Technology suppliers and user organisations often promote the power of innovation platforms in driving company dexterity and customer complete satisfaction, but not all platforms are strategic in nature.
Speaking at the Forrester Innovation & & Innovation APAC 2022 conference, Ashutosh Sharma, vice-president and research director at Forrester India, said even as tactical platforms assist organisations end up being “future-fit” and be worthy of the most attention and budget, the term platform has ended up being tired.
“In an age where everyone’s calling their application or product or services a platform, you actually do not know how to differentiate a tactical platform from a non-strategic platform.” Sharma said in a recorded discussion.
In Forrester’s view, a strategic platform has to be broad enough for it to be used by a whole organisation, rather than a single department or function, and support a wide range of organization results.
An enterprise resource preparation (ERP) system might fit the bill, but Sharma sounded a word of caution on applying the tactical label on such systems, which are often provided by large providers that can supporting several service functions.
“You’ll end up putting all your eggs into one basket, creating lock-in and calmly struggling with the pledge of feature updates that include things that thousands of customers ahead of you have actually voted for but are of no value to your business,” he stated.
Strategic platforms, Sharma said, should be open, modular and extensible through low-code and no-code development, with a rich ecosystem of technology add-ons and partners that further make it possible for the platforms to be extended to third parties.
While the technical aspects of a platform can be assessed under the hood, organisations ought to also consider less obvious elements, such as a supplier’s innovation chops, its licensing practices and how it is allowing other partners to add to its platform, Sharma said.
“The genuinely open platforms make it easy for developers across communities to collaborate, and share code and ideas, lowering the risk of vendor lock-in,” he said, adding that an open platform is likewise no less secure as open communities can recognize and resolve security concerns much faster.
But in many cases, recognizing a strategic platform is not simple, even if there is one that ticks all the right boxes.
“Sometimes, you might go to a fairly unverified partner or platform that doesn’t meet most of your requirements because you purchased into its item roadmap and have the power to shape that roadmap as well,” Sharma stated.
When it pertains to budget concerns, Sharma urged organisations to focus on worth and not just the cost of their strategic platforms.
“Strategic partners will work with you to develop the best cost model due to the fact that you don’t have a boundless budget plan and you need to construct something that conforms to your spending plan and requirements,” he stated. “If you concentrate on value, your CFO will not bug you much, even if the expense might be high due to the fact that you are driving worth for business.”
Key practices To understand the amount of a tactical platform, organisations will require to welcome some key practices, especially agile advancement and DevOps, so that they can construct and compose abilities to match their needs, showing what makes their platform tactical in the first location.
And while doing so, they ought to continuously embrace an “outside-in” frame of mind to guarantee what they are developing are always lined up with organization results, Sharma said.
Offered the versatile, modular and open nature of tactical platforms, organisations will also need strong governance practices, however not to the extent of suppressing creativity and development.
“Governance must not be too loose either, so you can avoid producing a wild west circumstance where it becomes tough to handle what’s going on,” Sharma stated.
Lastly, having the best innovation and speaking with partners, as well as metrics that matter will go a long method to quantify the value of a tactical platform.
Sharma said technical metrics that apply in an application-centric world will not use to platforms, which organisations must think about company metrics such as income development, client experience ratings, staff member retention and profitability.