Architecting for Digital Transformation with Digital Platforms with BMK Lakshminarayanan at Techstrong Con 2024

Hello there, and, uh, welcome all, every one of you to the session. Operationalizing AI by Techstrong Group, this conference where we are discussing various topics that is helping organizations to move forward with their digital transformation and also particularly with, um, artificial intelligence. And my topic today is architecting for digital transformation with digital platforms.

And by the way, my name is B and k LaMi and where we talk about, uh, some of the core pillars of the digital transformations for the enterprise organizations. And before that, um, let me introduce myself. My name is BK Ryan.

I'm a transformation architect and DevOps advocate. Um, work for section six, um, based out of Wellington, New Zealand. And what do I really care about as value stream management and flow and DevOps and dev developer experience, wellbeing, community and architecture.

So that is, uh, me and I'm also associated with the various global community groups, including value sharing consortium and also DevOps Institute ambassador, uh, ambassador for the CNCF and also run a cloud native summit. I co share a cloud native summit based out of, um, um, New Zealand. I'm a core organizing committee member for DevOps days in New Zealand as well.

And by the way, you can see my social handles and my block is Bmk, NZ. Easy to remember. Just to hit me up like now you'd like to connect and learn more, uh, and also share more, you know, with the committee members.

And, and with that note, let's, let's talk about the digital platforms. So this is, this is something like, you know, that we are seeing organizations like, you know, 15 years, 20 years of talking about digital transformation and business. Digital transformation is the Cree, uh, agenda item in most of the board meetings and most of the organization, enterprise organization, whether you come from a retail, whether you come from a commercial banking, investment banking or, uh, you know, um, banking for your, uh, institutional banking or you're coming from online, uh, retailer, whether it's a grocery shop or you're selling anything on the online or any organization which is having a digital presence and the entire in internal components, your organizational assets, your data, your services, your capabilities need to have the digital phase to handshake with your customers, your stakeholders, and also your ecosystem of partners.

What we mean by digital platforms, digital platforms, a repository of business technology and data components which facilitate rapid innovation and enhancements of the digital offering for our customers, the raw material of our digital offering is set off software components. When we say digital, we talk about software to facilitate the development of both new and enhanced offerings, companies need the enterprise organization, need robust platforms that make reusable business and technology components accessible to the people configuring those offerings. We, importantly the scalability where the digital platforms are designed to scale without a proportional rise in the cost extensibility, they can be extended with new functionalities, often by third parties, interoperability.

They can easily integrate with other systems and platforms. And one of the, uh, the study from MIT, um, they offer a perspective and digital platform often emphasize their role in enabling innovation, fostering ecosystem, and transforming industries. In the last 20 years, we have seen the massive changes in how organization they interact with their consumers.

Uh, whether you are coming from a retail or you're coming from a banking or you're coming from an education or you're coming from a health tech, you are coming from a consumer tech, any kind of, uh, uh, product and enterprise product offering that you have. And you do have your digital presence. So by the way, enabling your customers to interact with your organization and its service offerings or product offerings seamlessly.

Today I would like to talk about five core pillars of the digital platforms, and this is an early glimpse of one of the research work that I undertaken last year and I'm planning to complete by end of this year, 2024, and where I will be presenting this topic, um, as a paper and as part of this research, uh, work, I am reading materials available in the public domain, especially from a research, um, institutions and also interviewing some of the chief digital transformation officers in this region of Australia and New Zealand. And collating this information and coming up with some of the, the core pillars, what exactly is actually helping our organization to move forward in their digital transformation journey is what actually my main focus for today. And so far from the interviews that I've conducted and some of the studies that we have, you know, involved from industry, uh, research reports.

And these are the core pillars of digital platforms that I do see that exist, which helps organization to move with the digital transformation efforts. Number one, unlock the data in a dynamic landscape digital transformation, we stand at the crossroads of the precedent potential and innovation and data plays actually a crucial role with the advent of the artificial intelligence mission learning and the deep learning and all what is happening around the artificial intelligence. With the gen AI offering, you could see that like, you know, every organization is one way or other under pressure to add artificial intelligent component to their offerings.

Number two is compostable architecture, though organization, they do do the modular way of designing their systems and components, microservice architecture, but this is essential for organization, for building reusable components that can be mixed and matched in providing services and product offering, digital product offering to their customers. Number three, hybrid elastic and edge infrastructure. Given number of organizations, they have public cloud adoption as actually one of the primary agenda.

