Digital transformation empowered
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face the challenge of staying competitive while delivering innovative products and services. With market trends emphasizing cost efficiency and reduced innovation investments, businesses need a framework that enables them to prioritize both innovation and efficiency. This is where Itera's "Digital Factory at Scale" approach comes into play.
As a leading provider of sustainable digital solutions, Itera offers a proven framework and way of working to accelerate businesses' digital transformation initiatives, enhance efficiency and drive business growth.
In this article, we explain why and how.
Our approach
Digital Factory at Scale is our approach when developing digital products and services. It's more than a methodology – it’s a solid structure, our mindset, culture and common language.
By implementing this way of working we believe that businesses can achieve several strategical and efficiency goals, such as:
- Increased business agility
- Shorter time to value
- Increased productivity
-
Enhanced knowledge and expertise
It’s all about bringing digital products to life at record speed.
In brief, Itera Digital Factory at Scale is a way of working that combines agile methodologies, cross-functional collaboration and advanced technologies to enable organizations to scale their digital transformation efforts rapidly.
Companies using this way of working have been able to*:
50%
reduction in management overhead for technology teams.
70%
reduction in the number of business analysts needed to write technology requirements.
90%
reduction in number of testers due to test automation.
8x
higher performance of the top engineering talents than the level of their peers, as measured with metrics such as code commits.
*According to McKinsey.
Accelerating time-to-market and ensuring adaptability
In today's fast-paced market, businesses must reduce time-to-market and time-to-value to gain a competitive advantage. The Digital Factory at Scale approach enables organizations to develop and deliver products quickly, meet customer demands, and swiftly adapt to market changes.
With mergers and acquisitions leading to various business units and product areas with different technologies and processes, integrating software and consolidating IT becomes essential. The Digital Factory approach provides a standardized platform and processes across the portfolio, enabling efficient collaboration and reducing complexity.
Access to affordable capital is becoming increasingly challenging, limiting the resources available for innovation investments. As a result, businesses focus more on cost efficiency, making it crucial to find ways to deliver value while optimizing resources.
In a cost-focused environment, efficiency might take priority over innovation. Organizations must streamline processes, reduce waste, and ensure optimal resource utilization to remain competitive.
Itera Digital Factory at Scale, with its ability to drive innovation, efficiency, and scalability, becomes even more relevant in this context. It provides a framework to optimize processes, reduce costs, and deliver value rapidly.
Itera's Digital Factory at Scale approach has been successfully implemented in various organizations
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The Digital Factory at Scale brings numerous advantages to businesses
Strengthened ability to innovate and transform the digital agenda
Reduced time-to-value, enabling faster delivery and market entry
Ability to innovate at scale, meeting customer demands promptly and efficiently
Improved proximity to the customer, ensuring a better customer experience
Increased value for money invested, optimizing resource utilization
Advancing Organizational Success
The Digital Factory approach emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making and innovation. By leveraging data, organizations can gain insights, improve customer experience, and deliver value across the entire value chain.
Enterprises now expect the same level of customer proximity as start-ups. The Digital Factory at Scale enables organizations to become closer to their customers, enhance customer experience, and meet evolving expectations.
Implementing the Digital Factory approach helps organizations extract maximum value from their investments. By reducing tech development costs, improving quality, and minimizing incidents, businesses can achieve higher efficiency and value for the money invested.
– We liked the concept because it fit our need for additional resources. We imagined an organizational structure where we could scale up and down as needed and connect with experts when we required them. In this structure, we would be a part of "the factory," where Itera would take the lead and steer us in the right direction. We understood that Itera would provide clear ways of working, with much already pre-set, which would ensure that we work quickly.
Customer within Energy
The Itera Digital Factory at Scale Approach
The Itera Digital Factory at Scale approach is based on Microsoft's lean product development concept. It revolves around the "Northern Star" product-centric approach, which provides a clear direction for product development.
The Digital Factory at Scale approach accommodates two different engagement scenarios:
- "Fresh Product Start": Businesses can build their first product using a pre-built platform. Subsequent products can then be built on the existing platform, maintaining similar standards for product development across the portfolio. Continuous improvement of the platform is also a core focus.
- "Develop a New Business Model while Actively Adapting and Progressing": Often, organizations already have existing business units and product lines. In such cases, Itera recommends starting with integrated Enablement initiatives. Itera collaborates with the customer to define business priorities and their impact on technology and product development. This approach allows for discoveries, prototype solutions, integration into the existing model, and continuous improvement.
Seamless integration with the Digital Factory at Scale gives everyone, both customers and consultants, the support they need to innovate, grow, and scale the product. This results in more time spent on product development in the team, sparking higher productivity and shorter time to value. Itera has a large code base of cloud infrastructure as code (IaC) that can easily be adopted and used to provide standardized platform functions such as APIs, connectivity, identity management, test platforms and more.
Standardization across teams on key areas such as security, connectivity and collaboration makes it easier to learn across teams, deliver and report on compliance, and connect solutions together for synergistic effects such as a common data platform.
Itera will work closely with the business' employees, enabling them to acquire new knowledge, expand their skill sets, and adapt to evolving digital technologies. Working with Itera will provide your employees with the opportunity to foster knowledge acquisition and upskilling of its employees, facilitating their professional growth, and enhancing the organization's overall performance.
At Itera, we cultivate co-creation and design thinking, where shared ownership of work and results is divided between us and you. Interdisciplinarity, insight-driven development, and design are a natural part of creating a culture of innovation and creativity.
What are the industry perspectives on the Digital Factory and digital product strategies?
McKinsey & Company refers to a digital service-focused, strategic approach as building a Digital Factory.
As a business and technology consulting firm, McKinsey states that they consider the Digital Factory approach to be the answer to scaling digital transformation in large organizations. They describe the impact on executives from traditional organizations when they observe the creative energy inherent within cross-functional Digital Factory teams.
Forrester Research presents a similar approach that they call the product-centric IT operating model.
As a technology research and consulting firm, Forrester equates digital services to products and asserts that product management is a core capability for most organizations. They describe the product-centric IT operating model as a complementary approach for technology teams that can better support the business shift from traditional marketing-led product development to agile, iterative digital innovation creation.
The Product-Centric IT Operating Model Is Upon Us | Forrester
Product Centricity Is Coming To Your Organization (forrester.com)
Gartner defines their recommended approach as Fusion Teams.
As a research and advisory firm, Gartner advocates for the adoption of fusion teams – multidisciplinary digital business teams – as critical to finding success with digital transformation. In their view, technology leaders can foster distributed digital service delivery in their organizations by forming fusion teams to maximize business value while addressing the human aspects of digital business and innovation.
The Open Group recommends a Digital-First Enterprise approach supported by the IT4IT™ reference architecture.
As a global technology standards consortium, The Open Group and its members have collaborated to create “The Digital-First Enterprise” – a set of principles illustrating how digital standards might be used to accelerate the adoption of digital practices. In addition, they describe how IT4IT can function as a digital product backbone across an organization and how the IT4IT standard controls the key data objects to manage digital products using value streams.
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