The Art of Platform Thinking | 平台思维的艺术

作者: Amit Kaul (Vice President, Emerging Technology) & Ryan Murray (Director, Digital Platform Strategy)

标签: #Technology Strategy, #Innovation, #Strategy

The digitally-savvy customer has highly sophisticated - and ever-evolving - expectations for engagement and brand experience at every touchpoint. Delivering on and keeping up with these expectations requires an innovation-driven culture with customer value at its center. We’ve seen a common theme across our most successful client engagements: innovation and speed to market at scale requires more than just intense customer-centricity, adoption of agile practices and technology acumen. For almost any organization with significant brand value and historical technology investments, there will be friction from years of built-up technical and architectural debt. Unlocking core assets and business capabilities to enable customer-facing innovation requires effort and investment.

精通数字化的客户对每一种触点技术的品牌体验与互动都有着高度复杂的、不断变化的期望，实现和保持这些期望，需要以客户价值为中心的创新驱动文化。我们在最成功的客户合作案例当中看到了一个共同的主题：即大规模的创新和快速推向市场需要的不仅仅是以客户为中心、采取敏捷实践和保持技术敏锐度。对于几乎任何最具品牌价值和对技术做过投资的组织来说，多年积累的技术和架构债务都会带来摩擦（friction）。解锁核心资产与业务价值，任重而道远，只有持续不断付出努力和投资，才能够实现面向客户的创新。

All organizations have an innate innovation capability

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所有组织的创新能力与生俱来。

But yours may be so knotted up with organizational complexity and technology delivery friction that it’s less painful to stick to business as usual. How do you know? If progress becomes mired in departmental finger pointing, or your best people are busy just keeping things up and running, innovation is suffering. This wasted energy costs time and competitive advantage, it creates frustrating experiences for your customers, and ultimately drives tech talent out the door.

但是，企业可能会由于组织复杂度和技术交付相冲突而陷入困境，从而无法像往常一样专心于本职工作。有趣的问题？当事态陷入部门间相互指责的泥潭，或者企业的中流砥柱却只是忙于维持事情运转的时候，创新就会因此受挫。所浪费的资源将会消耗时间和竞争优势，并给你的用户造成糟糕的体验，并最终将技术人才扫地出门。

Platform thinking can help untangle those knots and free your organization up to be more innovative without adding additional debt such as inventory, real estate, divisions, and staff.

平台思维能够帮助企业走出困境，并释放企业组织的创新能力，而不用增添额外债务，比如库存积压、财产损失、部门分歧和人员流失等。

Here’s how it works:

For your organization to make the most out of technology investments, you need a comprehensive strategy that puts your essential business priorities at the heart of your approach to foundational technologies. Platform thinking then becomes the touchstone for making key technology decisions that will simplify your ecosystem, stimulate innovation, and accelerate delivery.

以下是平台思维的工作原理：

要让企业合理充分地运用技术投资，企业就需要一个全面的战略，将至关重要的业务核心放在打造基础技术的方法上，平台思维就会变成制定核心技术决策的试金石，从而简化企业生态系统，刺激创新，并且加速交付。

At ThoughtWorks, we’ve spent the past few years building and enhancing platforms that enable our enterprise clients to utilize the assets they already possess to support their forward-looking business objectives. We’ve collaborated with our clients to address key questions, such as:

• How do I reduce friction in our existing software development processes, reduce architectural debt, and achieve the accelerated delivery I need to be competitive?
• Is an off-the-shelf solution the right approach, or should we develop a custom solution in-house? Or is the answer somewhere in between?
• How do I unlock the assets and infrastructure we already possess to stay ahead of potential competitors and market disruption?
• How does our technology platform support a culture of innovation across the entire business?