Now, most of them they are migrating from on-prem data center to cloud, or they have some kind of a hybrid offering, or they have their own private cloud and they're also deploying solutions to the edge infrastructure closer to the consumer. Now this is actually a biggest thing in the, in our pillar, the reason for that, that actually if you are having a compostable architecture and your infrastructure needs to also support the scalability that you need, the resiliency that you need, the fall tolerance capability that you need, the elasticity that you need. So this is an important pillar for you, the hybrid, elastic and edge infrastructure.

Number four, an organization which is embarking on the digital transformation or which have already started and already, you know, shaping up the industry and how they're teaching new behaviors for their consumers. And they do realize that they have to work with digital ecosystem of partners now. An organization cannot completely build anything and everything that they need, uh, to their customers.

Instead, they need actually partners whom they collaborate and they can extend the capability of their core offering and they can start building an extensible components that offer unique value proposition for their business and also for their customers. Number five, re-Imagining digital Operations. What we mean by that, your traditional operational model is no longer helping organization to move forward.

So you need agility and you need to completely start from the scratch when it comes to re-imagining your digital operations. As we navigate this journey, the five fund foundational pillars emerges. The ging beacons eliminating our path forward.

These pillars not only define our approach, but also shape the very fabric of tomorrow's digital real from harnessing the raw power of data to redefining the operational heartbeat of the digital age. Each pillar represents a facet of our collective aspirations to build the future that is flexible, collaborative, adaptive, and sustainable. Today, we will dwell into this five pillars, explore, exploring their essence, transformation, transformation impact, and also we will get to see some of the, the industry examples and what they hold for the future of transformational tech.

Now this is another way to portray actually the, the five pillars. Now let's kickstart with our unlock the data, harming the power of information. Most of the traditional enterprise organizations, one of the biggest that they have is actually the data.

The data is locked in in their organization in one way or the other. Either it could be a database or it could be an appli, I mean applicational operational database, or it could be analytical database. An organization they don't leverage of unlocking this data and using this data for driving the innovations within their organization and also helping the enterprise leaders to make data-driven decisions or sometimes the data that you have is you cannot trust the data because of the data quality issues we have seen in the last 15 years.

So many things have come around in and around the data from actually the, the batch processing where you have, uh, yeah, 24 hours of lag time to the real fast data, which is actually in a real time processing, like a stream processing that's happening. Now, if your organization needs to unlock this data, it means actually you need to let this data available freely for your engineering team, your, your cons, your collaborating partners. So by the way, they can start building capabilities on top of this data and offer that example like your open banking API or an API developer portal, external facing.

So by the way, they, the partners can build the systems on top of the data, and indeed you do need actually a data governance and you need to talk about the data privacy and you need to also comply to the various industry regulations and the statutory requirements based on where you're operating. Now, the important aspect of this actually an organization, when you unlock the data, then this helps in data access, accessibility, interoperability, and real time analytics. We need to break down the data silos within the organization to enable the unified view of the data.

Liberating the data from silos are important because we need to drive the insights and make informed decisions across the entire digital landscape. It refers to the strategic liberation and utilization of the data from its, from it, its confines, ensuring it becomes a central and access actionable assets. It underscores the imperative of transforming data into insights, driving innovation and informed decision making, what outcomes that we expect, of course, enhanced data driven decision making, personalized user experiences, improved business agility through real time insights.

And this is critical for you in the fast changing industry, the consumer landscape, the digital landscape, and particularly what's happening with the artificial intelligence. And this is particularly important for your organization to embrace this and unlock the data. By the way, your, your engineering team are not waiting endlessly for getting a valued data that they can serve through your applications and their digital interfaces to their consumers.

Now, let's take an example, some of the future, what it looks like for the space. Of course, we have seen artificial intelligence, uh, the gen AI and the deep learning and the machine learning and machine learning ops data measures actually taking the future stage, I mean your center stage and data ops. Though the momentum has started way back like, but still it's gaining its popularity and people are realizing that this is something that they need to have.

