Driving Value Through Visibility

1. Summary

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to release it”
–Michelangelo

Even in these interesting times, organizations are looking to deliver on their digital transformation goals and unlock new sources of benefit for their businesses. Software is uniquely placed to bring value to an organization, responding to the needs of internal and external customers, creating new products, defining new categories, and transforming internal cultures.

As we cover in our paper on Value Stream Management, shared goals, language, and processes form a gateway to creating successful software. The key to unlocking value, to removing bottlenecks and driving efficiency, is visibility on activities and progress, based on a real-time view across the tools currently in place: only with such visibility can improvements be made, tested, and built upon.

But how can an organization deliver such visibility, in what will be a dynamic, complex, and frequently changing environment? In this paper, aimed at CIOs and CTOs, Senior VPs, VPs, and Directors of Information Technology, software delivery, and enterprise architecture, we consider:

• How the aspiration to innovate and transform through software can be stymied through lack of visibility, making it feel like the organization is constantly behind the curve
• How to enable a response, in terms of tools that consider the software pipeline from end to end, and principles learned from practitioners as they look to deliver higher levels of visibility
• Consequences, both short-term and over time, as the organization creates a platform that links measurable innovation activity with business-facing value metrics

In summary, the paper shows how visibility best practices and tools can move software-based innovation onto the front foot, and fit for the future.