In the current economic climate, organizations are naturally trying to work out priorities for their business strategies and decide how to best leverage opportunities as countries, cities, and communities move into the recovery phase. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on digitalization or digital transformation and how it can help provide cost efficiencies, speed up delivery of products and services, enhance sustainability, and create new ways of working and keeping workforces safe.  For many, the pandemic created the need to move to a digital platform and become comfortable collaborating online.  This was the beginning of their digital transformation journey.  

Defence organizations and the global aerospace and defense industry have also faced the challenges caused by the pandemic. With new priorities, rapidly changing information, and increased internal and external expectations, the industry needs to adjust to a new and rapidly changing reality. There is a need to transform and invest in the latest digital technologies to not only fuel a major shift in the industry but also to thrive beyond the immediate horizon. 

Time to digitally transform

Digital transformation is a critical path forward in today’s economy, and IT optimization paves the way. Organizations across industries are beginning to realise the need to accelerate their digital transformation to remain competitive in Canada and around the world. Defence organizations are realizing the need to accelerate their digital journeys to remain interoperable with allies and prepare for digital-savvy adversaries.  Lagging is no longer an option. Some are struggling with a legacy IT environment clogged with non-standard applications that reduce productivity and pose a significant business risk. 

In late 2020, the Department of National Defence (DND) shared a digital transformation vision for the Department outlining the criticality for today and tomorrow’s defence of Canada and the need for setting a digital transformation agenda. It has an opportunity to accelerate vision into action and action at speed.  

There is an opportunity to manage the data as a strategic asset. Data quality, data stewardship, and data governance are focus areas. A data management framework that recognizes that data needed for management is different than the data needed for operations. By building this foundation there is an opportunity to enhance data management and governance and readiness to apply analytics to improve decision making. These underpinnings are critical to progress to big data and predictive analytics and ultimately, digital transformation.

Digital transformation challenges we can overcome

Organizations have common goals and are facing similar challenges: 

  1. Upgrading and modernizing IT infrastructure: Organizations are recognizing the need to upgrade and modernize their IT infrastructure, but they vary greatly in their progress. Some organizations have a fully developed digital strategy that integrates cloud and new Enterprise Resource Planning applications; others are struggling to get started.  
  2. Improving employee experience: Today’s workforce expects personalized, fast services that are available anytime, anywhere. Organizations need to ensure they are receiving the information they need when they need it.  This applies to governments serving citizens and defence organizations serving the women and men in uniform. 
  3. Acquiring and retaining new talent: COVID-19 has put incredible strain on many businesses not only in Canada but all over the world. As we begin to emerge from the pandemic, transformation projects that were put on hold are being restarted, but organizations are struggling to attract and retain top talent. Meanwhile, employee expectations have changed. Forward-thinking employers need to consider new flexible options and benefits, including managed services partnerships. 
  4. Increasing productivity: To successfully deliver operations and services, organizations need to improve productivity in everything from manufacturing to supply chains. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are the ideal tools to find efficiencies and increase productivity, but it takes a thoughtful approach that starts with assessing the current environment and finding the right applications of AI.
  5. Adopting Sustainability as the new business imperative: Sustainability is a key business strategy to secure a competitive edge. We are helping organizations set and achieve clear sustainability targets through the use of exponential technologies (AI, IoT, Blockchain, Quantum) and Net 0 platforms that enable monitoring, intelligent processing, and reporting of activity across the value chain.  

None of these challenges are insurmountable. Today’s leaders understand the powerful changes that technology, especially cloud, can bring to the organization. Digital transformation is about leveraging those technologies to deliver the next-gen products and services that will support organizational objectives to accelerate and take the organization to the next level.

Accelerating innovation

To improve the business of defence and operational effectiveness, Western defence organizations are moving beyond proof of concept into implementation. In the US, the Army has unlocked the power of unstructured data for the Stryker vehicle, including maintenance manuals, work orders, and senor data, by applying innovation-based predictive maintenance identifying previously invisible maintenance issues and predicting vehicle breakdown, and providing a remedy leading to improved operational readiness. Bell Flight, another innovative example, is applying predictive maintenance capabilities in its aircraft maintenance process to prevent costly equipment failure for military and commercial rotorcraft. 

We will continue to see the acceleration of this digital reinvention—driving a more rapid transformation and digitization of the core business innovations in defence and all industries that drive agility and efficiency. Modernization of infrastructures and development processes, embracing multi-hybrid cloud network architectures, and agile development and operations (DevOps) will help prepare and withstand future ups and downs.  

Many organizations are moving away from the traditional capital investment model of IT—where an on-prem or off-prem data center was essential—to assembling a suite of applications and services born on the cloud. An integrated model across an organization’s hybrid landscape delivers optimization through a well-planned and defined architecture that ensures robust networking, resiliency, and security. 

Moving to a hybrid multi-cloud environment

With an integrated operating model in a hybrid environment, leaders can optimize services, operations, and management across both legacy and cloud environments while accelerating time to business value. Without it, the digital transformation efforts may be stalled and may add unnecessary complexity to the organization and increased operational costs.

