The three layers of Digital.AI’s VSM platform: Intelligence, orchestration, and shared services

Digital.ai offers one of the few truly complete Value Stream Management (VSM) platform solutions. Many enterprise solutions for digital transformation focus wholly on development, operations, or shared services environments. They may be effective at improving productivity and increasing data visibility within one of these areas, but they still contribute to the problems of enterprise siloing. Digital.ai’s VSM-focused digital transformation platform combines all three areas — development, operations, and shared services — along with powerful analytics. 

Bringing visibility into all major IT sectors while combining workflows into one continuous pipeline, makes Digital.ai’s digital transformation platform the only solution capable of aligning all teams across the entire organization.

With the goal of providing business leaders with a comprehensive view of value streams and end-to-end control, Digital.ai developed a proprietary VSM architecture. We then equipped this architecture with some of the industry’s most trusted tools, one for each critical step of the DevOps release process. Our vision was not just a full suite of tools ⁠—  from development to release and deploy to testing ⁠— but one that had a unique value add for each of the most critical elements of a digitally-driven organization.

• Orchestration: By unifying the release process and bringing end-to-end visibility, solutions like Digital.ai Release and Digital.ai Deploy make orchestrating sprints easier and more likely to result in outstanding releases. Digital.ai Agility provides industry-leading portfolio management capabilities. Powerful dashboard-based team management keeps everyone organized, focused, and informed.
• Intelligence: Use powerful analytics, automated data import, and custom dashboard views while leveraging some of the world’s most powerful and versatile AI+Machine Learning engines to model key aspects of your pipeline and generate continuous, automated insights for process improvements, product optimization, and amplified value delivery.
• Shared Services: Through a combination of service management tools and end-to-end value stream visibility, unify your shared services teams — both internal and vendors — using a single source of truth while providing metrics that help accelerate performance for each value stream.

Orchestration layer — Make your mark with outstanding work

The orchestration layer of Digital.ai’s VSM platform makes it easier than ever to generate outstanding products through efficient work.
Digital.ai’s Orchestration Layer solutions represent a comprehensive environment for each step of development and quality assurance:

• Digital.ai Agility — Plan
• Digital.ai Release — Build & Release
• Digital.ai Continuous Testing — Test
• Digital.ai Deploy — Deploy
• Digital.ai Application Protection — Secure

Each of these products can be acquired separately and integrated into your existing development pipeline. However, they can work better together thanks to shared dashboards and analytics, capable of providing end-to-end visibility and control.

Benefits to Digital.ai’s DevOps orchestration solutions include:

• A unified software delivery process. Connect the siloed stages of your development processes while simplifying workflows overall. Digital.ai solutions are flexible and capable of integrating with the tools and technologies your business needs to thrive.
• Make processes more robust, improving reliability and efficiency. Deliver better digital products, faster. Increase release automation coverage while ensuring compliance thanks to automated enforcement of security and governance best practices.
• Visualize sprint progress and KPIs. Make the release cycle easier to manage, oversee, and control — all while maintaining visibility for the metrics that matter most.
• Gain continuous analytics insights. Leverage data from across your release cycle to uncover bottlenecks reveal opportunities for improvement and model your largest sources of compromised value. Use these insights to drive continuous improvements, both within your processes and the quality of releases.

Intelligence layer — Go beyond human capabilities using advanced AI/ML engines

Every work activity and DevOps cycle event generates data. Sifting through all of this data in order to glean key insights would be incredibly time consuming for human beings — and impossible at the scale needed to truly drive data-based decisions.

Enter Digital.ai’s Intelligence Layer. It delivers advanced analytics capable of automating insights that spur continuous improvements.

Some of the intelligence layer’s most critical solutions include:

• Digital.ai Flow Acceleration — Compile release process data to model which factors tend to lead to late software delivery. Uncover bottlenecks and velocity-killing dependencies across teams. Pinpoint the non-value-add activities that tend to eat up resources, while standardizing and streamlining all release processes.
• Digital.ai Quality Improvement — Model factors that contribute to success in top-performing value streams to emulate that success and drive consistent quality improvements across the entire enterprise portfolio.
• Digital.ai Change Risk Prediction — Model factors that contribute to change failures, release rollbacks, and major escaped defects. Leverage these models to score release risks, uncovering the root causes of change failures, enhancing automation for change approvals, and accelerating change velocity overall.
• Digital.ai Service Management Process Optimization — Become proactive rather than reactive when it comes to major incident management, allowing operations teams to reduce incident levels, improve uptime, and lower service delivery costs.

These engines all provide the means to generate continuous process and service delivery improvements while predicting and preventing major contributors to release failures. Using data and AI/ML modeling, teams can find and fix issues across the entire value stream. 

Highly visible KPIs and metrics ensure that teams can obtain a single source of truth and a view into key factors affecting release velocity as well as quality. Find and fix your most pernicious issues across value streams, while aligning teams behind unified goals and best practices, allowing IT leaders to seek specific outcomes with pinpoint acuity.

Another significant benefit to teams is that they can intelligently automate security, compliance, and governance (SCaG). Increase adherence to minimum standards, while making SCaG assurance more efficient. AI/ML modeling also reveals the sources of SCaG compromises, enabling process improvements while giving IT leaders the data they need to make confident decisions.

Shared services layer — Align all of your departments under one vision of improved value creation

Aggregate all data from across the enterprise in order to view it from the lenses of particular value streams. Source data from your own applications and activities, combining it into one Unified System of Record that can provide key insights.

Digital.ai’s Shared Services Layer creates a unified platform for all shared services, both internal and vendor-provided. This capability allows enterprises to improve integrations and obtain better visibility, end-to-end across all value streams.

Key benefits to Digital.ai’s digital transformation platform for shared services include:

• A unified solution for shared services management and optimization. Pre-built data adaptors and tool integrations are available for hundreds of popular, best-of-breed solutions used throughout multiple industries. Each can be connected to form a single platform, enabling greater automation and improved transparency across all shared services.
• Accelerate productivity, and align teams. Visualize shared services’ contributions to the value stream, informing process and value delivery improvements to become leaner and focus on the factors that contribute the most to value creation.
• Simplify platform services management and deployment. Platform services make Digital.ai solutions easy to deploy and manage, including common user and license management.

Three layers fold together to form one all-encompassing VSM solution

Individual Digital.ai products offer powerful capabilities on their own, with available integrations, metrics monitoring, and analytics. However, when all of our best-of-breed solutions are combined, your organization forms an engine that drives you towards improved development, operations, security, and shared services performance

• Orchestration forms the backbone of value delivery activities
• Intelligence leverages the data you generate to automate discovery and inform continuous improvements
• The Shared Services platform unites teams across the organization into one view and under one vision, ensuring that all activities are geared towards optimal value creation

The combined capabilities of these layers demonstrate why value stream management is destined to become the next generation of must-have organizational practice frameworks —  driven further by cutting-edge AI/ML analytics capabilities that allow for greater automation and improved value generation.

To get a better look at the nature of VSM and how all the peices fit together download our VSM eBook now.