在 ThoughtWorks，我们花费数年经验打造与巩固企业平台，帮助我们的客户利用现有资产实现其极具远见的商业抱负。我们协同客户定位核心问题，比如：

• 如何减少已有软件开发流程的摩擦、减少技术架构债务、提升市场竞争的交付速度？
• 是否存在现成有效的方法实践，或是提供企业定制化的内部解决方案？或是答案位于两者之间？
• 如何充分利用企业已经具备的资产与基础设施，以保持相较于潜在对手或市场搅局者的竞争优势？
• 企业技术平台该如何支撑贯穿业务始终的全面创新文化？

By working in the trenches with partners facing real-world challenges, we have defined a holistic approach to technology that helps organizations meet and often exceed the expectations of today’s digitally savvy customer. Our platform-focused approach distills a client’s business objectives, current state architecture, and technology capability to provide a set of actions to maximize innovation and increase speed to market. We call it a Digital Platform Strategy.

通过与合作伙伴并肩作战面对现实挑战，ThoughtWorks 打造了一整套解决方案，能够帮助企业组织达到甚至常常超越当今数字化知识丰富的客户所期望的效果。ThoughtWorks 以平台为重心的解决方案可以用于提炼企业业务目标、现有架构形态与技术能力，以提供一系列具体行动，充分发挥创新能力与加快推向市场速度。我们称之为数字平台战略。

The Digital Platform Strategy is a ThoughtWorks offering that distils our global experience and learnings across domains and clients in order to unlock enterprise assets to facilitate innovation. Our knowledge framework and accelerators direct our clients to define and maximize the value of their core business capabilities and data assets through lean, iterative development of their foundational technology platform. Our wealth of experience gathered across a range of clients and industries, enables us to significantly accelerate and de-risk customer’s efforts. We’ve fallen into the traps and potholes and found the escape hatches so you don’t have to.

数字平台战略是 ThoughtWorks 所打造的一款产品，浓缩无数专业领域和企业客户的全球性经验与成果，帮助企业解锁核心资产以加速创新变革。我们所提供的理论框架与高效执行力，引导我们的客户定义并实现核心业务能力和数据资产的价值最大化，通过精益、迭代开发企业基础技术平台。我们所积累的丰富经验在无数企业客户与专业领域都卓有成效，使得我们能够显著促进企业创新进程并化解客户风险。我们曾经掉过坑、踩过无数陷阱并成功找到了逃生舱口（出路），而您不必再重蹈覆辙。

Platform Thinking at the Core | 平台思维的核心

Platform thinking works by:

• Removing friction from delivery teams by focusing on high quality, self-service access to foundational technology.
• Creating an ecosystem of technology and business capabilities. Using domain-driven principles, carefully-factored business capability interfaces (APIs) are critical components of an effective, modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.
• Explicitly investing in a foundation for experimentation which ensures every delivery team has access to tools to make testing new ideas and validating learnings easy.

平台思维得益于以下几点：

• 通过专注高质量、面向基础技术的自服务来消除交付团队的摩擦（冲突）
• 打造技术与业务能力的生态系统。能够利用领域驱动原则、精准业务分析的能力接口（APIs），会是一个卓有成效、现代化的面向服务架构（SOA）重要组件。
• 明确投资于试验性（创新实验）基础设施，确保每个交付团队都能使用相关工具，轻松测试新想法、验证经验收获。

This isn’t a “build it and they will come” approach to platform building. The Digital Platform Strategy engages your business and technology stakeholders to prioritize building the most valuable capabilities in a lean, incremental manner.