These leaders have found that “building new” accelerates time to value – and they want to unlock the same value from their legacy environment which has the data and insights needed to maximize internal and external engagement and improve employee experience. They need a way to streamline this “two-speed” world into a single operating model – quickly, simply, and cost-effectively.

We have found that organizations with a cohesive strategy for integrating legacy and born on the cloud are finding the greatest success in achieving digital transformation and gaining real-time insights. They know that an integrated IT operating model can increase the value to their business and reduce time to market. These leading organizations understand the need for a digital transformation strategy that supports new and emerging technologies, encourages a growth mindset and innovation forward culture, addresses regulatory requirements, and mitigates risks in the environment – while aligning with the business need to reduce costs, accelerating organizational capabilities and improving operations.

For example, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) seamless VMware integration to IBM Cloud enabled HPS to completely replicate their VMware-based Open Virtual Engineering Platform environment and provided it to their customers to use in their own projects and deploy in a matter of hours.  HPS has industry solutions for heavy industry with large equipment assets including marine, oil and gas, mining, chemics, and more.   

The processes involved in developing control products involve a high degree of collaboration between HPS and its customers. With this new environment in place, HPS customers can build and test engineering processes in a highly reliable and security-rich cloud-based environment.  Similarly, this could be applied in a defence context.

To optimize the newest technologies on cloud, cost-efficiently, organizations need to understand that successful digital transformation of the enterprise requires more than just new technology. A successful shift to an integrated operating model also brings swift and comprehensive change to processes and people – specifically, how technology services are delivered and managed, and by whom. People are a critical key to success.  In defence, in addition to creating a digital culture and mindset, it is recognized that personnel often have high levels of technology exposure in their lives. This is a real decision criterion for the next generation and the Canadian market is competing for the same talent.  They want to work with the latest technology to protect Canada making digital transformation a retention and recruitment opportunity. 

A lot of questions need to be addressed by organizations – addressing the skills gap that arises when employees must learn the new world when they were trained on legacy, how do you change your processes to accommodate the new technology, what processes are reinvented as you move from traditional program structures to smaller, agile processes? 

Organizations need partners that can step in to supply and manage technology, people, skills, and processes needed to maintain and manage the cloud environment, freeing the teams to focus on higher-value tasks that contribute to better business outcomes.

Many organizations use multiple public clouds from many vendors to deliver IT services. In fact, a hybrid multi-cloud environment is quickly becoming the new normal for many enterprises, but it can pose major challenges for teams accustomed to using on-premises infrastructure.

Managing cloud-based services across multiple providers can be overwhelming. Operational issues like dispersed workloads, security gaps, and limited visibility on development teams’ output have leaders looking for ways to streamline management to simplify operations, satisfy business imperatives, and adapt to changing business landscape.

As organizations migrate and modernize their technology infrastructure, the business benefits of changing to a single operating model in a hybrid multi-cloud environment are numerous:

  • Increased time to value/market for new business capabilities;
  • Reduced costs, increased efficiency;
  • Real-time insights and visibility;
  • A single pane of glass (control tower); and
  • Improved customer and employee engagement due to improved user experience.

The challenge for many organizations is with implementation. The organizations know what they need to do but they need help with how to effectively transition to a hybrid multi-cloud environment while keeping costs in control.  

5 reasons hybrid multi-cloud management makes sense

  1. Manage risk: Identify and address risks to ensure security, compliance, and dependability.
  2. Enhance innovation: Bring ideas to market more quickly in an integrated multi-cloud environment while maintaining governance, agility, and control of your hybrid multi-cloud landscape.
  3. Increase visibility: A single interface providing access to open-standards tools, self-service access to ready-to-use patterns, and built-in governance.
  4. Reduce total cost of ownership: Support and automate legacy IT while speeding the transition to cloud-based services infused with AI and advanced automation.
  5. Resource utilization: Maximize resource utilization on-premises while minimizing cloud costs.

With hybrid cloud fast emerging as the winning model for enterprise transformation, there is no need to compromise on availability, security, or speed. A hybrid cloud approach will allow organizations to gain visibility and control over their entire infrastructure and, in turn, do business in a much more secure and efficient manner.

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Garage Methodology

To remain interoperable and retain our place in the world we must digitally transform to reinvent defence in Canada. Digital transformation is required to improve efficiency, maintain interoperability with allies, and for recruitment and retention. People, processes, data, and architecture are critical to success. A culture of growth mindset towards digital innovation is essential to achieving the digital transformation vision. 

This requires working in a new way.  The IBM Garage is a bold, comprehensive approach to innovation and transformation that provides a place to co-innovate, build culture, and rapidly increase capability.  Using agile development methodologies and DevOps tools and techniques, IBM brings organizations together to work in a new way to create useful and highly adopted solutions. 

Applying the Garage Methodology with an enterprise perspective and integrated approach can accelerate the progression from digitization to digital transformation to digital reinvention. It’s the new way of working to accelerate achievement of the reinvention vision.