foreword
The key to the digital transformation of enterprises is to build a system with platform thinking, which means to provide a space (or system) for bilateral and multilateral groups that have mutual influence and dependence, and to meet the interests of different groups in this space.
In this transformation process, the following ten elements are an important part of this platform thinking.
Element 1: The global business perspective runs through the business chain
First of all, each business system is constructed from the perspective of the business leader to which the system belongs, lacks a global vision, and is prone to data islands due to inconsistent data standards and formats. In addition, because the business system is essentially a product built by different business departments from their own local perspectives, the high cost of linkage between systems is itself an intuitive experience of the "department wall", which is essential for the agility and efficient collaboration required for innovation. A great hindrance.
Therefore, the construction of the business center plays a central role. My understanding is that the business center is composed of a bunch of service centers (for example, the Internet middle station in our IT planning is composed of a marketing center, a user center, and a product center), and these service centers are respectively composed of a A stack system or a stack of microservices ( for example, the marketing center is composed of a series of services such as coupon code service, payment service, and order service ). These centers that provide external capabilities are fundamentally different from the system function modules we usually build. The difference is that they provide services to all front-end business scenarios or lines, so they are stateless, atomic, and tenant-isolated.
Element 2: Build a data link closed loop that supports business optimization
Although peers are also aware of the importance of data and the value of big data, in fact, in the IT organizational structure of many companies, basically one department is responsible for system construction, and the other is responsible for data management. It is easy to be difficult to achieve because of inconsistent understanding of business. Data drives business.
In order to avoid the separation of the system and data, a closed loop of enterprise data can be built together through the business center and the data center; the business center is responsible for digitizing everything, and the data center is responsible for commercializing all data. Here is a brief introduction to the functions of the business middle platform and the data middle platform.
The positioning of the business platform mainly includes the following aspects:
1. Business scenario coverage2. Collection of user contacts3. Transaction processing support4. Efficient data generation
The core positioning of the data center should be a standard and reusable data asset library. According to the book, it should be divided into three layers:
vertical data center, global data center
and
extraction data center
.
According to my understanding, it is mapped back to the bank's data system. The vertical data center should refer to the data warehouse post source layer after data is extracted from each application system. The global data center is more like an index layer or index library built according to certain business themes; the extraction center is more about the comprehensive portrait data (that is, the customer label system) of core business objects (such as cardholders).
In the new era of digital transformation, we can no longer build system functions first and then build data management and analysis functions as in the past. Instead, we need to prepare for the overall thinking of data closed-loop from the beginning to build the entire closed-loop capability.
Element 3: Taking the best user experience as an important principle
One of the cores of digital transformation is to shift from product-centricity to customer-centricity, or more specifically, to satisfy customer needs. Therefore, the pursuit of the ultimate user experience is an extremely important task.
In short, from the perspective of business requirements and user experience, user access terminal channels need diversity, and the so-called diversity does not refer to our traditional chimney-style construction of projects. For a system, its diversity should be reflected in the ability to better solve the current problems encountered by users in different scenarios by integrating the capabilities of various systems. By integrating the capabilities of different systems to meet the current needs of customers in real time. What do you mean here? To give a simple example, when a customer browses his monthly bill in the credit card APP and clicked on the bill installment page (but stayed for a while and finally left the page), when the system finds that he is an installment customer group through portrait data and The quota usage rate has been high in recent months, and the system can predict and assess that one possible reason why customers leave is that the rate is too high, so that the system can automatically trigger the push rate discount to the customer, or when the customer logs in to the bank On the homepage of the WeChat official account, the system automatically pushes discount advertisements with discounted rates.
How should we map it to the system construction level? From the perspective of architecture, we need to design the application system with a three-tier architecture (for details, please refer to the figure below).
1. The product sharing service layer, which separates the public functions required by multiple products from the global perspective of product applications, and provides support to the previous one in the form of services;2. Product service layer, which mainly includes functions under a single business scenario;3. The front-end interaction layer is responsible for combining and processing the services in the lower layer, product sharing service layer, and product service layer for the data and functions required by the user terminal, and returning them to the client.
After the further decoupling of the three layers, the reuse capability has actually been further improved. In addition to the product sharing service layer, the product service layer can actually provide a certain granularity of reuse. For example, the logistics tracking of e-commerce services in the product service layer can serve not only the 2C business flow of upper-level marketing/operation, but also the 2B business flow of logistics supply chain, and the data is consistent, so it is consistent for users experience.
Element 4: Provide reusability to support rapid business innovation
In today's era where fast fish eat slow fish, whether a company has core differentiated competitiveness depends on whether the company has stronger business innovation capabilities. So how can we have strong business innovation capabilities? One of the ways is to carry out the capacity building of the middle platform, abstract and encapsulate various core capabilities of the enterprise into specific "building blocks", and change the previous way of building information systems from scratch, but by combining different existing "building blocks" Only by changing the previous system construction from "cold start" to "hot start" can we maximize the delivery efficiency and provide technical support for the rapid trial and error of the business.