这不是一个「一蹴而就」的平台建设方法。数字平台战略使得企业的业务和技术利益相关者以精益、渐进的方式优先打造最具价值的能力。

The Pillars of the Digital Platform Strategy | 数字平台战略的（五大）支柱

Our Digital Platform Strategy framework is a blueprint for platform building that is comprised of five essential pillars (focus areas). Breaking down the complexity of an enterprise platform provides targeted focus on delivering business value through classes of foundational technology. To remove friction and build ecosystems, we focus on the key areas of delivery:

• Delivery Infrastructure
• Architecture and API Remediation
• Self Service Data
• Experiment Infrastructure and Telemetry
• Customer Touchpoint Technology

我们的数字平台战略框架是由五个主要支柱（重点领域）所组成的平台建设蓝图。打破企业平台复杂度，通过基础技术能力建设提供有针对性的商业价值交付。为了消除技术摩擦与打造生态系统，我们专注于交付的关键领域（核心部分）：

• 交付基础设施
• API 和架构治理
• 数据自服务
• 创新实验基础设施和监控体系
• 客户触点技术

Delivery Infrastructure: We take a holistic approach to infrastructure, build and release support, and observability. Elastic infrastructure and related tooling, coupled with simplified build, deployment, and monitoring enables engineers to deliver rapidly and safely, with appropriate controls and audit support. This pillar directly addresses delivery friction, reducing your time to market for new products and services.

交付基础设施：我们采取全方位的方式来打造基础设施、构建与发布支持、以及监控系统。弹性基础设施和相关工具再加上精简化的构建、部署和监控，使工程师能够在快速、安全地进行交付的同时，得以适当控制与审计支持。这个支柱将直接解决交付摩擦的问题，减少新产品和服务推向市场的时间。

Architecture and API Remediation: Engaging customer experiences that evolve to meet the constantly changing market require maximizing the value of existing organizational assets and business capabilities. Our approach to API and architecture includes methods for building net-new capabilities using modern service-oriented (SOA) and event-driven (EDA) approaches, as well as practices for remediating legacy systems so they effectively expose key existing assets to developers. A platform of well-factored, self-service APIs that hide the process, technical, and operational complexity of the underlying capability allows teams to move quickly to experiment with and production-alize new customer-facing solutions. We typically start by focusing internally to optimizing your own delivery capability, and can extend the approach to public API strategies to expand the ecosystem to your customers and partners.

API 和架构治理：打造响应市场不断变化的用户体验，需要最大化现有组织资产与业务能力的价值。我们对 API 和架构治理的途径包括使用现代化面向服务（SOA）和事件驱动（EDA）的方式打造网络新功能的方法，也包括治理遗留系统的具体实践，从而有效地将关键的现有资产提供给开发者使用。 一个完美的自助 APIs 平台，隐藏了底层功能的流程、技术和操作复杂度，使团队能够快速试验并为生产实现提供新的面向客户方案。通常我们会从内部开始着手优化企业的交付能力，并且能够扩展公共 API 战略的解决方案，将生态系统扩展到客户与合作伙伴。

Self-Service Data: Today’s businesses rely on real-time analytics to power decisions. Data and application architecture are increasingly merging as we create more real-time, data-enabled business capabilities, while supporting advanced data science-driven analytics. Application developers need to focus on contributing to the organizational data stream and selectively tapping into it. Your data platform is therefore becoming ubiquitous. It needs to reduce friction by streamlining the use, management, and operations of complex data technologies like Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. It should also expose a self-service ecosystem of curated data assets, addressing data strategy issues such as data lake design, data ownership, and authorization issues.

数据自服务：现今的商业依赖于实时分析来做出强有力的决策（在当今的商业世界里，企业依赖于实时分析来做出强有力的决策）。数据和应用程序架构正由于越来越多实时的、数据支持的业务能力而融合在一起，与此同时也在支撑着进一步的数据科学驱动的分析。应用程序开发者需要专注致力于企业数据流和有选择性地挖掘数据。因此，企业数据平台将变得无处不在。这需要通过简化 Kafka、Hadoop 或 Spark 等复杂数据技术的使用、管理和操作来减少摩擦（friction）。与此同时还应该暴露出一个用于管理数据资产的自服务生态系统，解决诸如数据湖设计、数据所有权和授权问题等数据战略问题。

Experiment Infrastructure and Telemetry: Innovation lives and dies by the ability to learn quickly through purposeful, measured experimentation. Using canary release processes, toggle architecture, and meaningful instrumentation, your experiment infrastructure helps you to make the right decisions about your experiments and investments.

