Organizations are facing multiple challenges that increase their risk of extinction and make it hard for them to maximize business value. Enterprises face challenges related to rapid advancement in technology, stiff competition, uncertainty, regulation, and compliance, as well as the change in market conditions and customer needs. The response to opportunities and challenges require the organization to leverage the benefits of technology and increase their agility and innovation rate. In essence, the effective response to challenges and opportunities requires the organization to have the right technology and tools, a culture that cultivates innovation, an entrepreneurial mindset, adaptive business processes, and responsive business models and strategies. 

Advancement in technology has created many benefits and challenges and redefines the rules for the success of an enterprise. The urgency for digital transformation that maximizes end-users and business value is necessary to succeed. It’s do-or-die, you either embrace technology and use it to maximize value, or you risk becoming extinct.  Technology influence innovation, agility, productivity, quality of products and processes, and enhance decision making. The value-based is the holistic approach that focuses on maximizing end-users and business value. This approach will enable the enterprise to embrace agility, the ability to build quality solutions, as well as continuous improvement and innovation.

 “Guys, if we don’t become the best technology company in the world, we’re doomed, we’re dead.” And when I talked about digital industrial, I’d say, “There’s no Plan B. There’s no other way to get there. Who’s coming with me? What’s in your way? What do we need to be doing differently?”
                                                                            --Jeffrey Immelt, How I Remade GE, HBR 2017

The right technology implementations that capitalize on the organization's unique strength and maximize end-user and business value will lead to a competitive advantage. In other words, it is best to do the right things the right way than pay a hefty price associated with implementing unfit solutions with bugs, poor performance, or poor usability. Or hefty price on solutions that are vulnerable to security attack or are rigid, fragile, and cost a lot of money to maintain or change technology and extend functionality.

The 2016 research done by Tricentis for 548 software failures that were reported on English news articles around the world reveals:

• The total cost of failure was 1.1 trillion USD
• The total number of companies affected was 363, including 148 from public sector
• Equivalent to 4.4 billion people were affected if you assume that each person was affected once.

Figure 1: Software failures in 2016

1. The importance of principles-based culture, processes and systems

The principles of lean, agile, and design thinking are the heart and soul of a value-based approach. These principles are the foundation for creating efficient and effective organization processes, the right technology implementation, culture, and support system. Principles will aid the enterprise to create favorable conditions to gain a competitive advantage through technology, agility, continuous innovation, waste reduction, and quality products and processes. The value-based approach requires an understanding of the principles behind effective process, culture, systems, and strategies. The organization needs to understand the principles that will aid it to achieve the end goal.  

As an engineer, I acknowledge the value of understanding relevant principles and their application to solving problems. In engineering, we usually focus on understanding the problem: breaking it into smaller problems, researching, as well as designing based on principles, patterns, constraints, and assumptions. Then testing, evaluating the result, and adjust the design or explore an alternative solution based on feedback. 

The approach to engineering design has produced innovative processes, products, and systems consistently despite changes in technology, regulation, customer needs, and market conditions. I have also realized that the empathic engineering design approach is similar to the methodology derived from design thinking principles. And the combination of design thinking, agile, and lean principles can help the enterprise to gain a competitive advantage. The proper application of Lean, Agile, and design thinking principles will lead to an increase in innovation rate, reduction in waste, agility, and quality solution.  

To recognize the importance of understanding the principles behind effective culture and processes, you have to look at the failure and success lessons from the NUMMI plant. New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated (NUMMI) plant in Fremont, California was a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors (GM) formed in 1984 that allowed Toyota to start producing cars in the USA. In response to U.S Congress restrictions on imported cars, Toyota needed to have a plant in the USA right away in order to learn how to create favorable conditions to support Toyota Production System (TPS) core-values in the USA. GM gave Toyota a plant at Fremont in exchange for the opportunity to learn about technology for making quality small cars.

Before Toyota began production at NUMMI, they first had to figure out how to create alignment between the behavior of former GM employees and TPS principles. Then they provided employees with training, tools, and a support system to reinforce their behavior. By doing so, they were able to influence the culture that supports TPS. As a result, the same group that had low productivity and was ranked in 1982 as the worst workforce for producing poor-quality cars under GM leadership became one of the best in the USA in making high-quality cars under Toyota leadership by 1985. 

