Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Digital Innovation Platform?

As changing customer landscapes and evolving markets drive demand for mobility, organizations are quickly realizing that the traditional approach of rebuilding legacy applications into mobile applications represents a lateral move that delivers some benefits, but not significant value. A digital innovation platform, however, can establish new business channels with customers, employees, and partners — not only to create efficiencies, but also to uncover new business opportunities.

Leaders today increasingly recognize the power of SAP solutions to help them deliver digital innovation platforms, with a new generation of solutions, such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Fiori, and SAP HANA Cloud Platform, serving as critical components. But as leaders start putting together all the pieces, they need to keep in mind six key elements. 

1. Design Thinking

Starting with the end user in mind, rather than the technology, can help you rethink processes in a meaningful way so you can simplify them, deliver new efficiencies, and unlock new value. Ask yourself: Does the checkout process work for the customer? Is it really that useful to have five levels of invoice approvals? Can user experience tools help you creatively redesign an optimized business process and efficient user interface?

2. Innovation

With a new set of digital tools and a design-thinking process at your disposal, what do you want to do that you’re not doing today? What could you do to generate new markets and opportunities? For example, could you track the enterprise user’s buying patterns and purchasing history to reduce the need for approvals? Or could you track customer shopping cart information to make product recommendations and find upsell opportunities? Could you package recurring services along with the products sold?

3. Mobile Mindset

Consider creating a responsive design that can adapt to the user’s device of choice. Doing so requires you to understand the user’s day-in-the-life activities and pain points — and to design a solution that caters to user wants and needs.

4. Cloud Value

With software-as-a-service (SaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, you can get to market faster and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). You can also tightly integrate activities with your supply chain and sales partners. But don’t stop there: Consider integrating third-party Internet of Things (IoT) providers to complement your offerings. Possibilities include integrating data from fitness trackers into wellness and insurance products, or leveraging data from electric smart meters to cross-sell new energy products.

5. Big Data Power

Getting nuggets of information to the user’s device involves boiling down big data to make it useful and actionable. A big data platform that includes analytical algorithms, therefore, is an essential element of the digital value stream for supporting web services for mobile apps.

6. Inside-Out Security

Greater mobile engagement means more security concerns. Follow secure platform development practices at every tier of the application stack — from robust authentication, authorization, and encryption to data privacy controls and management tools for devices and the app life cycle.

To understand how to make most of the digital platform to power your innovation potential, a conversation with Deloitte Consulting, an SAP global services partner, can serve as a great first step. Contact us via email at SAP@Deloitte.com to get the conversation started or visit us at www.deloitte.com/SAP.