创新实验基础设施和监控体系：创新的存亡与否取决于通过有针对性、有分寸的试验而快速学习的能力。使用金丝雀发布流程、功能切换开关（toggle）架构和有意义的监控系统，创新实验基础设施能够帮助企业对实验与投资制定正确决策。

Customer Touchpoint Technology: Knowledge of your customer is the foundation of delivering value. Together, a consistent content strategy, a single view of the customer, and transparent telemetry provide unprecedented customer insight that enables personalized product offerings. The benefit? New, targeted value streams that can be delivered quickly across multiple channels.

用户触点技术：了解客户是交付价值的基础。一致的内容战略、单一用户视野和透明的监控体系可以共同提供前所未有的客户洞察力，实现个性化的产品交付。好处就是能够在多重渠道快速投放新的有针对性的价值流。

The Digital Platform Strategy Process at a Glance | 数字平台战略流程一览

A Digital Platform Strategy engagement begins with a discovery to understand your customer’s business priorities, organizational complexity, and technical maturity. We then merge that with our patterns, practices, and principles of enterprise platform building. This culminates in a prioritized, lean technology strategy and platform roadmap tailored to your business needs.

数字平台战略始于探索，以理解客户的业务优先级、组织复杂性或是技术成熟度。然后，我们再将其与我们的企业平台构建的模式、实践和原则相结合。这将会是为企业业务需求而量身定制优先级的精益技术战略和平台路线图。

Moving into the execution phase, the partnership of strategy and delivery moves into high gear. We begin with the highest priority platform capabilities to vet strategy against reality. At this stage, we test our assumptions about organizational delivery capabilities, degree of technical debt, and remediation complexity. This allows us to deliver early platform value that underpins your key business priorities. As the engagement continues, insights from execution are fed back into continuous strategy development and review to inform the path of execution. This feedback loop fine-tunes the short- and medium-term tactical moves, while platform thinking maintains the strategic vision of meeting your business objectives.

进入到执行阶段，我们的战略与交付合作关系将会全力以赴，马力全开。我们从最高优先级的平台能力建设开始着手，根据具体事实重新审视具体策略。在此阶段，我们根据企业交付能力、技术债务程度和治理复杂度的具体情况，逐个测试验证我们的假设。这使我们能够较早地交付平台价值，以巩固企业关键业务优先级的基础。随着合作的持续进行，来自于具体实施的洞见将会被反馈到持续的战略制定与回顾中去，以制定改善新的执行路径。这种反馈环可以对中短期的战术实施进行微调，与此同时平台思维则继续维持企业商业目标所需的战略视野。

So Where Do You Begin? | 所以，从何开始着手？

Digitally-savvy customers want to feel delighted and inspired; they expect your brand to add value to their lives. They want to feel the passion that you feel for your brand and to be part of your next great solution. Building out a scalable technology strategy that manages complexity will enable rapid development, stimulate innovation, and create new opportunity for growth. An optimized foundational technology platform is essential to being able to meet your customer’s expectations and increase their engagement with your brand.

数字化知识丰富的客户都期望着愉悦的用户体验、或是从中备受鼓舞；他们期待企业品牌能够为其生活添资增彩。他们期望感受到企业对于品牌的热忱，并且想成为企业下一代卓越解决方案中的一员。建立可管理复杂度的、可伸缩的技术战略，将会使得快速开发、激励创新和创造增长新机遇成为可能。优化的基础技术平台，对满足客户期望并增强用户品牌粘性至关重要。

For more information on how to harness the creative horsepower that your enterprise already possesses, check out ThoughtWorks’ Digital Platform Strategy.

有关如何运用企业资产发挥创新性能力的更多信息，请查看 ThoughtWorks 的数字平台战略（Digital Platform Strategy）。