October 22, 2020
A Digital Platform optimised for the delivery of Digital Services can be an accelerator for your organisation.
The Equal Experts Digital Platform playbook is our thinking on why, when, and how to build Digital Platforms. We have found that, under the right circumstances, introducing a Digital Platform enables an organisation to achieve Continuous Delivery and Operability at scale.
Our approach is based on first-hand experience building Digital Platforms in a wide range of domains such as Government, Financial Services, Retail and Utilities and our deep expertise in helping organisations adopt Continuous Delivery and Operability principles and practices.
To be competitive, your organisation must rapidly explore new product offerings as well as exploit established products. New ideas must be validated and refined with customers as quickly as possible if product/market fit and repeatable success are to be found.
You might have multiple teams in a brownfield or greenfield IT estate, where your ability to deliver product features is constrained by your technology capabilities. In either scenario, a Digital Platform optimised for the delivery of Digital Services can be an accelerator for your organisation – if you can make a multi-year commitment to investment. A Digital Platform isn’t a small undertaking and requires ongoing funding for you to realise the greatest benefits.
We’ve created this playbook to help you and your colleagues build a Digital Platform together. It’s for everyone in your organisation, not just software developers or operability engineers. That includes CIOs, CTOs, product managers, analysts, delivery leads, engineering managers, and more.
We’re strong proponents of cloud-native computing, serverless in all its forms, microservice architectures, and open-source technologies. However, the practices defined in our playbook are technology and vendor-agnostic, to allow you to determine the best way to adopt these ideas in the context of your organisation.
It is worth noting that the playbook is a game plan in the sense that it is not a recipe for a single activity but an orchestration of a number of ideas that together make up a successful Digital Platform. The playbook touches on topics such as What is a Digital Platform, its capabilities, benefits and when to start building one. We have recommended principles to adopt and we outline the practices and pitfalls we’ve identified along our way.
We hope you find this and our other playbooks useful. We thrive on feedback and welcome contributions. As you can see, we love building digital platforms! If you’d like us to share our experience with you, get in touch in the form below.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.