Best Practices for Navigating Your Digital Thread Initiative for Enterprise Growth Strategy

You can't improve unless you are open to change. And that change won't come without bumps in the road. But many innovations are worth pursuing, especially technology-driven approaches that can keep organizations competitive. The adoption and creation of an enterprise growth strategy through a digital thread initiative is a perfect example.

EE adoption: Navigating a digital thread initiative

An enterprise growth strategy is based on the principal of enterprise excellence (EE). Implementing strategy through a digital thread initiative can define the details of an enterprise's strategy and its status while addressing multiple challenges to growth. Digital threads have many advantages, which is why more and more companies are in desperate need of them. But you can't just install some software and hope to succeed. You have to commit.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to enterprise growth or EE adoption. However, there are best practices solutions for successfully navigating the path through the creation of a digital thread. This post offers tips on creating that digital thread, ensuring its effective consumption, and managing the cultural changes that tend to come with this sort of process transformation.

Switching to digital thread authoring

The first big step in creating an enterprise growth strategy based in EE is communication and transparency. The initiative to prioritize thread-based authoring changes focus from traditional work products and artifacts to the evolution of the digital thread itself. As your team(s) makes this change, there are a few ways to ensure success.

• Pursuing reduced annotation. Different teams are accustomed to adding dimensions and complexities to each step, and it results in extremely time-consuming processes. Luckily, all of those details are built right into the "care and feeding" of a digital thread. This means that each team and member adds the relevant information identified/requested of their role to the thread itself, instead of additions to multiple disparate documents and sheets. This allows the value and truth to be achieved in the thread, reducing the overall workload for communication and documentation. This has many synergies with lean processes and agility. If you aren't already pursuing those goals, your move to a digital thread is a great place to start.

• Embedding semantic artifacts. Another benefit of a digital thread is the ability to embed semantic artifacts, or electronic documentation, consumable for downstream use in the process. There is truly a world of potential for leveraging semantic artifacts through automation once a digital thread has been created. When product teams add the appropriate information from the start, they can minimize any later disruptive changes to the engineering workflow, as well as avoid potential downstream delays.

• Streamline tooling and manual effort. At some point in the evolution of most companies, there comes a time of "tool sprawl/bloat." This happens for various –and all valid at their time –reasons, but it is a barrier to growth and scaling. To allow for the easiest adoption of thread-based processes, redundant or limited tools need to be eliminated. Tools that can integrate with each other but require manual effort or configuration to do so should be eliminated. There are many enterprise tools available that provide full suites of features for multiple departments, and the chances are high that an organization already has licensed [at least] one. If there is "analog" effort involved in integrating various systems, the thread will ultimately be compromised and less likely to serve its purpose, which handicaps the entire organization. (There is the added incentive for streamlined tooling in that an enterprise can realize cost reductions in expenditures, savings in waste of time and resources recaptured, savings in overhead of management of multiple tool sets and associated security policies, and the lower risk of introducing a security risk through network traffic.)

Shifting to digital-thread-based processes

It's not enough just to create a digital thread. In fact, merely substituting your old enterprise application(s) with an integrated solution to create your digital thread will give you the lowest return on your initiative investment. If you do this, you are missing an opportunity to realize significant value. ("Lift and shi*t," anyone?)

A digital thread can contain a higher level of detail and fidelity that you can leverage in a number of innovative ways in engineering, finance, delivery, and other functional departments. To make the most of your digital thread, it pays to adopt thread-based processes throughout the entire development process.

Product teams

Let's look at product requirements. When you share a digital thread containing the information and details with the company as a whole, you reap the benefits of:

• Keeping everyone informed;

• Clarity in prioritization;

• Minimizing duplicated effort;

• Fostering collaboration;

• Allowing for feedback;

• Providing real-time status of efforts underway; and

• Clear communication of what and why.

Engineering

For engineering teams specifically, it provides for:

• Connection with the larger organization;

• Communication of definitive requirements;

• Potential for innovation;

• Greater confidence in the projected result; and

• Better accuracy and understanding in the time required to invest.

ERM (enterprise risk management)

When discussing enterprise development, implementing a digital thread and the subsequent automatic creation of semantic artifacts allow for governance, regulatory, and security information to be readily accessed. When there is a need for an assessment or certification, the required evidence has been automatically produced and is therefore more accurate and standardized. This saves considerable time and money.

Everyone...

Finally, any functional department that needs to create documentation, illustrations, or instructions will benefit from a digital thread. There is no longer the need to reference multiple deliverables, documents, or sheets in several systems. Instead, they can view, manipulate, and interrogate a single system to get the information they need. As a result, they can provide greater detail and accuracy in all status reports, planning, and deliverables.

Managing cultural change

The new tools and processes involved in a digital thread initiative require what some will feel is a major technological shift. But there is also cultural change to consider.

Your business stakeholders are likely comfortable with certain preferred applications. They may have never worked in an integrated system, or may already be adjusting to a "citizen developer" world. Your engineering teams may be more comfortable with limited responsibility and feel safe in their segregated departments. If you have separate teams for networking, infrastructure, and/or operations, they are likely to rely on their management consoles and an interactive approach to their responsibilities.

A digital thread will disrupt their daily tasks as they learn an entirely new way to think, to create systems, integrations, and controls to support the thread and its inherent document creation. It will have similar downstream effects as well. But there are a few ways you can encourage success during this adoption.

Understand what you are asking

To start, there are many different stakeholders with distinctly different interests in any organization. Functional owners, including engineering managers and directors, must still meet their project deadlines, even if the organization is in the process of a cultural change and digital thread adoption.

This is not a small undertaking. It is important to recognize their constraints and support their efforts and feelings as they make the changes necessary to achieve these new goals. Do not discount the short-term costs of this kind of change.

Provide tools for success

Second, any initiative is at the mercy of its systems of support. An enterprise growth strategy and supporting digital thread effort is no different. Without the right scaffolding in place, you cannot hope to succeed. Make sure to supply the right training, technology, technical support, and resources of expertise to help your teams successfully employ these new processes with as little pain as possible.

Educate your employees

Finally, it pays to educate and work with your employees to help them become familiar with this new way of working, and their place in it. Everyone must understand that the digital thread itself is a deliverable. Any variation or lack of engagement will jeopardize the entire initiative and negate any results. This is a step that some organizations skip or gloss over, and it can cause problems that would be easily avoided with upfront education.

As previously said, these approaches are not one-size-fits-all and it is unfair to expect that all of your employees have kept current in their own training. Trying to fit a new initiative into an old framework or approach is a sure path to inefficiency and can limit any returns achieved.

Today, many organizations rely heavily on multiple tools and systems. Teams and employees may not be comfortable working collaboratively with all stakeholders and may not grasp its importance. Further, especially in today's work force, they may have significant experience in a single area but not the broader understanding that others may expect. You will need to guide them through the transition. It is in both your interests to provide ample support as everyone learns to work in a more transparent way –and that is intentionally a transformation that needs to be acknowledged and embraced as disruptive.

Best practices for success

As you move forward with digital thread initiatives, there will be challenges. But, with some foresight, you can manage those challenges and reap valuable benefits in support of transparency, traceability, design, agility, time-to-value metrics, and the greater product development process.

As you create these new threads, be sure to support digital thread authoring and thread-based processes while also managing team expectations and cultural change. This is how to make the most of any digital thread initiative, keeping your organization agile, competitive, and ready to face whatever the future may bring.