Therefore, my understanding is that the construction of the middle platform is an important part of digital transformation and an important construction goal of business digital transformation. (For specific discussions on the construction of China-Taiwan, please refer to my other article
Talking about the Implementation of China-Taiwan Construction_justyman's Blog-CSDN Blog 
https://blog.csdn.net/justyman/article/details/114477257?spm=1001.2014 .3001.5501
https://blog.csdn.net/justyman/article/details/114477257?spm=1001.2014 .3001.5501
Element 5: Support the network collaboration of upstream and downstream enterprises
The value of data will be enhanced through sharing, and the increased value of data depends to a large extent on the extent to which data is shared and opened. When an enterprise's internal data sharing mechanism is done well enough, in order to achieve continuous improvement in efficiency and benefits, it will definitely share data with the upstream and downstream of the ecological chain in order to further improve the efficiency of the ecological chain.
For how to support the network collaboration of upstream and downstream enterprises, the industry has two main ideas.
- Many large Internet companies say that they need open data to open to the upstream and downstream of the ecological chain in the form of services, and then guide upstream and downstream enterprises or organizations to form linkages with themselves, and then integrate them into their own systems to achieve a higher degree of interaction and collaboration. But this method is relatively one-way, depending on which side has the right to speak.
- The other is to directly provide SaaS services to upstream and downstream enterprises in the ecological chain, bringing more value to everyone in the form of digital empowerment. Of course, this approach is generally only suitable for those companies that have a large voice or market share in the industry, that is, they have sufficient digital capabilities, and they also have the appeal to further improve synergy efficiency, and then they must appeal to the ecological chain. Upstream and downstream enterprises help themselves improve efficiency by improving the efficiency of the entire chain.
Element 6: Support multiple development teams to build together
Digital transformation itself is a digital construction for the whole link or ecology, so it must not be achieved by only one team, but by the cooperation of multiple teams. Therefore, there is a need for corresponding unification in processes, planning and norms.
As can be seen from the above figure, the entire link should be divided into business middle platform layer, digital middle platform layer, product sharing service layer, product service layer and front-end interaction layer. The functional and operational boundaries between different teams should be clear, and my understanding is that there should be no overlap. From the perspective of the business domain, it is necessary to build a business operation system for each layer in the above figure. Each team conducts daily operations on the corresponding operation platform, and at the same time conducts efficient online collaboration based on the platform. This is a problem of process specification.
In addition, because the middle office is also constantly evolving, in order to avoid the unconstrained style of each team in the later stage, it is necessary to define from three aspects: system architecture design, product design and product development, as follows:
-
No matter what function or system is to be built in the future, the above layered specification must be followed;
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In the product design stage, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the division of labor of each operation platform and the experience of user terminals. It is necessary to realize the independent operation of different teams and ensure the consistency of the final user experience.
-
Establish platform-related specifications (authentication specifications, interface design specifications, etc.) to ensure that multiple teams use unified specifications in the product development process to achieve the effect of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Element 7: Support user personalization and business expansion needs
Each company has different departments, and each group manages different branches; their demands are not the same. From the perspective of the whole company or the whole group, it is hoped to concentrate resources on construction, improve linkage efficiency, and avoid the problem of inconsistent business systems and data caused by their own construction systems; from the perspective of departments or branches, because they have their own personalized demands, If the business is required to adapt to the system, it will affect the efficient development of business because of the unified construction. This kind of problem is very common in enterprises.
In fact, digital transformation must solve this inevitable problem. How to solve it? In fact, what needs to be done is how to meet the individual needs of users (different departments or branches) and the issue of business scalability. So how should we do it?
1. Establish a tenant isolation mechanism
The tenant isolation mechanism is adopted to ensure that each user's data is isolated and invisible. However, tenant isolation needs to solve the following problems:
-
Data sharing between tenants and platforms;
-
Data sharing between tenants;
-
Data flow across tenants.
2. Realize the separation of commonality and individuality based on the middle platform architecture
From a macro perspective, the essence of business platform construction is the separation of commonality and individuality.
3. The business extensible framework supports the personalized needs of business scenarios
Our principle when doing service design or microservice division is to achieve service capability cohesion. But in many cases when we do design service centers, we will encounter some difficult problems. For example, when we build an order center, it may be a relatively simple function at the beginning (lock inventory -> order creation -> deduct inventory), here I call it "Atomic layer", but with the access of various channels later, and because of the particularity of different channels, the order center will be required to add additional functions to the previous "atomic layer" (for example, if it is connected to a third party, it may be necessary to push To a third party under the status of an order), these functions must not be orchestrated and encapsulated into a larger-grained service, which I call the "aggregation layer" here. But as the number of service centers increases, you will find that this will be a test of efficiency and cost for middle-end developers. Of course, you can say that this is a channel feature that should be solved by the channel development itself rather than middle-end development, but what if this feature is required by several channels but not all channels? Is it the channel team's own repeated development or the development of the middle and Taiwan team?
