Digital transformation demands a holistic approach to scaling innovation

Digital transformation must span people, process and technology. IBM Garage methodology can help, as evidenced by IBM’s work with Audi UK, using Adobe Experience Cloud.

Winston Churchill once said, “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” For successful enterprises, change is inevitable as businesses evolve to keep up with modern technology and customer demands. However, true digital transformation requires more than lifting and shifting technology. To be sustainable and effective, digital transformation must be innovative, scalable and holistic, incorporating people, processes and technology.

That is why IBM Garage is at the heart of almost every Adobe consulting and implementation project we do for clients. This end-to-end model for accelerating digital transformation at scale equips enterprises with the practices, technologies and expertise needed to rapidly turn ideas into business value. At its core are people, bringing together a squad of cross-disciplinary collaborators who bring expertise to the project to co-create (design), co-execute (build), co-operate (scale) with clients. Built on agile principles, leveraging Enterprise Design Thinking and DevOps tools, we find this methodology grounds teams in user-centered outcomes, accelerates time to market and fosters culture change along the way.

Audi UK puts innovation in the driver’s seat

One recent example is the partnership between IBM and Audi UK. Because 90 percent of car purchases now start online, the premium vehicle brand wanted to reimagine its digital experience, creating a seamless customer journey, from the first touchpoint — the website — through the vehicle purchase and ownership experience. Audi and IBM’s business design consultancy, IBM iX, co-created a strategic roadmap for digital transformation and then got to work executing their vision. To improve front-end development and analytics, the team moved to the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager.

Through coaching and practice, the Audi and IBM teams collaborated to establish new ways of working. Development squads adopted agile principles, organized into scrum teams and selected product owners who attended weekly product refinement sessions. As a result, Audi began delivering more relevant functionality faster. With agile practices such as pair programming and two-week sprint cycles, developers are delivering tools in three months — up to 75 percent faster.

Based on design discussions with customer panels and user-centered customer journeys, development teams created more immersive experiences from a digital product perspective. The intuitive pages pull users from the screen into the driver’s seat, with beautiful images and clear specifications that lead them to click “Book a test drive.”

Webpages are responsive and integrate with the Adobe Experience Manager content management system (CMS), which offers a lot of flexibility in the development architecture. With this new back-end and front-end framework, Audi content editors are empowered to complete everyday content changes so that developers can focus on more complex tasks. Audi is also creating libraries of reusable components, such as an application framework that has reduced initial setup time from weeks to minutes.

A custom website demands a custom analytics package. So, the Audi and IBM team built the Audi analytics platform from scratch on Adobe Analytics. The IBM iX team brought Adobe expertise to the project and provided education around advanced tools so that analytics would become part of the development cycle. Analytics provide marketing insights and help pinpoint and mitigate technical issues. This insight helps Audi continuously optimize and scale what is working and scratch what is not — building for the future instead of reactively deploying new pages and applications.

The results? While car sales plunged 29 percent in the UK in one year, Audi UK saw a 59 percent increase in leads year over year.

Companies and cultures change in the right direction

In an unpredictable and rapidly evolving business climate, companies need to design their businesses for change. There has never been a greater need for partners who can both enable and accelerate enterprise digital transformations to drive strategic outcomes for clients. By driving culture change, tripling the speed with which new applications can be brought to market and reducing product design time by 75 percent, the IBM Garage is a proven methodology. When enterprises couple this driver of digital transformation with Adobe’s full suite of products and IBM’s Adobe accelerators, AI- and Cloud- enabled technologies and deep consulting capabilities, they are indeed changing in the right direction.

Register for IBM’s session with Audi UK at Adobe Summit.

Download Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Report on the Business Value of IBM Garage.