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IBM Garage Aims To Steer The Drive To Cognitive Business

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Companies used to be just companies. They used to be firms, organizations, business concerns, partnerships and sometimes even institutions. That all changed with cloud computing, connected mobile device ubiquity, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics and Artifical Intelligence. Now, today, companies have to think of themselves as [insert inspirational adjective here] enterprises.

This is the resounding message coming out of the technology industry these days as it seeks to ply us with its latest wares and encourage us to become digital businesspeople. There’s the intelligent enterprise, the self-driving enterprise, the plain old smart enterprise, the data-driven enterprise and the perhaps more cerebral sounding cognitive enterprise.

Understanding cognitive business

This last label (cognitive) is the preferred term of IBM. The company (sorry, the cognitive enterprise IT vendor) has set out what it thinks are key steps and methods for becoming a cognitive enterprise operator. But how exactly should companies change the way they work if they want to become a new entity in this way?

“In the next chapter of digital reinvention, the ability to innovate at scale will be the difference between success and failure – this requires a fundamental shift in how companies work,” said Mark Foster, senior vice president, IBM Services and Global Business Services. “For the [data] incumbents of the world, who we believe have a major advantage in their proprietary data and decades of industry-specific expertise, the ability to adopt hybrid cloud strategies and quickly shift to new ways of working will allow them to beat the so-called digital disruptors of the last decade.”

Foster and his team talk about the IBM Garage initiative. The ‘garages’ are physical workspaces that encompass IBM’s methodologies for fast-tracking towards digital business. In real terms, this is just another way for IBM to package a set of consultancy services, shortcuts, best practice templates, reference architectures etc. all wrapped up and called a garage to make it sound workshop-like.

IBM says that its garage experience can happen anywhere in the world, in dedicated IBM spaces or client offices or even virtual environments. Inside the garage itself, the company promises exposure to diverse teams of IBM experts who will sit shoulder-to-shoulder with clients to develop new ideas, then rapidly test, discard or advance those ideas. IBM has actual physical garage locations in North America located in Austin, Toronto, New York, Raleigh and San Francisco.

The teams make use of IBM assets such as hardened reference architectures, proven software application solutions and code. They also use networked experience informed by hundreds of client engagements and practices (such as lean Agile, extreme programming, continuous integration and continuous delivery) in order to de-risk innovation.

New workflows

Like all major technology vendors, IBM insists that now is the time to reinvent workplace workflows to take advantage of all the goodies that come with cloud, AI and big data analytics. For IBM, this means that organizations need to understand how to manage new technology-driven workflows by developing new skills and a new work culture.

“Leadership must evolve from hierarchical, experience-based decision making to orchestration of work and decisions based on shared real-time data and tools that recommend ‘next best actions’. We are seeing the rise of a concept of ‘control towers’ in our leading clients that use these dashboards to guide both innovation and operations to ensure its impact,” notes IBM, in a white paper.

German car manufacturer Volkswagon has used IBM’s offering in this space to create its ‘We Experience’ app, bringing together location and other data to anticipate driver and passenger needs, suggest services near parking locations and deliver targeted offers from partners, including coupons from retailers.

The Government of Nova Scotia and IBM built a working prototype of the connected automated external defibrillator (AED) system using IoT so bystanders can reliably locate an AED the moment it is needed. In total, IBM says that is has helped 500 companies work on their IT engineering in the garage environment since the initiative was launched 18 months ago.

Takeaways to take away

There are some key takeaways to take away from all of this:

Tech companies are now talking about workflows i.e. the digitization of business processes and tasks so that we can define which ‘things’ represent repeatable grunt work that can be fed into AI engines. Further, these workflows themselves should be re-engineered around AI advancement in the first place.

Products and services are being developed so rapidly for the new digital economy that we’re now more heavily popularizing the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) i.e. the notion that we should adopt an Agile approach that champions continuous development, continuous delivery and continuous change (enhancement) for the always-on world of the web.

Co-creation among co-located and distributed teams of workers for all work tasks (in all workflows) will become the norm in the new connected future. This in itself will increasingly popularize the use of the term ‘design thinking’, which has already been adopted by IBM and others.

Finally, despite all the technology, it still comes down to people. We’ve already mentioned new skills and workplace culture for a reason i.e. people are going to be able to do their jobs in a different way. But, first and foremost, if organizations really want to be cognitive enterprises, they will need to win hearts and minds by showing evidence that there are trusted security measures in place to allow these new platforms to execute.

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