What happened to your application landscape that is also happening. Your data landscape, the data ops stream processing, like, you know, you have a real time stream processing like you know, you are looking for, not for, uh, your batch processing and then actually, uh, where you at the regular interval, you process the data where you are doing now as the data flows in, you are processing this data, the stream processing, and most of the applications also go into detail of, uh, in depth with the data driven architecture. There are vector databases with the GI, uh, advent of GI and innovation that's happening around it.

And also data observability, which is also taking the the direction for our future direction for this unlock data. Now let's look at an example of an industry example for unlocking data. Of course, Netflix is, uh, a known one for most of us as we stream movies or our favorite TV shows.

But look behind what Netflix's engineering team is doing. They heavily invest in a mission learning to continuously improve member experience and optimize the network service to it. Their personalization recommendations are really unique.

For example, if you have a family of four and they have all watching their, um, their favorite TV shows and movies in their own account, you could see that like in not one person gets the same kind of recommendation like as another person. So the personalization that you get between millions of subscribers is unique to you and how that is possible because that's how the read learn the behavior of the consumers using machine learning shape, the catalog of movies and TV shows, optimize the production of digital, digital movies and also optimize the video and audio encoding with the AB A BR with the adaptive bit trade selection. So now look at that, how unlocking the data is helping Netflix.

So this is not something they have started doing yesterday or day before they were doing right from their inception. Look at what Amazon is doing. Look at what Adobe is doing now with the experience platform.

The, it leverages AI and machine learning to provide real time consum customer profiles from multiple data sources. So this is a, is a great way to look at how organizations are taking the, the benefit of unlocking the data and also embracing some of the modern data architectures to shape up their digital offering to their customers. The second one is composable architecture.

Building for flexibility and innovation is critical as of no, because most of the organization where their, their budget is a constraint and you cannot keep building and keep throwing them away. Instead, you need to build components that can be work like a Lego pieces that you can mix and match and you can always, you know, provide services. You know, the time to value and time to market as your consumer demands are when something changes in the, in the ecosystem of service offering or a product offering.

And the compostable architecture helps you to deliver that product innovation at speed. The flexibility and scalability of the compostable architecture is what supporting the rapid innovation adoption to the market changes. And we have seen the microservices, APIs, containers and enabling compostable architecture.

Designing systems of modularity is not actually new to us. And we have been discussing this, we have been doing this as an industry for last maybe 20, 30 years. We had a two tier architecture, we have three tier architectures.

We have an interior architecture, we have a distributed architecture, we have a microservices and we have a micro frontend. So it allows actually dynamic combination for shift adaption to the business needs outcomes that you look for, increased flexibility and scalability, faster time to market for innovations and reduce system disruptions during updates. And when you have APIs that are reusable in nature and it gives you the power by the way, your frontend team can compose these APIs and start providing a new capability for your customers through the digital products.

The compostable architecture embodies the design principle of modality in systems and application. It champions the creation of distinct interoperable components that can be dynamically combined, allowing organization to adapt shiftly to evolving business needs and technological emerges. Now what is happening in the future look of this compostable architecture.

Some of the items that I have may not be future because it's already there in place. Now. For example, like the MAC alliances, where we call microservice based API first cloud, native SaaS and headless architecture patterns and an effective way to implement composable architecture.

Even driven architecture is the, where you talk about applications are responding to the events like especially in a distributed architecture, like, you know, instead of orchestration between your services, they are responding, you know, a asynchronously using even driven patents and you have edge Artificial intelligence is the implementation of artificial intelligence in an edge computing environment, which allows computation to be done closer to where data is actually collected rather than at a centralized cloud computing facility or an offset data center. You have a dapper, which is, uh, we call dApps, which we call actually decentralized apps. Blockchain and distributed ledger is often the technology behind the decentralized apps.

Dapper in the other hand is a portable event driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient stateless and stateful application that can run on cloud. So these are some of the examples that you see, like of course your microfinance as in API serverless computing, AI driven development platforms. All these are changing this space very rapidly.

Now, I did not include any example for the compostable architecture because we do have a number of industry examples, very well known industry examples, including amazing, including some of the banking products that we see globally, including some of the, the retail offering that we see where they have multiple microservices, multiple distributed components. They are working choreographed behind the scene and which they do various things and provide with real time. You know, insights example, like when you buy a book and you see the book reviews and you're also getting to know the, the various book recommendations based on the book that you have selected in Amazon.

