Towards a Continuously Evolving and Learning Organization – MuleSoft and the Live Enterprise
Businesses face a new imperative in today’s digital age: they must digitally transform now, and they must do so in a way that enables a continuously evolving and learning organization.
At the root of this digital transformation there is a need for a quantum organization which delivers perceptive experiences for customers and employees, builds responsive value chains and allows intuitive decisions to pivot in the face of unexpected change.
What does it take to achieve this model? And what does it mean to be approaching a digital era that favors the Live Enterprise?
In this article, we’ll look closely at both questions and offer our insight into the technologies and expertise cross-industry organizations require to navigate the digital era.
Digital transformation and the Live Enterprise
In today’s digital age, every enterprise is familiar with the idea of digital transformation (DX). Yet it can be difficult to define what such transformation looks like within a company. What does it mean to digitally transform, and what should be the end goal?
The answers to these questions certainly depend on each individual enterprise, but there is some common ground: to meet the ever-shifting demands of consumers and technology, organizations need to be connected, observable, sentient, alive, agile and innovative. They need, in short, to be Live Enterprises with the capacity to make more intuitive business and design decisions that keep pace with customer evolution and market dynamics.
Live Enterprises work in concert to achieve four strategic outcomes. They follow a quantum organization, a product-centric organization that promotes agile development and hyper-productive team management; enable the creation of more perceptive experiences, customer interactions beyond mere transactions whilst allowing design that is more measurable, adaptive and inclusive; build responsive value chains with proximity to source, zero latency, instant simulation with micro feedback ; allow AI-enabled intuitive decisions powered by a digital brain and data-powered knowledge graphs.
These outcomes are made possible through four ingredients. Live Enterprises design to evolve allowing layered and evolving architectures delivered in micro releases; create a digital runway with shared digital infrastructure, microservices architecture exposing APIs that quickly integrate and allow unbundling and re-bundling of application and processes; foster hybrid talent that allows knowledge workers to have access to the systems, data, and tools they need anytime, anywhere; lastly, emphasize implementing micro modifications within the organization, as opposed to large-scale initiatives, to realize lasting change.
MuleSoft and the enablement of a Live Enterprise
Quantum organizations provide tools for rapid experimentation through the digital runway, promote interactions between users, user to platform, and platform to platform to drive value exchange in each interaction. MuleSoft’s low code-based offering MuleSoft Composer enables knowledge workers to bundle and build solutions specific to market, country or region with the capability to compose business process, unbundle and re-bundle them using microservices to increase innovation velocity and take a value stream view, embedding collaboration into the DNA of every business process.
User centricity is a key to everything in the Live Enterprise. Focus on delivering better experience and user hyper-productivity. By providing usable, relevant data to the fingertips of those who need it most within an organization, MuleSoft Composer brings understanding to the user experience, using telemetry to understand usage patterns and frictions in a process of continuous improvement and helps to create perceptive experiences. This allows IT to function as a business enabler instead of an obstacle to implementation.
Sentience drives the complete reimagination of value chains through five principles: proximity to source, zero latency, instant simulation, micro feedback and guided practices to achieve responsive value chains. MuleSoft API Management capabilities and low code offerings provide the ability to unbundle the business processes and capabilities into foundational service which are loosely coupled, modular and layered to build value added features and functions on them. These foundational services can be re-bundled in multiple ways to solve different problems and/or build new products and services.
The knowledge graph links all data spanning employees, customers, partners, networks and devices and interactions between them. “Digital brain” is a concept which uses machine learning for continuous, autonomous leaning from data across business units. The knowledge graph and digital brain continuously curate organizational knowledge to create perceptive experiences and make intuitive decisions. MuleSoft AI capabilities are industry-leading, creating a responsive and intuitive digital brain within an organization. MuleSoft Anypoint DataGraph enables you to leverage the existing capabilities of your application network by unifying all your existing data in a unified schema to create new connected experiences.
An architecture-first approach establishes the right foundation for achieving design to evolve wherein business and technical capabilities are unbundled into modular, layered services and re-bundled to create value added services, features, functions and experiences. Live Enterprise reference architecture provides a five layered approach: Interact, Process and Serve, Intelligence, IT and Systems and Digital Runway designed to provide scalable capabilities.
Digital runways provide a shared company digital infrastructure by curating the organizing knowledge, platforms and services, processes and playbooks, data and AI services and resources. Platform services provide a centralized software and hardware infrastructure abstracted as APIs that enable value add features, functionality, and interactions in a plug n play based model. MuleSoft as an API-led platform is poised to build digital runways on hybrid digital platforms powered by MuleSoft Accelerators as a set of prebuilt technical assets and implementation best practices.
Hybrid talent is the future of the workforce, a seamless mix of employees, machines, gig-economy providing the scale to meet workforce needs. Z-skilled talent is most effective digital talent with the ability to adapt new technology and master it with learning experiences delivered via an anytime anywhere learning model.
‘Micro is the new Mega’ is the strategy of deconstructing complex and large initiatives into micro initiatives with clear goals and objectives. Delivered via a cadence of regular micro releases and micro changes organizations can address micro problems with small, hyper-productive, agile teams to evolve and take concepts to market.
A cross-industry solution
Enterprises across industries are using API-led technologies to navigate the digital era. In the financial services industry, for example, banks with API management capabilities can unbundle and re-bundle banking journeys that incorporate more holistic services, using data to onboard customers, aid in credit decisioning, and transfer funds securely and rapidly. MuleSoft technologies support the emergence of an open banking model, helping large, legacy-based financial institutions expose APIs quickly, harness third-party data, and launch new apps and digital banking solutions — in just a few months.
In healthcare, access to patient data, and the ability to utilize this data in real-time, is critical to providing relevant care. With composability and knowledge graph, providers and medical professionals can access the medical records and bodies of research they require to derive accurate solutions quickly and at scale. We’ve seen the need for such agility very recently, as scientists and healthcare organizations collaborated to develop, test, distribute, and monitor COVID-19 vaccines at a global scale.
The notion of the Live Enterprise may seem like a broad, top-down driven concept. However, often, change starts at the micro level within an organization. At Infosys, our goal is to create business opportunities exposed as services, to help enterprises achieve business objectives at the same speed as they are developed. Reaching this goal does not require a massive act of initial digital transformation — it requires a few small intentional first steps. This happens to be the way MuleSoft operates as a technology platform, which is why we are proud to call ourselves a MuleSoft partner committed to the idea of the Live Enterprise. With the right technologies in place, organizations can make a resilient, more composable future much more of a reality.
You can learn more about what enterprise-level composability looks like with the support of MuleSoft’s industry-leading technology in the MuleSoft CONNECT Session Enable No Code Integrations — All with MuleSoft Composer.
You can learn more about Live Enterprise by visiting us at Infosys Live Enterprise Suite and Infosys API Economy and Microservices., part of Infosys Cobalt
Related Readings:
