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.
What are Gartner hype cycles?
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:
- Innovation trigger: As the technology emerges and takes shape.
- Peak of Inflated Expectations: As publicity creates a buzz or expectations around the technology and either meets, or often does not meet those expectations.
- Trough of Disillusionment: Interest falls as the technology doesn’t deliver on its promises. Companies that can implement improvements to turn the technology around to meet the needs of early adopters can continue securing investment.
- Scope of Enlightenment: The benefits of the technology become more widely understood and more enterprises begin trials.
- Plateau of Productivity: Technology is adopted more broadly.
The ‘Transformational’ digital platform conductor
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:
- Agile and DevOps: described by Gartner as proven collections of practices and tools that enable organizations to drive customer value faster.
- I&O Automation: Gartner sees automation as foundational for I&O leaders to scale and exceed the demands of digital businesses, becoming more agile, while mitigating risk.
- ITSM: Technologies that enable IT teams to transform service delivery to support the business.
- Monitoring, Observability, and Cloud Operations: Tools that solve the problem of monitoring and analyzing an increasingly complex IT environment to allow better business decision making.
So, how does a digital platform conductor add value to your business capabilities?
The role of a DPC
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:
- Collect and analyze data at scale to understand the impact of change using an accurate, real-time, holistic view of your IT estate, to optimize DevOps and ensure you deliver value through change, while decreasing uncertainty and risk.
- Benefit from new agility using automation across all your HDIM tools at every stage of your IT transformation program, including planning, communications, scheduling, testing, rollout, and reporting.
- Automate service enablement across your HDIM tools, allowing you to scale from handling individual resource requests to managing complex programs such as datacenter decommissioning and multi-cloud transitions.
- Gain clear visibility across your IT environment and bridge the gaps of your disparate performance monitoring and analysis tools to rapidly aggregate and analyze the data they manage. Use that data to optimize your IT environment leveraging automated workflows.
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.
