In the Mutable Business™ framework an organisation maintains a permanent state of reinvention, so that it can survive today’s disruptive business landscape, by adapting its Business approach, its People and its Technology. The technology ingredients expand to the sectors of our Mutable Business™ – Technology framework.
Ultimately technology, digital business models, and a new data driven era of Software Defined Business and Big Software allows organisations to effectively virtualise their entire architecture, even create a Digital Twin of the business. Once you have an idea you need money, people, production, and distribution. All of these are now being offered “as a service” through pay-on-demand platforms and ecosystems. This means that businesses can be scaled up and down very quickly and cost-effectively – and if your business model does not allow for this sort of adaptability and agility, it will not be able to compete, over time.
At the centre of our technology framework, your business is supported by the way your systems and technology Interface with the world – this includes your customers, suppliers, partners, people and the devices they use and interact with. You need to consider all of the channels you use to communicate with them, focus on the user experience, and understand what can be automated to do more with less or do it better.
In modernising and adapting your systems approach we believe you need to use Data as the starting point to interact with, gather and understand, so it can drive actions. You start here because the way that data is collected, stored, and used, along with the response times you will need for analysing it to give the answers and outcomes you are looking for will decide and inform the infrastructure choices you need to make.
The Infrastructure segment covers network, compute and storage and software can be used to define everything. Most organisations are on the journey to Cloud, but they are at different stages. Many still have to deal with legacy applications in Data Centres, often working alongside Public Cloud, and Private Cloud applications, with even the latest incarnation of enterprise servers (mainframe 3.0) as an option – we live in a Hybrid and Multicloud world. The mutable approach is all about choosing the right tool for each job in turn and running each workload on the most appropriate platform (remembering that this may change over time). 5th Generation Networks (5g), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing are essential infrastructure enablers for a range of new business and technology developments, often termed Industry 4.0, that cover areas like autonomous vehicles, smart city grids, e-health, automated factories, mobile content streaming and data analytics. To support reinvention and adaptation, all of these need to be factored into your infrastructure plans.
The Action segment is where you make things happen, you provide insight, drive people to act, define your working process. You will use apps and Software as a Service. You should be thinking agile in your development approach, and using DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery as a matter of course. Low-Code and No-Code platforms should be considered, and automation from machine learning to robotic process automation should form part of your strategy.
The foundation of all of this technology should provide Trust from identity to governance to security and resilience. Post pandemic, with the big shift towards home working, the traditional technology perimeter is dead, creating an ever-expanding attack surface for cybercrime. You have to be sure your approach is safe, secure, and assured that it will keep working, and deliver the quality levels that are needed.
Our mutable approach deploys Automation to augment and connect all of the segments of the technology framework. From AI to robotic process automation you need tools that combine natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning that work with and enhance the technology components you will deploy.
Finally, this Mutable Business™ – Technology framework can’t operate stand alone, but has to support your Business models and approach, as well as supporting and being supported by your People, their leadership and your organisation’s culture.
Diagram: The Mutable Business™ – Technology
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