These are, you know, behind the scenes coordinated by compostable architecture patents. The third pillar is hybrid, elastic, and edge infrastructure. Adapting infrastructure for future challenges and opportunities is, is a very, very important pillar for us, as I discussed in the start of the session.

Now, the blend of cloud on premises and edge computing is essential in creating flexible and responsive infrastructure. Highlighting the, the importance of elasticity is important for our architecture patterns and our business needs disease. And because actually where your operational costs are going up and your hosting costs are going up and you need a, a smart way of managing the workloads without spiking our cost associated with them.

The merging the robust on-premise solutions with scalable clouded technologies is important for ensuring the agility and responsiveness outcomes, of course, you look for is optimized cost and resource management, enhanced system resiliency, redundancy shift adoption to changing business needs because the elasticity that you look behind this is actually okay, I can, I can scale as I need and I can scale, scale out or scale in as I need, as I require. And also I can completely tear down when I don't need anything for the particular offering. So it's a cost saving rather than the traditional, the old school way of looking at your data centers and your hardware investments.

This particular pillar emphasizes the fusion of diverse IT resources. It underscores organization ability to scale and promote according to the demand, ensuring resiliency, ensuring agility in fluctuating digital environment. Now, the future, what it looks like in this space is of course, yeah, you have the platform engineering is evolving towards the simplification and value delivery, adopting a platform, a service mindset, the role of platform engineering teams and shifting from complex infrastructure management to becoming service providers within the organization for the development teams and value creation and observability, financial aspects of it, sustainability consideration are becoming more important.

Part of the platform engineering. You will see decentralized platforms, serverless itch computing, distributed cloud, autonomous data centers and sustainable computing and green computing and web assembly where the continued evaluation of the web asbl is delivering on the promise to what's achieving right ones running anywhere in cloud open telemetry, the framework for correcting metrics. So this is what your future is looking like in this space where of course the distributed cloud is taking a central stage, multi-cloud is taking center stage and also the advent of artificial intelligence in this space is also helping dynamically in a smart way.

You can deploy your workloads, you can manage your workloads, and you can scale and you know, tier down them, uh, tier them down as you need it. Now one of the, the, the good example for, for this particular pillar with the capital owned bank, what they did actually they, they leveraged actually their data centers and they moved to the cloud. It has built the foundation for the bank for the future with the following benefits, instant the provision infrastructure at near unlimited scale.

Of course, this helps with a smart way of lowering the cost, increased scale, increased resiliency. The, the benefits that you look be from these this pillar is that it not only helps you to increase your agility, it not only increase you to the resiliency, but also actually help you to lower the cost as well. And another interest example, the six SixSigma, uh, ways by M-I-T-P-O-S demonstrates how resources can be reallocated dynamically across tenants in a cloud environment to meet varying workloads.

Let's move on to our fourth pillar, the digital ecosystem of partners. This is an important pillar as well because an organization which is often in digital various products and various services, they cannot build anything and everything by themselves. They need to have an API, they need to have some way of collaborating with their partners to accelerate and amplify the value delivery to their customers.

Expanding origins through collaboration. So strategically integrating with the network of digital entities for co-creation. Shared innovation growth is important for digital ecosystem of partners.

So what this is going to help you with the outcomes that you look for, expand the market reach and capabilities, foster innovation through collaboration, strengthen the value proposition wide diverse offerings. It highlights that the strategic integration collaboration with a network of digital entities and also underscores the value of co-creation, the shared innovation, the symbiotic growth transforming organization from isolated entities into a interconnected nodes in a vibrant digital way, thriving in dig today's digital landscape, the business landscape. It requires organization, specialized digital infrastructure, services, applications and data.

When business can find the right partners and connect with them in the right place, they can get the digital capabilities they need without having to build those capabilities themselves. That's what what I meant in when I started this topic because you are co-creating and it accelerates your innovation. What's happening in the future side of this?

Of course, blockchain and distributor apps, API economy where you're building API for your digital infrastructure. So by the way, example, like your open banking or I OTs, ecosystems federated learning the past for your partners. So all these are becoming more and more important now how you connect with your partners and what you offer to your customers.

Your good example for this, I would like to take this is one of my favorite example, the unified payment interface. The National Payment Corporation of India has done a digital revolution back in 2016 and they have built actually a national wide digital payment infrastructure. This has a way rapidly gained the momentum and revolutionized how the Indians conduct the transactions.

