Traveling a new path is made so much easier when you have a map to your destination. As companies continue to evolve, adapt, and grow by leveraging the quick thinking and adaptability necessitated by the pandemic, seismic socioeconomic and geopolitical changes persist. The Autonomous Digital Enterprise, or ADE, offers inspiration, practical strategies, and an end-goal for the road that lies ahead.
ADE is the framework for the successful future enterprise. It’s a digital-first business with distinct tech tenets and operating model characteristics that support transformation through actionable insights, business agility, and customer centricity.
Figure 1. The Autonomous Digital Enterprise.
ADE Outcomes
While most organizations today have embraced a digital-first approach, success is measured in the results. Successful ADEs are defined by three key outcomes:
Actionable insights: The explosive growth of data and the rapid emergence of data analytics tools (heavily influenced by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies) have empowered leaders and employees with new capabilities. By leveraging these technologies, an ADE can move beyond data correlations and business or system alerts towards true actionable insights, broader perspectives, and predictive intelligence to drive faster, better decision making.
Business agility: Primed by technology, processes, and data and an awareness of the markets, ecosystem, customers, competitors, and major factors that can impact the business, an ADE possesses the agility to respond rapidly to internal and external demands and capitalize on opportunities as they arise to gain an early-mover advantage.
Customer centricity: All organizations recognize the need to understand and serve customers, stakeholders, and partners, yet many struggle to live up to those aspirations. An ADE uses technology to meet customers where they want to be met, often by providing an omnichannel experience around products and services. Customer-facing employees, customer-serving processes, and technology options all must be integrated to reduce friction for every customer interaction and deliver a superior experience.
The ADE Tenets
Five key tech tenets define an ADE.
A Transcendent Customer Experience recognizes the full lifecycle of internal and external customer touchpoints and gives people what they need, where and when they need it, in a highly personalized, frictionless experience.
Automation Everywhere helps businesses execute with efficiency and scale, free up employees from mundane tasks, reduce costs, and improve customer interaction with AI-driven automation and orchestration of business and IT processes.
Enterprise DevOps enables the rapid and continuous delivery of applications and services by applying DevOps processes, tools, skills, teams, and leadership across the business.
A Data-Driven Business captures, correlates, and monetizes data enterprise-wide, yielding high-value business cases with AI/ML while also optimizing and improving data extraction and analysis.
An Adaptive Cybersecurity posture navigates the challenges of scarce talent, remote work, and explosive connectivity with automated, AI-enabled, and crowdsourced threat detection. It uses coordinated development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) strategies and a Zero Trust access and authentication framework.
By adopting pervasive technology for automation, innovation, and business growth, ADE-focused organizations will surge past their competitors and define the future-ready enterprise. BMC is uniquely qualified to help enable your ADE journey with over 40 years in the industry and a comprehensive, best-of-breed portfolio that delivers automation, service and operations management, and mainframe solutions. Learn more at bmc.com/ade.