On the contrary, it took GM close to 15 years to realize the value of TPS, and after that, more than ten years to be able to implement it. GM's first attempt to make its plants look like a NUMMI plant was more like a Band-Aid solution. The underlying systemic problems within GM created a challenging environment for transformation. The transformation required GM to address the issues related to defensive bureaucracy and the nature of the relationship they had with UAW (United Automobile Worker) and suppliers. They failed to understand that Toyota's plant layout requires a culture that values quality and waste reduction and the system to support it. GM at the time valued quantity over quality to support its goal to grow fast. Hence, GM rewarded managers based on the number of cars produced at their plants. Their attitude was quantity first, inspect and fix the defects later. The problem is the propagation of defects may worsen it to an extent where it is hard and expensive to fix it.

Toyota, on the other hand, valued building quality products and waste reduction. They rewarded employees with great ideas for improvement. Toyota makes it easy to identify problems that could affect car quality. They make sure when a problem occurs, it gets fixed right away. For example, Toyota has Andon cords on its assembly lines to be pulled by workers whenever a problem arises. Thus, allow leader and worker to solve the problem within a small timeframe, and if the timer expires before the problem is solved, the line stops automatically. As a company, Toyota takes time to understand its customer's needs, innovate, improve its processes and build quality cars. Hence, maximize customer value.

At the NUMMI plant, Toyota was able to turn a nightmare into a success story by focusing on end-goal. Under different operating conditions (USA), Toyota created a culture and system to support TPS values. They achieved their goal despite the challenges related to UAW labor union, U.S regulation, and U.S suppliers. Toyota was also able to build trust with employees and their partners. The employees at the NUMMI plant felt valued and respected, and they had a system that supported them to build quality. Toyota understands that even though it has effective processes, there is always room for improvement. They also believe the people that use the system can become their strong allies in improving it.

The collaboration with customers, employees, and partners are important in Lean, Agile, and design thinking practices. The essence of Lean, Agile, and design thinking are:

• Understand end-user needs and pain points
• Build quality on products
• Embrace experimentation
• Eliminate waste
• Iterative process
• On-time delivery
• Cultivate desired behaviors for innovation and building quality products
• Right leaders and skilled workforce with a support system to achieve end goals
• Cross-functional collaboration and effective communication among the team player with the shared common purpose
• Agility through adaptive planning, adaptive processes, and responsive solutions
• Data-driven decision making
• Continuous improvement and innovation

Identifying the sources of waste on the software development processes, delivery pipeline, and systems is the first step toward removing waste on enterprise systems. Treating the system as a whole and factor its complexity is crucial to finding the root cause of the problem that affects the quality of the products or creates a bottleneck on processes. For example, wastes on the delivery pipeline are manual-repetitive tasks that are prone to human error and take a long time to perform.

The complexity of enterprise systems that are characterized by tightly coupled architecture creates a waste. These systems are rigid and fragile, and therefore they are hard and expensive to scale and maintain. Similarly, detailed plans or decisions that are hard to change based on unvalidated assumptions can lead to waste. Other wastes include software bugs, extra features, or solutions with poor usability. These wastes can be reduced by build quality solutions, collaborating with customers and other stakeholders, continuous improvement, and idea validation.

2. The innovation flow diagram and process

For example, before Apple released iPhone in 2007, they collaborated with Motorola and Cingular Wireless carriers to create a phone with iTunes (Motorola ROKR E1) as part of their strategy to respond to change in technology and market conditions. When Apple decided to build iPhone they understood some of the problems and challenges they were facing in creating innovative solutions. They capitalized on the partnership, design thinking principles, talented employees, visionary and passionate leaders, their ability to persevere and persist in order to maximize customer value.

Apple needed a Big Bang solution to have a significant market share that would allow them to make a profit on their investment into a market that was already congested. They understood the end-user frustration because they could empathize with end-users. They had a cell phone and knew their frustration with their phone. ROKR experience also provided Apple with valuable lessons and acted as motivation. Apple used its challenges as an opportunity to create innovative products and business models. Apple addressed the issues that could compromise the overall user experience of the iPhone. They partnered with Cingular Wireless (AT&T) which was able to make the investment to improve its wireless network. Apple was also able to negotiate a deal with AT&T that gave them full control to make decisions related to pricing and designing of the iPhone.

