The Hard Truth about Digital Transformation

Proactive transformation is a mammoth effort; it strains so many aspects of a city or society – or a company.

Paula Ziehr Paula Ziehr

If you’ve seen our video snippet inviting you to the Alfabet presentation at Software AG’s Release Update Virtual Conference, you’ve seen my colleagues, Uli and Ali, standing in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in a hubbub of traffic moving from east-to-west and west-to-east. Thirty years ago there was a 10-foot concrete wall just behind where they are standing, with only small groups of tourists climbing onto the observation platform to get a peek into life under Communism.

How things have changed in Berlin– and will surely continue to change. As an American expat living almost 40 years in this city, I’ve witnessed the huge transformation of a city, that was once a gilded island of history, culture, simple city planning and stable societal elements, turn into a metropolis of people coming from all ends of the globe (in particular young entrepreneurs who’ve endowed the city with “coolness”), construction sites every few kilometers and a budget problem that prompted a previous mayor to give hope to the situation by describing our beleaguered and beloved city as “poor but sexy.”

Transformation is hard. And it costs money – a lot (just now – 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – is the solidarity tax being repealed). So you need to do it smartly. This is Alfabet’s strength. Software AG’s platform for enterprise architectureIT planning and portfolio management, Alfabet is an essential platform supporting our customers’ transformations into digital enterprises. By integrating all the relevant aspects of change to understand conflicts and synergies, it ensures you have the information at hand to make smart decisions.

Alfabet releases 10.4 and 10.5 leverage new technologies for transformation and innovation. For business and IT users’ ease-of-use, the “Alfabot” conversational user interface finds desired architecture objects, diagrams and reports even with unclear requests. It offers a new FeedbackBot to survey users on the fly to improve user experience.

For strong analytics capabilities, AI-enabled portfolio diagnostics – first introduced in release 10.4 – will let users refine analyses to include more relevant aspects about the objects being examined. To help advance agile practices and cloud portfolio management, release 10.5 introduces a “demand-to-investment” Kanban board to embed demands tighter into project decisions and manage the change from demand to investment seamlessly.

Gartner clients can decide on relevant technologies for their digital transformation by importing Gartner Hype Cycle and feeding it into their technology roadmap. And integration with Microsoft Azure lets customers effectively plan and manage cloud deployment for greater agility and lower costs.

At our virtual conference we’ll also be introducing our new Alfabet FastLane product that helps companies just beginning to establish a portfolio management practice. It allows them to get up to speed quickly with pre-configured reports and KPIs, to get answers to the most critical questions fast.