TechHub: Digital (Culture) Transformations, GrayMatter Wins, APM Q&A

What Can We Learn From Digital Transformations at Other Companies? It’s All About Culture Change

A Deloitte survey revealed challenges companies contend with while pursuing a digital transformation.

Jerry Kane, a professor of information systems at Boston University, and Anh Phillips, a Deloitte researcher at the Center for Integrated Research, spoke with Tanya Ott on Deloitte’s podcast about the survey’s findings.

We selected a few of the key points from the discussion, which you can see below, but most of the challenges appear to revolve around the profound culture change required to pull off a successful digital transformation.

Or, as one technology author puts it on Twitter…

Digital business transformation is pretty much 95% about culture and about 1% technology.

— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) October 31, 2018

We had asked this year, “What’s the biggest challenge impacting your company’s ability to compete in a digital environment?”

And the top thing was experimentation … getting people to take risks to work in a more agile way.  And that’s unfortunate because we’re seeing experimentation as the key way that organizations learn.

What’s the biggest difference you see between working in a digital organization and a more traditional organization?

We actually asked respondents that question. One that came out on top with the pace of business. They said the speed at which decisions need to be made, the rate of change, is really the key. About 23 percent of our respondents said that. The next shift was culture and mindset—the need for creativity, for learning, for risk taking, for collaboration.

What did they tell us about the role of the CEO in these companies?

One thing we saw in our data is that as companies moved up our maturity scale, they were more likely to report that their digital efforts were being led by the CEO’s office. In the early stage, companies were led more by the IT group. And then we see the shift as they become more mature, that has it being taken over by central leadership. That is really key because one thing that companies realize when they begin down this digital transformation path, they realize basically so much of the organization needs to change.

GrayMatter Wins ‘Solution Provider of the Year: Innovative Technologies’

The Pittsburgh Technology Council awarded GrayMatter the equivalent of a “tech Emmy” at the 2018 Tech 50 Awards in Pittsburgh on Oct. 25.

GrayMatter was the leading company in the Solution Provider of the Year: Innovative Technologies category, which had eight other contenders: AquaSource Technologies Corp., Diamond Kinetics, Ethical Intruder, First Insight, JazzHR, Powercast Corp., TradmarkVision and Voci Technologies, Inc.

GrayMatter CEO Jim Gillespie thanked the council for the award and said he’s excited

GrayMatter CEO Jim Gillespie thanks the Pittsburgh Technology Council at the 2018 Tech 50 Awards ceremony in Pittsburgh.

about continuing GrayMatter’s work to solve interesting problems in innovative ways.

A judging committee, made up of Pittsburgh Technology Council member companies, read and score the nomination forms received for the Tech 50 awards, according to the council. Based on the cumulative scores, 50 companies are selected to be finalists.

Nominees were scored on  growth, impact and accomplishments.

PGH Tech Fuse: Tech 50 Solution Provider of the year: Innovative Technologies – GrayMatter

Up next at the #PTCTech50 ! Winner of solution provider of the year in innovative technologies is @GrayMatterSys

— Pittsburgh Business Times (@PghBizTimes) October 25, 2018

We won! Thank you, @pghtech! https://t.co/u4OIFCO2DV

— GrayMatter (@GrayMatterSys) October 25, 2018

5 KPIs to Gauge Your Digital Transformation’s Progress

If you’re in the midst of a digital transformation of your company’s operations or maintenance strategy, you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to be prepared.

Many managers begin on a digital transformation journey without even identifying what to measure.

As the amount of reactive work falls, time and resources will become available to focus on determining how to use predictive data to take proactive maintenance actions.

That will lead to less downtime, increased availability and, in turn, lower maintenance costs.

Download GrayMatter’s full report to learn the 5 KPIs you need to know before a transformation, plus we give you a chance to pose some of your APM questions to our Intelligent Assets Practice Leader Paul Casto.

3 Critical Parts to Creating a Digital Twin

Many IoT platforms advertise digital twin technology as part of their offerings.

A recent Industry Week story cites a 2017 estimate by Orbis Research that says 85 percent of IoT platforms will contain “some form of this technology by 2022.”

It’s important to understand what a digital twin is and how it works. Industry Week breaks out three key components of a digital twin: a 3D digital modeling tool, sensors ported to the digital twin and a way to display that sensor data.

That’s a nuts-and-bolts view of a digital twin. Also important is the ability to analyze the operational history of a facility or device.

“The value in knowing when something will fail before it has reached a critical breaking-down point is the holy grail for manufacturers, because it ensures that manufacturing lines and other equipment continue to generate product that generates revenues.”