In the process of designing the iPhone several ideas, sketches, and prototypes were developed and tested for different features and the iPhone. In order to find an effective solution they refined validated good ideas and eliminated ideas that were not viable. They also had projects divided into three major groups: engineering, industrial design, and operating system. The engineering team focused on the functionality of features both hardware and software; industrial design team on presentation (visual appeal, and UI interaction) of iPhone. Each group got information from their leaders that allowed them to perform their work without knowing the details of the overall product or have access to other parts of the system. 

Despite the many challenges Apple faced they were able to create a working prototype by December 2006.  On June 29, 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, with the carefully orchestrated execution of a marketing campaign that got people excited to buy the iPhone. Apple as a company tests its ideas by developing a prototype in order to validate or invalidate them. Moreover, they redesign, develop, and release a new model of the iPhone every year and have software updates regularly.

For software, it makes sense to test an idea before you develop a full product because only a fraction of the good ideas are good, and the rest are not. Microsoft online experimentation results indicated that about 33% of the good ideas pass validation tests for predicted desired outcomes. 

• “Our experience at Microsoft is no different: only about 1/3 of ideas improve the metrics they were designed to improve. Of course there is some bias in that experiments are run when groups are less sure about an idea, but this bias may be smaller than most people think; at Amazon, for example, it is a common practice to evaluate every new feature, yet the success rate is below 50%.”
                                      --Ronny Kohavi et al. Online Experimentation at Microsoft, 2009

   

  Thus, experimenting, capitalizing on cross-functional collaboration, and using insight from feedback to explore an idea can lead to a better outcome of finding the best solution. This approach provides an opportunity to get validation from the customer and other stakeholders' feedback through the experiment from the early stage of the project. The compound effect of small experiences can help to create an innovative solution that maximizes customer value and minimize waste.

  
  The process for designing innovative solutions includes understanding customer needs and pain-points, defining the problems, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The customer is represented by the business that pays for the product and the end-users. Meeting customer needs require alignment between meeting user needs and business goals. The project leader needs to articulate the objectives and purpose of the project to the stakeholders. The purpose-driven team will direct all the efforts to achieve the targets.
  

  
  

  The effective communication and cross-functional collaboration of project leaders, experts, designers, developers, business people, end-users, support, and other stakeholders are required to achieve end-goal. To ensure understanding among team players, the team should use the common language of the business domain and avoid the use of terminologies that are specific to one particular field of expertise. 

  
  

  For example, domain experts can help to provide guidance to the team about common terminology and share knowledge about the domain. Domain experts can also share knowledge about their understanding of the problem, requirements for the solution, and possible existing alternative solutions in the market, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of those solutions. The understanding of the problem is the key to finding a suitable solution. It may require observing end-user performing a task, interviewing them, and reviewing related data. 

  
  

  Other stakeholders can share other requirements that will also help ensure the solution adhere to standards. The designer/developer should also collaborate with the end-user, domain experts, and other stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle. The collaboration will help to reduce waste and maximize customer value. Moreover, it will be important to create a storyboard with persona, scenarios, use cases diagrams, photo and other diagrams of the knowledge that the team have captured. The team can also include metrics to measure success and other requirements for an effective solution.  

  
  The leader should also create a roadmap that includes the high-level plan with measurable targets and timeframe to achieve them. Once enough information is available the team can proceed into sketching. Visual diagrams aid in an understanding of what the solution would look like and can help to get feedback early on. There are several options for sketching and selecting the best design. However, for this article, I suggest designers and other members in the team spend at least 4 hours to come up with the list of ideas individually and sketching some of the ideas. This will allow team members to have sufficient time to think through ideas and tap into their creativity. Hence, generate well-thought ideas from a different perspective and increase the effectiveness of the brainstorming session.

  
  

  The team can have a brainstorming session and come up with two or more sketch based on multiple ideas. The remix design can be a combination of good features from different designs. If design remixes are validated the developers/designers can proceed with prototyping. And if the ideas are invalidated the process can continue until the team gets the desired outcome.

  
  Thereafter, designers/developers can create about two prototypes and test them to end-user or potential end-user and stakeholders to get their feedback. The prototype helps the stakeholders to have a preview of the look and feel of the designed solution. It will enable end-users and other stakeholders to provide meaningful feedback to improve the design.

