Agile Automation in the Enterprise

At Digital.ai, we believe in partnerships, not vendorships. Our goal is to continuously collaborate with our customers to ensure they deliver exceptional value to their end-users. One area of interest that continues to stick out is enterprise consistency. It’s a challenge that becomes increasingly complex in large organizations where thousands of individuals work across diverse portfolios, programs, and departments to achieve critical outcomes. So, how do we drive consistency in such a vast and intricate environment?

The Integration Challenge: Synchronizing Systems Across the Enterprise

The first problem that has been around for quite some time is data management through system integration. At scale, it’s not uncommon for 100s of tools to be in place at any given time. The most common questions typically revolve around ITSM, planning, and DevOps tooling. To help with this problem, Digital.ai Agility has a capability called Agility Sync that provides integrations to and from Jira, Azure DevOps, OpenText ALM/QC, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. These integrations account for almost 80% of the requests coming in from customers.

Agility takes its integration capability a step further by enabling enterprises to build custom plugins with its open sync framework. Digital.ai customers take advantage of our open sync framework for two purposes: integrating homegrown solutions and bringing in data from third-party vendors that don’t come out of the box and are not on Digital.ai’s roadmap. By enabling these integrations, we ensure that data remains consistent and up-to-date across systems.

Keeping data up to date between two systems is only one of the two problems we see today. Next, we will turn to how enterprises take advantage of APIs to automate processes.

Automation in Action: Enhancing Data Fidelity and Reducing Human Error

Before diving into how automation is used in the enterprise, let’s look at what problems the enterprise is trying to solve. While today, data is king, we can only take this royal stance if the data is reliable. Data fidelity is one of the biggest problems enterprises face as data-driven decisions have become more important than ever. Data fidelity falls victim to another issue as well, and that’s human error. We’re all human, after all, and thus being humans, we make mistakes. Sometimes, they’re just accidents; sometimes, our mistakes are due to insufficient enablement or onboarding processes. The result is inconsistent data, which can severely impact decision-making in large enterprises with over 100,000 team members. Digital.ai recently partnered with a large enterprise to discuss how agile planning can be automated – hang with me here!

Automating Agile Planning: A Game-Changer for Large Enterprises

While collaborating with this customer, we learned that they were attempting to rethink the way they fund and organize around the value they wanted to deliver to their customers. They needed a consistent approach that standardized onboarding at scale while improving data fidelity with less human error. See what I did there… Using Agility’s powerful API, we automated the setup of Agile initiatives as soon as they were funded. This included creating planning levels, configuring PlanningRooms for the business, and setting up TeamRooms for the development value stream—each tailored to the portfolio’s specific needs. The API also facilitated the assignment of team members and the import of data from other systems to build out the proper portfolio item tree structure.

All this provides a firm foundation to kick the initiative off and has made a huge impact in onboarding all the teams required to deliver on that initiative. Not to mention all the administrative time and overhead if we manually set up and configured Agility. This automated approach not only streamlined the onboarding process but also eliminated administrative bottlenecks, enabling large enterprises to kick off initiatives more efficiently. This kind of automation is a game-changer in an environment where even three to five administrators can become a bottleneck. And while automation typically brings DevOps to mind, applying it to planning is truly thinking outside the box.

Your Turn: How Are You Solving These Challenges?

We have covered these two problems today – system integration and process automation. How are you solving for these in your enterprise? Are you using integration or automation to bring data together and drive consistency across your organization?