Now look at the stats of it. There are 300 million UPA users. Of course the stats are based on, uh, the May, 2023 stats, uh, um, in year before, but it's much more than that.

Now. You have 500 million merchants, you have 300 banks and partners, you have 10 billion monthly transactions and USD one 80 billion value within the month of actually May 23. So now look at this way where when India, the NPCI built this digital payment infrastructure that built to the core infrastructure, but whereas the, the partners who came on board, the various financial institutions, the FinTech organization, the banks, they came on board, they started offering interfacing with this.

So your customer operating with one bank can still utilizes this and then can make transactions, can buy trade tickets, buy, buy your flight tickets, book your movie tickets, pay somebody, pay your business, you, you just with the scanning the QR code or using the digital payment interface. Now this is a brilliant example for looking at how you can scale your offering the same time you bring your partners on board to accelerate innovations. And also the picture that you look at on the, on the slide, it's also shows how the UPI is now going across global in different countries.

We are no longer writing checks and we are all making digital payments. The final pillar is reimagining digital operations. Optimizing for enhanced efficiency and sustainable growth.

This pillar is important focus for us as well. Like the other four pillars, just changing your digital infrastructure, your architecture, your unlocking your data is not sufficient, but you need to also look at how you can change your operations, how you handshake with your customers and what you do with your, you know, service offerings and service management aspect of it. Now, the overhauling the traditional operations with digital first methodologies for streamlined inefficient processes are critical for any organization in digital transformation.

Reimagining digital operation advocates for the transformative overhaul. It emphasize adoption of digital first methodologies, automation, data driven strategies, artificial intelligence, ensuring operations are streamlined, efficient, aligned with the demands of the modern digital consumers. So you are talking about cost efficiency, you are talking about the process efficiency, you are talking about eliminating waste in, in, in your system, in your value stream.

And also you are talking about how you can automate certain things to reduce the to and also actually use artificial intelligence where you can provide a quicker response, an innovative response to your consumers outcome that you look for is improved operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. Now, uh, industry example for this is where GE uses digital twins to simulate and optimize the performance of industrial equipment. Schneider Electrics, lot of banks are implementing now ai, AI chatbots, lot of organizations, they have virtual assistance.

So these are some of the examples where they provide very personalized services to their customers, their their, their digital backbone or their digital operations to their, to their consumers. So what the future is looking like, you look like, you know, it, it is with the, with the ai, you know, innovation happening at the rapid pace that you can see. AI powered automation is taking a central stage.

You have digital twins, augmented reality in operations, predictive maintenance, edge analytics, and you also look at the same time being compliant, being, uh, applying automated governance and also sustainable software like green software adoption. Now, a couple of things that I would like to take in. This is, uh, predictive maintenance and AR and operations, leveraging automated reality to enhance operational tasks from training to maintenance leading to improve efficiency and reduce areas.

What we mean by predictive maintenance, use data analytics and mission learning to predict when the equipment will fail or require maintenance leading to reduce downtime and cost saving and also improve the customer satisfaction. Now with that by difference, we have come to the end of this presentation. I would like to give you the key takeaways and the four, the five core pillars that we discussed so far in our session.

Architecting for digital transformation digital platforms. This five pillars unlock the data, harness the power of information that captures the essence of the data importance in today's digital age. By emphasizing harm harnessing, you suggest an active approach to utilizing data, which is crucial.

Number two, compostable architecture, building for flexibility and innovation. Number three, hybrid and elastic infrastructure. Scaling for tomorrow's demands, we added edge to the mix, so we acknowledge that the growing importance of its computing in the modern infrastructure.

Number four, ecosystem of partners expanding horizons through collaboration. This emphasize the importance of not just recognizing but actively collaborating with external partners. Number five, re-imagining digital operations where we streamline our digital operations for efficiency and growth.

And this captures the transf nature of the digital operations emphasizing both cost efficiency, process efficiency, and potential for our growth. With the note, I would like to thank you every one of you for joining the session and thank you tech strong group for providing this platform to discuss this topic on digital architecting for digital transformation digital platforms and also fellow speakers and sponsors who make this kind of evens successful are where people from different part of the globe can connect and learn, share, grow together. With that note, once again, thank you very much.

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