  
  

  If the prototype invalidates assumptions about the idea, fail fast or pivot with the least amount of effort and money. The cost of failure at an early stage is small compared to when the product is fully developed. If the test validates an idea, and the solution is not good enough, the stakeholders can refine the design to maximize user experience and meet business goals. The team can continue to iterate until they find an effective solution. Companies like Microsoft, Google, GE, IBM, and Amazon validate or invalidate some of their ideas to the customer.

  
  

  
  

   Figure 2:Innovative Solution Flow Diagram 

  
  

  Once the design has been validated team can proceed to build a product. Before sprints begin, the team should prioritize the features, decide the length of the sprint, and create a detailed plan for the implementation of the first small batch of features. The features prioritization can base on cost-benefit analysis as well as efforts. And the 80/20 rule to decide MVP deliverables.
  

  
  

  Eric Ries popularized the concept of validating MVP in his Lean Startup book. Unlike a startup, the enterprise has an image to protect, and therefore I will recommend the enterprise to build quality into its MVP. Building quality into the MVP can help to reduce risk and waste related to rework, bugs, and increase the complexity of the enterprise system, or damaged reputation.

  
  

  The MVP in this context is the least number of features that have essential functionalities to address some of the biggest pain-points. It is a fraction of the most important software features that could maximize customer value. The MVP will help to obtain meaningful feedback from the customer, system, and other stakeholders for improvement.
  

   

  “By combining the principles of design thinking with Lean Startup practices, we can build a continuous feedback loop with real users and customers into our development cycle. The principle is to invest the minimum amount of effort to get the maximum amount of learning, and to use the outcomes of our experiments as the base for our decision to pivot, persevere, or stop.”
                                 --Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly, “Lean Enterprise”, 2014

   

  In other words, the batch size should be small enough to obtain feedback fast and big enough to get meaningful insight to make informed decisions. Thus, the ability to improve the system or product features based on insight from the data. The understanding of customer problems, data-driven approach, and collaboration can help to create just enough key features which are easier to use, improve productivity, or enhance the quality of services or products. It can help to save the money associated with extra features which are not needed or solution with poor usability. Poor usability is costly to an enterprise because it leads to the loss of revenue caused by low productivity or other adverse user experience on products or services.
  

   

  The stakeholders would also have to agree on a sprint length that is suitable for their project. The sprint length can be from 2 weeks to 2 months. On each sprint, the team can decide the features to deliver at the end of it. The leader should also make sure to have proper tools to collect and evaluate feedback from the enterprise system, customer, and other stakeholders. The insight will help to update the plan and improve the features or pivot.
  

  
  

  The adaptive planning allows the enterprise to adjust the initial high-level plan based on insight from feedback and changes in operating environments. Moreover, the leader should create a progress report. The progress report can include a list of completed tasks, issues, tasks in progress, work to be done, insight captured, and success stories. This process should continue until all the useful features are delivered.

   

  3. Value-based software development

  The value-based approach for enterprise systems or software application involves:

  1. Implementation of Agile, Lean, and design thinking principles and practices for waste reduction, quality product, and to foster agility and innovation
  2. Design principles and patterns, architecture, and development practices to build quality in enterprise systems
  3. DevOps principles and practices: automation of test, build, configuration, and deployment with manual/automated gates; as well as others to ensure on-time delivery of quality software features, and monitoring and feedback system

   

  The value-based approach is suitable for creating quality software applications in the enterprise system that can automate the tasks or processes, enhance decision making, and drive continuous innovation and improvement. 

  
  

  
  

  Figure 3: The Value-based approach for custom enterprise application

  
  

  Building quality in software is achieved by using software design principles, patterns, layering architecture, and other practices to create a secure system with superior performance that is flexible, maintainable, and scalable. The continuous refactoring of the applications and enterprise systems is key to improvement. Streamlining the delivery flow also add value. The overall long-term benefits of the value-based approach are:
  

  • Continuous innovation
  • Low maintenance cost associated with failure and recovery from failure
  • Reduction in waste
  • Reduction in operating cost
  • Improved quality of products or services
  • Improved productivity
  • Flexible, scalable, and maintainable enterprise system, which are easy to maintain and change and hence easy to implement changes related to technology or business rules
  • Superior performance, secure, available and reliable system with improved usability and thus improved user experience (UX)
  • Agility
  • Return on Investment (ROI)

   

  Quality products and improving the enterprise system and delivery flow will maximize customer value. In the early 2000s, before Amazon officially started experimentation for AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure services, Amazon learned that building quality into their system can benefit them and their customers. 

