High-velocity enterprise transformation: To where and how?

This blog elaborates on the the right future state for organizations and guides them on how to achieve it via high velocity enterprise transformation. To understand what is a high velocity enterprise transformation, please read this blog by the same author.

High-velocity enterprise transformation: To where and how?

Today, organizations face several challenges. The need for agile, reliable, and personalized experiences drives competitive markets across several industries. As new-age technologies rapidly change business dynamics, enterprise transformation has become a continuous process. Enterprise transformation is a fundamental change to enable organizations to create and deliver value to their customers, partners, employees, and stakeholders. Transformation to a composable enterprise allows organizations to provide value.

A McKinsey Global Survey on digital strategy revealed that 64 percent of companies understood the need to build new digital businesses. In contrast, only 11 percent believed that their current business models were economically viable through 2023.

Velocity over speed

In a highly competitive environment, organizations focus on speed for their business and information technology (IT) operations. However, speed without a long-term strategy at the enterprise level offers very few benefits. Business units moving at high speeds in different directions compromise the growth potential while the organization loses focus on a unified and integrated future state. We insist on using the term future state over the target state because organizations need to continuously evolve with new technologies, business models, and industry convergence.

Before we know the transformation approach, let us understand what a high-velocity enterprise means and how it differs from the speed that many successful organizations are targeting. By definition, speed is a scalar quantity with only magnitude, whereas velocity is a vector quantity with magnitude and direction.

The high-velocity enterprise

Zensar defines high velocity as the combination of high speed with the required direction (future state, results and outcomes, experience, agility, and purpose).

A volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world has compelled today’s enterprises to focus on velocity with agility, flexibility, innovation, experience, responsiveness, and adaptability.

Enterprises began the journey of digital transformation steered by major technological shifts such as cloud enablement, agile software engineering, data visualization, and experience contextualization. COVID-19 has accelerated the rate of virtual adoption through rapid advancements in technology and processes. It has completely changed how we work, do business, deliver services and products, and measure experience. Today, organizations adopt the hybrid model, with employees finding a balance between working from the office and working from home.

As the hybrid work environment becomes widely adopted, organizations will pivot from only focusing on speed to embracing newer technologies, delivery models, and contextualized experiences. Velocity will be needed to navigate this new digital transformation through convergence of five levers of high velocity transformation:

These five levers need to be applied in harmony through the entire business and technology organization to create a high-velocity enterprise (HiVE). It is easy to create, deploy, manage, secure, and consume services and products in a hybrid world.

The best way to set this up is by investing in the formation of an enabling and governing function called the foundation squad that covers the following:

1. Technology and architecture - This group will be responsible for continuous research and analysis of new technologies and cloud-native features and functionalities. They will define reference architectures and bring a domain flavor through domain-oriented reference architecture (DORA) for various industries. Enterprise architecture will be a dynamic state and will always be called the future state rather than the target state architecture.

2. Roadmap and value realization - This group will create a risk mitigated roadmap with defined milestones, minimum viable products (MVPs), and quick wins. They will help with the business case and continue working on value stream mapping to measure realized value.

3. Automation and reusability - This group will create standard reusable components and utilities in cloud foundation, developer utilities (internal and external APIs, domain-based microservice), intelligent process automation, and modernization automation (from apps assessment to migration automation).

4. IT process engineering - This group will define, integrate, and democratize the adoption and management of various IT and IT-enabled business services (ITES). The group will drive cultural changes and move toward an integrated, lean, agile DevSecOps consumed through a digital enterprise marketplace working with the above three groups.

5. Experience, intelligence, and security - This group will continue to monitor and provide direction around three areas - experience unification, applied intelligence, and zero trust. Experience unification will create a consistent experience across the physical and virtual world by focusing on human desirability. Meanwhile, applied intelligence will bring innovation, and zero trust will create fool-proof security.

High-velocity programs

We at Zensar have embarked on several high-velocity programs for various clients across industries and geographies. Below are a few examples and the results of some of our programs:

1. For a leading retailer in North America — We are transforming the legacy-based monolithic warehouse management platform to an agile, composable, microservices and DevSecOps-based open platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The aim is to drive a quick launch of new distribution centers, reduce the time for new feature launches from six months to two weeks, and save over 250 million cubic inches of space.

2. For an FTSE 100 diverse conglomerate with diversified interests in clean air, efficient natural resources, health, and battery materials — We followed the approach of building a foundation product-oriented delivery (POD) to run more than 30 projects to transform how they create, manage, and deploy products and enhance experiences.

The way forward

Every enterprise journey in the new hybrid world is different and will need a customized transformation approach. How companies address their digital transformation strategy and achieve velocity over speed will determine their success.