In fact, the best way to solve this problem should be to improve the openness of China and Taiwan. That is to say, it not only ensures the stability of the middle platform (closed to the commonality), but also improves the flexibility of the middle platform (open to the individuality). The specific method is:
4. Based on the functional market to realize the "thousands of people and thousands of faces" of user experience
For the same system or product, the services that different roles (including users and customers) care about and need are completely different. For example, in an online shopping mall, customers want to see a wide variety of products and corresponding discounts, while operations want to see the current order status and event operations. Even the same character wants to see different things on different terminals. To give another example, what operators want to see on the mobile terminal is some summary or analytical data (such as the total number of orders), but on the PC side, they want to see the details of each order (especially some orders with customer complaints).
This requires enterprises to use functions as small construction units when building their own platforms, rather than the system itself. This also coincides with the concept of the service center in Zhongtaizhong. The platform must carry out "atomic" management of all services built with functions as the granularity, and support users with different roles to use according to the subscription model, so that It is really the "thousands of people and thousands of faces" that realizes user experience based on the functional market.
Element 8: The team shifts from project-based construction to digital capability product operation
The traditional project-based construction model has the following disadvantages:
1. System scalability has never been a necessary option. Whether it is a project with the goal of online acceptance or an on-site iterative model, the system or functional modules it delivers will eventually cause the problem of low scalability. The reason is that It is the goal of system launch and acceptance, not continuous operation, which is the "original sin" of the project system;
2. The project-based model cannot continuously meet the needs of business growth, but should adopt a faster-response "sausage-cutting" iterative model to continue trial and error, and fill in the business and IT through continuous "feeding" of the business side gap.
3. The project system is not conducive to talent training, because after the project is over, the personnel will be transferred to other projects. If it is the same type of project, it is fine, otherwise it will be difficult to have a deep accumulation in the same business (who can guarantee that they will be able to do so in the future? Years of projects are all the same type of business?), which is not good for enterprises and individuals. For enterprises, it is always impossible to cultivate talents who understand both technology and business, and for individuals, they will always be a tool person.
On the contrary, the middle platform construction mode based on product operation is helpful to help IT cultivate business experts. After all, the operators or developers of the middle platform will face the needs of the middle platform services in all business scenarios of the company in their daily work. , This will force them to support or satisfy the business with a global perspective, and theoretically help people build an overall cognitive system, which will grow into an expert in the middle platform service (or field) over time.
Element Nine: Support the ecological co-construction of external partners based on capability openness
The development trend of enterprise digital transformation is the opening of capabilities. In the construction of this altruistic platform, we should not place too much emphasis on management and control, but should be open-minded to attract partners. When an enterprise opens up its core capabilities through the platform, the business data of its partners also flows back to the enterprise, in order to better accumulate industry-level data capabilities for the enterprise.
Element 10: Change from a functional organizational structure to a business-oriented organizational structure
The traditional organizational structure of the enterprise leads to the so-called "departmental wall" problem. When this phenomenon is mapped to the IT system level, it will appear that the early business system construction is based on the needs of specific business departments, which leads to the continuous proliferation of chimney systems. source. Of course, this was in line with the "company's situation" at the time; indeed, the core of the company in the early days was to survive, and the only requirement was to quickly put into production from zero to one, instead of sitting down and slowly demonstrating how to connect data and functions. How to reuse; this is a bit difficult. I don’t know whether the enterprise will survive tomorrow, so I can’t talk about the problem of data connection or function reuse.
With the development of business, this problem must be solved. According to the book, the organizational structure can follow the following three principles:
1) Transparent sharing of data; 2) Business orientation; 3) Unified organizational cognition
.
First of all, transparent sharing of data can not only reduce the cost of information acquisition, but also improve the efficiency of team collaboration. Because when data is shared, human potential can be released. why? Because different people are in different roles and have different interpretations of the overall data, which allows the team to burst out innovative or efficient ideas. Second, the unequal data information has been largely resolved, and everyone will be trusted and consider themselves one of the co-owners of the data. In this way, people are not only willing to take on work responsibilities, but also continue to seek more Big responsibility, which is good for the team or the company.
Second, the business orientation I understand is to establish a matrix organization, that is, to combine people of different professions around the same business goal into an entity or virtual organization, and they work together efficiently for common business goals, which is somewhat similar A full-featured team from product and BA to development and testing under the background of business agility.
Third, organization-level cognitive unity. The organization determines the corporate vision, the middle level decomposes the goals based on this vision, and the grassroots is responsible for the implementation. In this process, the more the vision is transmitted to the grassroots, the weaker the perception will be. Therefore, business leaders need to lead the team to clarify and refine the goals, not just stop at the verbal requirements of countless meetings.