Andrew Sweeney
Last year Gartner began talking about an emerging tool called a digital platform conductor (DPC). It described how a DPC addresses a critical issue for Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders as their hybrid digital infrastructure becomes more complex, helping them to understand what they have and how it delivers value. This year, Gartner has recognized a DPC in four hype cycles, reflecting a growing interest in its transformational capabilities.
Gartner hype cycles are released to show the evolution of a technology or application over time, helping to discern from the hype. They help companies understand more and explore the technology’s potential for solving a particular business need. They provide guidance for early adopters as well as those who take a more moderate or cautious approach so they can make decisions based on their level of risk acceptance.
Hype cycles track future potential and maturity over five phases:
Since coining the term digital transform conductor (DPC) last year, Gartner has seen interest growing, reflecting the capabilities of a DPC to address organizational challenges. As a result, Gartner has recognized digital platform conductor tools in four hype cycles, citing DPC tools in an ‘embryonic’ stage, as ‘transformational’ in enabling the following:
So, how does a digital platform conductor add value to your business capabilities?
Whatever stage you are at in your organization’s digital transformation journey, you are most likely navigating the increasing complexity of your IT estate. Your cloud migration offers cost savings and flexibility, but your IT estate is now more distributed. Your end user base is distributed too, adding to the challenge of delivering change and ensuring end user experience parity. New capabilities such as digital experience monitoring (DEX), cybersecurity asset management (CSAM), and cloud management can help you address these challenges, but each comes with a distinct set of management tools to add to those you’re already using.
The result is a disparate and siloed hybrid digital infrastructure, making it difficult to gain a holistic picture to understand the value and risk of change, while increasing the number of touchpoints you must manually interact with as you roll it out. At a time when agility in areas such as cybersecurity and service enablement is key, this lack of visibility or cross-tool automation creates business risk and headaches for your team.
Traditional methods of data discovery have always had their limitations, but as the number of hybrid digital infrastructure management (HDIM) tools you interact with increases, it becomes ever more challenging. More tools require more headcount to manually aggregate and analyze data from more sources to understand the impact of change. Because of the dynamic nature of your organization, a longer data discovery time means older project data, while manual effort opens doors to errors.
By introducing a DPC you can reduce IT complexity and extract greater value from all your HDIM tools as you evolve IT capabilities. A DPC connects to and leverages the information within those tools and any other data sources, using intelligent automation to aggregate and analyze it. Then leveraging its orchestration capabilities, a DPC automates workflows, triggering your tools to manage tasks when pre-defined dates are reached or events occur, and your estate is ready for change.
It's clear why Gartner recognized the transformational capabilities of a DPC within the four hype cycles, as it allows you to:
A DPC can be used to deliver measurable success across many I&O use cases as IT maturity evolves, including, IT asset management (ITAM), Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), Cybersecurity Asset Management, and more.
Book a demo to understand how ReadyWorks cuts the time, effort, and complexity of managing IT change in your organization.