  “Instead of an organized development environment, they had unknowingly created a jumbled mess. That made it a huge challenge to separate the various services to make a centralized development platform that would be useful for third parties.
  At that point, the company took its first step toward building the AWS business by untangling that mess into a set of well-documented APIs. While it drove the smoother development of Merchant.com, it also served the internal developer audience well, too, and it set the stage for a much more organized and disciplined way of developing tools internally going forward”
                                                    -- Andy Jassy “How AWS came to be”, Techcrunch, 2016

   

  Amazon adopted service-oriented architecture (SOA). Eventually, they refactored their system to microservices architecture. Amazon also formed two pizza teams (5-10 peoples) to work on individual services. Microservices, team structure, continuous integration, and continuous delivery helped Amazon to achieve a high innovation rate and agility they need to manage changes easily and serve their customer better.  As a result, Amazon was able to deploy the application in production at an average of 11.6 seconds during weekdays by 2011.

   

  The transformation of AWS was the result of their desire to create a solution that alleviates Amazon and its partners' pain-points. AWS contributed to 12.2 billion of Amazon corporate revenue in 2016 and 3.1 billion of operating profits. Amazon takes advantage of its core competencies. They capitalized on their experience gained in overcoming their challenges to develop infrastructure as well as an opportunity to provide infrastructure services to their partners and start-ups.

  
  

  In 2006 Amazon officially released AWS cloud services that included simple storage service (S3) and Elastic compute cloud (EC2). They started with few features and used feedback from their customers to improve those features. They also built quality into their system. Moreover, Amazon frequently runs experiments to validate ideas to their customers. Since the 2006 release of cloud computing services, they have continued to iterate and add more features that add value to their customers and allow even enterprise to use their infrastructure services.

   

  It took almost another eight years for the AWS business segment to start becoming profitable in 2014. AWS has a large percentage of market share for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Amazon's success is not an overnight success, and the process they use to get where they are was not straightforward or smooth. However, the ROI after several years of experimenting and hard work for the AWS business segment is high. In the face of new regulations, stiff competition, and changes in technology, I do not doubt that Amazon will continue to use feedback from its customers and potential customers and continue to innovate and improve their system.

   

  4. Highlight of Principles based Approach

  You have probably heard stories of the so-called overnight success of organizations. However, these stories neglect to include information on hard work, resilience, and both failure and success stories behind the big success. The reality is it takes time, and time varies depending on capabilities, strategy, and goals. Toyota, Apple, and Amazon used different strategies to respond effectively to challenges and take advantage of opportunities.

  
  

  In the case of Toyota, it was a strategy to adapt TPS to new operating environments. It helped Toyota to create a culture and support system to build quality into products and processes. For Apple, it was a strategy they used to develop the iPhone and gain a large market share in a market that was already saturated. They were able to build the iPhone despite their lack of experience in designing phones and unwillingness to recruit engineers from outside for the first iPhone. Apple's goal was audacious, and hence it required the selected talented employees and leaders to have a steep learning curve and to work under intense pressure to deliver a new product within 2.5 years. On the other hand, Amazon developed a strategy to respond effectively to challenges in infrastructure development and took advantage of the opportunity to provide infrastructure services. 

  
  

  They succeed to implement their strategies. Toyota, Amazon and Apple employees were willing to persist despite the challenges, persevere, and experimenting with different ideas until they found the solution. In essence, they succeed where others have failed because they have passionate and visionary leaders as well as dedicated employees who are committed to working hard despite the setbacks and transform the ideas into innovative solutions. These organizations have a culture that supports innovation, the effective implementation of technology, and effective adaptive processes.
  

  
  

  Furthermore, Toyota, Apple, Amazon, and many successful organizations use principles and practices as the foundation to create effective products, enterprise systems, and processes. Hence, the proper application of principles and practices is adapted based on unique strengths, challenges, opportunities, and end goals. In other words, there is no magic bullet, organizations need to apply the principles and practices in a way that takes into consideration the uniqueness of their strength as well as challenges, opportunities, and the goal they are want to achieve. The success of Apple, Toyota, and Amazon did not come easily, but their ROI is high. 

