Rendering Rigorous and Detailed Planning for Logistics Project Success

The CIO’s Cloud Playbook Volume 3 should be about convergence, an open platform model used as a massive accelerator of business and societal change.

While all of us in the IT community have built our organizations to be quite flexible, the technologies in our estates, even the most contemporary, tend to be purpose built. If we’re smart about our architecture, we craft these systems so that they are component-based and can be used for many purposes over time, and we use commoditized SaaS solutions where we can. Most IT shops are still working on systems which must communicate through purpose-built integrations with our customers, suppliers, vendors, and partners. In this sense, the tech industry has yet to realize the potential of digital transformation.

Think about what we know is coming: constant connectedness, sensors everywhere, sophisticated analytics making sense of the massive data streaming in from those sensors, things interacting with users and environments and other things, robotics, and so on – all which will be increasingly used together - to deliver breakthrough capabilities for customers, new knowledge and opportunities for workers, and so on. So what platform and standards exist to help us treat all of the above as part of a single ecosystem, accessible seamlessly and easily and even automatically?

If we reorient our thinking away from fixed business processes or transactions towards a customer’s perspective not only as it relates to our company, but to all other partners and suppliers, we can start to see the potential of convergence. Today, all of us have a set of services, applications and data stores to serve our customers across the channels we own. All of these services and applications and data stores were designed to support how we run our enterprise, which is considered best practice. But now think about the other service providers your customers have, and what the customer has to do to get to a single view of end-to-end activity across a business process?

At BDP, we talk a lot about customers’ visibility across their supply chain. While customers may outsource logistics and some adjacencies to us, manufacturing may be outsourced to another organization, and so on. Customers do not typically outsource their entire supply chain operations to a single entity. In order to optimize across supply chain processes, they might hire BDP or a management consulting group to optimize the broader network. It’s an explicit activity in which analysis takes place and recommendations are made. But shouldn’t the supply chain be fluid, constantly adapting based on known optimization goals, capacities and participation of the players across the platform? Those players might be corporate entity types - customers, consignees, shippers, logistics providers, manufacturers, etc, - or they may be things like container sensors responding to events, weather patterns or other data flows, or user triggered events across an ecosystem. Rather than an explicitly built massive e2e supply chain solution built for a single entity, imagine a platform on which all entity types can operate cleanly and efficiently, increasing the speed of business, integration, environmental considerations, and other broadly-held optimization goals.

The world we operate in is dynamic, but most IT systems and application development practices are not. We need to work to bring those together. We need more dynamism in our solutions and in how we produce those solutions, because we can’t make the world more static.

Now is the time to be thinking about this. For the first time, we can reasonably craft these sorts of platforms.

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