Our 5 Principles with Digital Platform Construction
Incus5 is a software development and integration company dedicated to designing and implementing successful Digital Transformations for businesses. We do this by building Digital Platforms for customers, partners, and employees that create seamless self-service user experiences, with the end goals being to lower costs, improve user experience and vastly increase scalability.
A successful digital platform delivers alignment to the business, a higher utility of assets, an elevated degree of data security, the perfected user experience, and often a decrease in technical debt. The appeal of our digital platform is its ability to run a business process from end-to-end, allowing your business to grow.
1 – ALIGN TO BEST SERVE YOUR BUSINESS
Knowing what both your customers and your senior management want—and validating that direction with real data early in the process—ensures your digital platform is in proper alignment with your business. Good alignment accelerates the process and focuses development efforts on what is important. Conversely, if the solution design and architecture are wrong, your transformation will fail.
2 – INTEGRATE TO DIFFERENTIATE
Digital Transformation requires building digital platforms that are powerful and easy to use. The power of these platforms comes from aggregating the functionality of your most important existing systems and new innovative systems that are being published daily. Ease of use comes from providing a shared context across these systems that is aligned with your business objectives. The Amazon Shopping app is a great example of this, as it brings information from many systems into one single powerful UI, which is uniquely designed just for shopping. Creating platforms that bring together functionality from applications you already own and like will create a foundation for all subsequent activities. This includes SaaS (Cloud Hosted), COTS, and custom applications.
3 – ELEVATE USER EXPERIENCES
The major goal of a Digital Platform is to create a seamless self-serve user experience. A business necessity can interrupt this experience with a step or process that requires a real person. But once this condition is resolved, the user experience should continue and be connected back to the Digital Platform.
A user experience can be damaged by:
- Having more steps than necessary
- Disjointed solutions caused by poor integrations
4 – CREATE A DATA-DRIVEN BUSINESS
Data can be the single most important element in differentiating your business from your competition. Gaining a competitive edge in your industry is possible when you manage and leverage that data properly. Businesses must navigate through the maturity model by how they acquire, persist, and use their data, using both traditional decision support systems (i.e. data warehouses) and advanced use cases, such as Deep Learning and AI.
5 – RETIRE TECHNICAL DEBT
Every application that is added to your portfolio creates a bevy of operating expenses. Some expenses are obvious, such as 20% software maintenance. But others are less obvious but equally crippling expenses, such as: administration, security, DR, backup, and compliance. Applications must be retired to make room for better solutions and accommodate new business objectives. Our Incus5 methodology provides an efficient way to remove these applications at a lower cost.