  
  

  5. Value-based digital transformation

  The value-based digital transformation takes time to reach a point where an enterprise can maximize the business value. The length of time depends on enterprise capabilities, strategy, as well as the gap between the organization's current state and the desired goal. It means the organization will need to evaluate the gap between its current state and the end goal that they want to accomplish.

  
  

  The value-based digital transformation will help the organization to differentiate itself strategically in the digital era. It is customer-focused, data-driven, and requires alignment of business objectives and competitive advantage strategies as well as strategy and tactics alignments. It also requires right systems, culture, technology, people, data, processes, and applications that will enable the business to gain a competitive advantage.

  
  

  The enterprise systems that are not suitable to achieve cost-effectively desired agility and continuous innovation to gain a competitive advantage will require a makeover. The organization will need to create favorable conditions to foster innovation, agility, to build quality into products and processes. To have talented employees and visionary and passionate leaders, as well as right technology implementation. Additionally, to develop resources, build the right culture and support system that will help to enforce desired behavior for the desired outcome.

  
  

  The success of the organization's initiatives will also depend on an understanding of the purpose behind the objectives and goals. Leaders need to articulate and reiterate the vision and mission of the organization to the teams. They will also need to set long-term and short-term goals to maximize business value.  

  
  In addition to that, the leaders can create a roadmap for long-term goals with measurable business targets and time frames to achieve the targets.  The teams can tackle one problem at a time iteratively by breaking a problem into small manageable steps and adjust as needed based on feedback to achieve the end goal. The leaders will also create a progress report to provide the team with the status of the project. The short-term goals can involve the execution of components of long-term goals and improvement on existing enterprise products, services, processes, and systems. The goals can include long-term plans to grow capabilities.  The growth is possible through merger, acquisition, innovation, strategic partnership, increasing market share, and exploiting new market opportunities.

  
  Effective adaptive processes, adaptive systems, and technology are the must for an organization to have a successful digital transformation. Thus it becomes critical to create, evaluate, and adjust strategies and metrics to measure success based on the changes in market conditions, customer needs, regulation, and technologies periodically. The organization should also have criteria to prioritize investment. These criteria could take into consideration the organization's vision, goals, strength, challenges, opportunities, and capabilities as well as the sensitivity analysis, cost of delay, trends, and value proposition.

  
  

  Stiff competition creates a challenge of too many competing products or services and an opportunity to maximize customer value. The transformation will require the organization to redefine its core-values to be centered on customers. The value-based approach is customer-centric, in which the purpose of every target set should be to add value to the business and end-user. This requires an understanding of all the stages in the customer journey as well as their pain points. Followed by experimentation of solution that will help alleviate customer pain points and maximize their value. 

  
  Success in digital transformation requires right people with the ability to persevere and persist through setbacks. The high payoff comes from the compound effects of small wins, and the lesson learned from failure. In essence, the strength of an organization depends on its resilience, agility, and innovation capabilities that enable it to overcome challenges and take advantage of opportunities.
  

  
  

  Furthermore, to have strategies to increase the market share of products or services and identifying the new market opportunities. The enterprise needs to allocate funds and resources for ongoing research, and development of ideas. The enterprise should capitalize on strategic partnership and the cross-functional collaboration of employees, customers, and experts. The knowledge and ideas sharing through collaboration will help to increase the innovation rate.

    

• “Software can provide your enterprise with a competitive advantage by enabling you to search for new opportunities and execute validated opportunities faster than the competition.”
          --Mary and Tom Poppendieck “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit”

  The transformation will help the enterprise to reduce operating costs, increase innovation rate, agility, and make it easy to build quality products and processes. The enterprise should leverage the benefits of a value-based approach through technology. For example, the automation of manual repeatable processes or tasks can help the enterprise to reduce waste. Similarly, taking advantage of software to extract meaningful insight from a large set of data will help to enhance decision making.

  
  

  The success of the enterprise will depend on its ability to create intelligent systems to address unique business and customer needs. Having the right data and tools to extract meaningful insight that will allow to take actions and maximize customer and business value is also crucial. The meaningful insight from data will help to reduce the risk of uncertainty. In most cases, decisions will involve the trade-off, and therefore enterprise should focus on the optimal solution that enhanced user experience and align with business goals. 
  

