so much fun to challenge one another — turning thinking on its head.

I find this all inspiring because we’ve spent decades trying to automate manual tasks. To now have the ability to do real cognitive stuff is a game changer. Besides I just love building things and couldn’t think of anything better to build. For example, in fact, my team and I are trying to build Intelligeni into a truly Intelligent System. How inspiring is that?

It makes me learn. It makes me realize just how much smarter people are. It makes me learn to see things in a different way. Most importantly it makes me grateful to be given the opportunity to build such stuff.

You heard it here, first.

Speaking of innovation, Microland and Serco AsPac (a division of Serco Group) announced on September 11 a strategic partnership in alignment with Serco’s 2027 strategy to accelerate innovation in business services that can fuel the next wave of growth and expansion. The partnership will focus on providing exceptional digital public services, enabling business growth, delivering enhanced digital experiences, and accelerating cloud adoption.

Serco Group, one of the world’s largest providers of public services, cited the strategic partnership as imperative to an initiative to drive digital transformation leveraging cloud for business agility and resilience. The strategic partnership for AsPac Serco extends to an 18+ year technology delivery relationship between Microland and Serco. As part of Serco AsPac’s 2027 strategy, we will help Serco exit data centers and transition to the cloud transforming them into a cloud-adopted organization. Serco AsPac is leveraging Microsoft Azure for its cloud and data center transformation.

We at Microland are thrilled to continue to support Serco in their mission to bring innovative solutions to some of the most complex challenges facing governments and deliver standards of service, cost efficiencies, and policy outcomes that all citizens deserve.