To enable value, “we need to invest in platforms that we recognize are valuable. Then we can quickly deliver and scale. Once you have a platform, you have the clarity of value.”
These are the words of Anupam Khare, the CIO of Oshkosh Corporation, a Wisconsin-based industrial technology that won Forrester’s inaugural Technology Strategy Impact (TSI) Award for North America. Oshkosh is planning to use its future fit platforms to grow from an $8 billion company to a $10 to $11 billion company by 2025 — and you can read about its full strategy in this case study. But that’s just one company: What else are organizations doing with strategic platforms to bring the most value to their companies and their customers?
To answer that question, we identified the platform best practices found in the other submissions to the inaugural TSI Awards. We added the submitting companies’ real-world examples to help you understand the full future fit platform strategy and see how it could support your organization. Here are three best practices to guide your strategy:
- Deliberately connect experience and operations. The top-performing organizations take a connected, ecosystem approach to platforms and are fully integrated in the areas with the best returns. They develop a working architecture for connecting multichannel experiences to myriad back-end systems and operations. They make deliberate strategic choices on where to use industry solutions, custom developed software, or third-party add-ons.
- Find the right mix of proprietary and standard platform elements. The best organizations build platform strategies with a clear understanding of the intended business outcomes. They then acknowledge platform capability, connectivity, and control tradeoffs before moving fluently across the spectrum of standardization for scale and customization for differentiation. This allows organizations to leverage standards for faster time to value and reduce technical debt by focusing custom efforts on truly differentiating areas.
- Leverage composability and AI for real business results. The leading organizations pursue modern capabilities in their platform approach, making business processes and workforce enablement more efficient. They add strategic AI capabilities to their overall platform strategy, as well as adopting AIOps principles and composable architectures to yield maximum benefits.
Our new report, What Makes A Future Fit Platform Strategy?, provides an in-depth exploration of these best practices, as well as real-world examples. Learn what you need to do to build a future fit technology strategy that fuels growth, fosters innovation, and empowers your organization to thrive in the face of change.
And if you think you’ve already built one, now is the time to submit an entry to Forrester’s 2023 Technology Strategy Impact Awards before the deadline of Monday, June 19, 2023. To view complete award nomination criteria and submit an entry, visit here (NA), here (EMEA), or here (APAC). We’re looking forward to seeing your future fit platform submissions!