  
  

  Moreover, the software is needed to create a platform for collaboration. Most of the products and services we use today also depend on software. Hence, a need to use the software to enhance products and services. However, the uniqueness of an organization will require the enterprise to have some of its solutions customized. The customized solutions tailored to address the unique needs of the business will lead to a competitive advantage.
  

  
  

  There are benefits of having reusable-components, flexible, maintainable, secure, reliable, and scalable customized software applications with superior performance on enterprise systems. It is easier and cheaper to maintain and change technology or add/remove features as a result of the change in business rules to a system that uses layering architecture characterized by separation of concerns, high cohesion, and low coupling. Overall, the long-term ROI for the digital transformation will also include the monetary savings/gains or customer benefits. Such as an increase of profit or revenue due to the improvement of the processes and quality of products. The increase in the innovation rate, agility,  and productivity and cost reduction to maintain a system. Additionally, cost savings as a result of the failure and recovery time from failure reduction. 
  

  
  REFERENCES

  1. Liker, Jeffrey K (2011) The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy With Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-147746-8
  2. Dino Esposito, Andrea Saltarello (2014) Microsoft .NET - Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (2nd Edition), Microsoft Press, ISBN: 978-0-7356-8535-2
  3. A CIO’s Guide: Five Steps to Business Agility, https://www.ca.com
  4. Jez Humble, Barry O'Reilly, Joanne Molesky  (2014) Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-44-936842-5
  5. Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck (2003). Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. Addison-Wesley Professional 1st edition ISBN 978-0-321-15078-3.
  6. Thomke, Stefan H., and Barbara Feinberg. "Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple." Harvard Business School Case 609-066, January 2009. (Revised May 2012.) 
  7. The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry, https://www.wired.com/, by Fred Vogelstein 2008
  8. Meyer, Pamela (2015- Streaming Audiobook) The Agility Shift: Creating Agile and Effective Leaders, Teams, and Organizations
  9. Ries, Eric (2011) The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, ISBN 978-0-30-788789-4
  10. Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology, https://www.interaction-design.org/
  11. Birth of the iPhone: How Apple turned clunky prototypes into a truly magical device, https://www.cultofmac.com,by Leander Kahney  2017
  12. Driving Business Innovation Through Technology Innovation CIOs’ critical role as digital innovators, https://www.accenture.com/, by David Quinney 2016
  13. Software Fail Watch: 2016 in Review, https://www.tricentis.com/, 2017
  14. Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org/
  15. Principles of Lean, https://www.lean.org/
  16. Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation, www.creativityatwork.com/
  17. 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process, https://www.interaction-design.org, by Rikkie Dam and Teo Siang
  18. Online Experimentation at Microsoft, http://www.exp-platform.com/, Ronny Kohavi, Thomas Crook, Roger Longbotham, Brian Frasca, Randy Henne, Juan Lavista Ferres, Tamir Melamed 2009
  19. Project Vogue: Inside Apple's iPhone Deal With ATT, https://www.forbes.com, Peter Cohan 2013
  20. How AWS came to be, https://techcrunch.com, Ron Miller 2016
  21. Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think, https://www.wired.com/, By Steve Levy 2011
  22. Amazon's massive cloud business hit over $12 billion in revenue and $3 billion in profit in 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com, By Julie Bort 2017
  23. Amazon opens up about AWS revenues, https://www.cio.com/, By Bernard Golden 2015
  24. Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS: Accelerating Software Delivery with DevOps, by AWS
  25. Microservices and Teams at Amazon, https://www.infoq.com/, By Jan Stenberg 2015
  26. How I Remade GE, https://hbr.org, By Jeffrey Immelt  2017
  27. Exclusive Profile: Andy Jassy of Amazon Web Service (AWS) And His Trillion Dollar Cloud Ambition, https://www.forbes.com/, John Furrier 2015
  28. Nummi: What Toyota Learned and GM Didn’t, https://hbr.org, Ben Gomes-Casseres  2009
  29. The End Of The Line For GM-Toyota Joint Venture, https://www.npr.org, Frank LangFitt 2010
  30. How to Change a Culture: Lessons From NUMMI, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/, John Shook 2010 
  31. Yoffie, David B., and Renee Kim. Apple Inc. in 2010 : Harvard Business School Case 710-467, April 2010. (Revised July 2014.).