Why is a cloud-based service delivery critical for Digital Enterprise…?

While every Enterprise is keen on accelerating automation and enabling digital operational models, their approach to Service delivery is old-fashioned. Automation as it is done today can only provide incremental changes. The focus instead must be on digitizing delivery through a cloud-based services approach. This article (part 1 of the multi-part series) stresses the need for digitization and highlights the three facets of this new digital service delivery model.

This is a mulit-part series on Digitiization. In this article (part1) we will focus on the need and different dimensions of the new Digital service model

The need:

I) Enterprise service delivery today is highly people centered. Raising a ticket, for a service need, waiting for a service-engineer to acknowledge & resolve - are all things of the past. The modern enterprise user wants to enjoy the same experience as an online-shopper on Amazon — Order what you want, when you want and have them delivered instantly. An ITIL based process centric rhythm is more and more becoming irrelevant in Enterprises.

The concept of man-in-the-middle is dead.

ii ) Automation unfortunately cannot the holy grail that people want. Enterprises today are almost spoilt for choice when it comes to automation platforms. But their end-user experience has not changed. Automation has only resulted in silos for every Enterprise. For example, DevOps, IT infra-automation, App automation through RPA, Cloud Management etc., have all performed well as specialized silos.

What the user still does not have is a unified pane of glass for all service needs and unified employee engagement experience.

In addition, any automation on the current processes in Entprises, that are mostly non-standardized will only yields incremental results. And the yield tapers beyond a point in time. This is true for any large enterprise today that is working with multiple platforms, providers, vendors and enterprise systems.

iii) The decisive shift to cloud — With infrastructure moving to cloud in form of AWS, Azure and GCP and with software moving to SaaS models — it is now the turn of IT service delivery to move to cloud. This shift is characterized by higher levels of standardization, ease of access with flexible pricing models.

Service delivery today cannot accommodate such flexibilities.

iv) Dynamic changes to Business models — The last 18 months have only accelerated the need for every business to innovate and to enable digital business models. It is a mandate for IT organizations to to respond to this need to accelerate digital transformation and to enhance their business agility. For all the reasons mentioned above and then some, it is almost impossible for businesses to reinvent their operational models with the current context..

So how do we move forward. ??

We at DigitalXC believe the solution to the current situation can be inspired from the way consumer world has innovted and by setting a gold standard in terms of user experience. Every service need (taxi-ride , movie-watching, banking etc.,) is an App on an App-store (iOS) or a Play-store (Android) that can be downloaded, personalized and paid-for by usage.

Enterprises need to follow suit and enable a digitization layer to provide the flexibility, scale and experience that consume world enjoys . We look at Digitization as a framework and also at the intersection of three main facets..

1. Consumerization — The ability to simplify services and make them extremely easy and intuitive for the user. Through consumerization, complexity is abstracted at the backend so that the user experience is seamless.

2. Service centric digital foundation — As part of the digitization, a service-centric delivery is enabled, where any service is a catalogue, a piece of code in the backend and is delivered zero-touch. They key is to enable self-service, simplification, and standardization of services at the backend and shift to a highly ‘templatized’ delivery model.

3. Productized Operations — Nextgen delivery model where services are delivered as products and follow a product engineering rhythm. With highly automated services, the delivery model shifts to Agile and DevSecOps delivery model.

Over the next few articles, we will deep-dive into each dimension of this framework in detail.

Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on the digitization trends you see in your Enterprise.