Is Your Enterprise Agile Enough for GenAI Success?

[Fred Champlain]

Organizations have been scrambling over the past ~20 months since the release of OpenAI ChatGPT to understand GenAI technology, kicking off a wave of investment in innovation experiments and pilots in an urgent frenzy to find ways to create competitive value with it.

As a result, many early adopter companies now have a clearer understanding of where GenAI can be leveraged to enhance their products and services, offering their customers and employees enhanced experiences and workflow efficiencies that offer increased productivity of workers and systems.

Organizations are now in the next phase of their GenAI journeys – which may prove to be much harder: Scaling up their successes from their winning experiments and pilots and deploying them into production.  The leap from innovation to production has historically proven to be surprisingly risky, expensive, and has vexed many technology leaders.  Leveraging an AI platform can provide a fast lane to GenAI success.

Fortunately, many organizations have spent the past few decades learning how to transform by growing their competencies in scaling lean and agile practices, providing them with a foundation of agile readiness to now exploit GenAI for further competitive advantage.  Their persistence and investments in agile transformations has prepared them for the future non-linear market accelerations and resulting disruptions that GenAI promises to bring.

I’ve previously written about aligning investments in GenAI with strategic objectives to drive business value (see Strategic AI: Business Benefits First), a core aspect of scaling. Let’s take a further look at leading lean and agile practices and competencies needed for GenAI success.

Frameworks such as a SAFe, Disciplined Agile, LeSS, Kanban Method, Flow Framework, and FaST collectively provide a rich body of knowledge for scaling GenAI:

Lean Portfolio Management – provides a dynamic governance structure for GenAI investments based on business cases aligned to strategic initiatives, providing for allocation of resources and capacity to the most promising GenAI opportunities.  By leveraging a continuous planning process and managing flow of value, enterprises can gain an integrated view of their GenAI investments and risks, enabling predictable scaling of GenAI innovations.

Agile Architecture– adopting architecture design and management practices that emphasize set-based and emergent design approaches to architecture, combined with using the cloud technologies that enable componentized and distributed architectures.  Model based design and engineering provide the digital twinning needed to leverage rapid advances in GenAI and actively managing resulting technical debt.

Technical Agility – several technical competencies are needed for successfully implementing GenAI solutions including DevSecOps, Quality Management, Security, Site Reliability Engineering together enable the ability to rapidly implement GenAI that scale to production.

Agile Product Management – applying a product-centric approach is essential to competing with GenAI and is no longer and option.  Establishing competency with lean startup and hypothesis based decision making for GenAI product investments is key to making the faster decisions demanded by the speed impact that GenAI is bringing to markets.

Design Thinking – is at the core of ensuring customer-centric GenAI solutions, identifying the pains and gains of gains that lead to improved customer journeys and identifying new value stream opportunities that enable sustained competitive advantage and business agility.

The ServiceNow Now platform is the AI Platform for Business Transformation, powered by Now Assist GenAI and out-of-the-box GenAI experiences, accelerating the benefits of GenAI for enterprises globally.  ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Collaborative Work Management (CWM) provide the capabilities and functionality to support and govern the essential lean and agile practices and competencies for GenAI success.  See https://www.servicenow.com/now-platform/generative-ai.html for details on how your company can succeed with GenAI.