The emergence of the Data-Driven Enterprise

Becoming data-driven and “data-centric” is now the aspiration of all modern enterprises across clients and vendors alike. What is so different about a “data-driven” enterprise? It is not as if data were not available earlier for organizations to take advantage of this trend! 

If we analyze further, the theme of “data-centric” has come into the forefront due to 2 other trends – “Design Thinking” and “Digital Transformation”. 

“Digital Transformation” is about delivering exciting digital experiences and offerings often on existing legacy products and platforms. As such, it requires understanding (documenting, inventorying) the current assets the enterprise possesses, where the gaps and opportunities are, and then deploying agile, design-centric experiences for the customer. Digital Transformation is a prominent theme in driving the data-driven enterprise. Enterprises require data about their current landscape to transform into their future digital landscape. 

But how does “Design Thinking” influence the march towards a data-driven enterprise? Design Thinking focuses on the user or the customer of the product. Designing products is a process that requires embracing design thinking at each step within the process. As different workers collaborate to develop the product (or the MVP) they are continually thinking “Who am I doing this for?”, “Who is the target audience not just for the product but for my work?”, “Am I showing empathy? Do they understand what I am producing?” Stated differently, design thinking presents the data to the user in a way that the target user can understand, appreciate, and interact in a highly intuitive fashion. 

Specifically, in the Business IT planning domain, this has caused some interesting shifts towards:

• Emergence of Data Driven Enterprise Architectures – enterprise architects, are no longer producing models in notations that only they can understand and follow. Instead, “Design Thinking” enterprise architects are ensuring their visual views of the enterprises can be followed by a large variety of business audiences who have no background in modeling notations
• Top-Down portfolio planning and prioritization – instead of first defining projects and then defining capabilities that those projects need and prioritizing the work, design thinking PMOs start first with outcomes and goals and strategies required for digital transformation and then link them to business capabilities and then identify investments they want to fund
• Forward -looking, contextual storytelling for the CIOs – instead of producing series of beautiful tableaux, design thinking CIOs want to build forward-thinking roadmaps and alignment views. These views contextualize their digital transformation story that can be understood and collaborated upon by their business stakeholders

At EOS Software, our EOS ITPM product is data-driven to the core with microservices at the very heart of our architecture. We can deliver a wide variety of experiences for our customers which tailored to their needs. These experiences are contextualized for the mental model of the enterprise. Our product caters to a broad spectrum of use cases ranging from Application Portfolio Management and Business Capability Maps to Kanban Board driven planning views for the CIO! We aspire to be your partners in the data driven enterprise transformation! Book your demo meeting ASAP with us 😊