Underrated Digital Methodology | IBM Garage Method

I mentioned IBM's digital innovation methodology in my article "The Difference between "Digital Innovation" and "Digital Transformation" three years ago.“IBM Garage Methodology”, three years have passed, and this methodology has obviously not been widely disseminated in the field of domestic digital transformation. I feel that as a systematic and practical method for enterprises to carry out digital innovation and create digital products, it has been seriously underestimated in China's digital transformation community.

Some friends do not understand why it is called the "garage" method - almost every household in the United States has a garage, and some people like to tinker with various repair tools in the garage. Many innovative inventions are made in garages. For example, Silicon Valley companies such as HP and Apple were started in garages. See "The Inheritance of the Garage Law", so "garage" is synonymous with technological innovation.

Just like in the ERP era, SAP ERP implementation produced the "ASAP methodology", which almost established the implementation methodology standard for large enterprise software. The IBM Garage methodology is an end-to-end approach from digitally driven overall transformation of organizational culture to cloud-based digital product creation. It is characterized by:

• Based on user experience, it is an enterprise-level design thinking method

• Reveals how to closely connect distributed or centralized digital product teams

• take advantage of DEVOPS tools/techniques and cloud platforms for continuous delivery

• Empower site reliability engineering ( SRE )

• Iterate quickly and deliver business value

• Improve digital talent and organizational culture

• Digital innovation at the enterprise level (rather than at the group or product level)

Over the years that the term "digital transformation" has been coined, I have rarely seen global technology companies propose such a complete and open-to-user methodology system. Although some major international cloud companies have similar methodologies, they are not systematic and user-open enough. The digital product methodologies of some technology consulting companies appear to be too technical.

Several major domestic cloud companies lack such a complete methodology system, and they have not packaged their own cloud services and DEVOPS tools and methodology systems. China’s digital transformation slogan is loud and clear, and there are many concepts of generalization and commercialization. However, in terms of methodological summary of digital practical operation,Innovation processes, technology tools, organizational change and ways of workingThe attention on the website is not enough! We have to admit that in the IT industry, there is still a big gap between China's information technology application methodology and its foreign counterparts!

The core of digital innovation is to create "digital products". Compared with traditional development information systems, whether it is the working form of the product development organization, the development process, the technical tools used (key technologies include: cloud computing, hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, containers, container management platforms, DevOps tools, etc.), or the organizational changes of enterprises developing digital products (multidisciplinary collaboration of designers, architects, engineers, data scientists, business strategists, product managers, etc.) expertise) and organizational culture (key organizational cultural traits include agile organization, innovation culture, etc.) are significantly different.

The IBM Garage method is an integration of design thinking, agile development and Devops technology. It includes the digital product development process and related best practices:

• Discover: explore business opportunities and determine product development direction

• show ( envision ): Minimum available product ( MVP ) design

• develop( develop ) Technology development architecture, code, testing, and deployment

• Wisdom ( reason ): Big data and artificial intelligence applications

• Operations ( operate ): Highly available digital product operations

• learn ( learn ): User experience feedback and continuous product improvement

• Culture ( culture ): Agile culture and agile organization operations

The methodology also recommends a range of IBM-owned and third-party digital tools to support these processes and practices. Taking the above "culture" as an example, we recommend digital tools commonly used by agile organizations: code management Github, collaboration tool Slack, whiteboard tool Mural, Kanban tool Trello, storage platform Box, and conference call platform Webex, etc.:

Although this methodology was invented by IBM, it can be used as a universal digital innovation method. Recommended tools can be replaced by tools that users are accustomed to using, such as:

The IBM Garage methodology was produced simultaneously with IBM Cloud business (IBM Cloud) around 2016. However, IBM's public cloud business had an ill-fated launch in China. This may be an important reason why this methodology has not been popularized in China. It is a pity that although this methodology has been launched in the United States for several years, the IBM Chinese official website still does not have a complete Chinese translation of the methodology document, and the Chinese explanation of "garage innovation" on the Chinese website is also very different from the original meaning.

Due to the versatility of this methodology, I very much hope to see Chinese cloud vendors package a similar methodology system to guide China's digital innovation.

Finally, please note that this article is not an official explanation of the IBM Garage methodology, but only the author’s personal research experience; for the original text, please visit the website: https://www.ibm.com/garage/method

Machine-translated from the Chinese original 被低估了的数字化方法论 ｜ IBM车库方法 (published 2022-03-29). WeChat original ↗