Accelerating Digital Transformation with IBM Garage
Key Points
- IBM’s Garage methodology emphasizes cultural change—adopting agile, collaborative mindsets—to ensure employees actually adopt new cloud tools and processes for a successful digital transformation.
- The first facet, **Discover**, focuses on defining business objectives such as total cost of ownership, scaling support operations, or reducing latency, to clarify what the organization aims to achieve in the cloud.
- In the **Envision** phase, teams generate solution ideas using techniques like MVP development and design‑thinking workshops to quickly deliver tangible value and validate concepts before full‑scale implementation.
- Overall, the six‑facet Garage framework (with culture at its core) provides a repeatable, customer‑centric approach that blends modern tools, processes, and cultural adoption to accelerate legacy‑app modernization and cloud migration.
Full Transcript
# Accelerating Digital Transformation with IBM Garage **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bAhqB4WXkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bAhqB4WXkA) **Duration:** 00:09:55 ## Summary - IBM’s Garage methodology emphasizes cultural change—adopting agile, collaborative mindsets—to ensure employees actually adopt new cloud tools and processes for a successful digital transformation. - The first facet, **Discover**, focuses on defining business objectives such as total cost of ownership, scaling support operations, or reducing latency, to clarify what the organization aims to achieve in the cloud. - In the **Envision** phase, teams generate solution ideas using techniques like MVP development and design‑thinking workshops to quickly deliver tangible value and validate concepts before full‑scale implementation. - Overall, the six‑facet Garage framework (with culture at its core) provides a repeatable, customer‑centric approach that blends modern tools, processes, and cultural adoption to accelerate legacy‑app modernization and cloud migration. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bAhqB4WXkA&t=0s) **IBM Garage Methodology Overview** - The speaker outlines IBM's Garage approach to modernizing legacy applications, emphasizing culture, agile practices, and a six‑facet methodology that begins with the Discover phase. ## Full Transcript
here at ibm we've perfected the process
of modernizing legacy applications by
working directly with our customers
now we picked up some tips and tricks
along the way and we wanted to share
that with you
with the exact approach we take with the
ibm garage
now today we're going to talk about
what's called the ibm garage methodology
which we use with our clients to ensure
that they're using the latest and
greatest cloud technology
and accelerating their digital
transformation
now within any organization there's
going to be
some of the latest and greatest tools
that are being used
as well as processes
now at the center of all of this is
going to be
what i call the culture
now this is critical to any team taking
on a digital transformation
and that's because you might be using
the latest and greatest
tools and implementing the processes but
without the actual users and and you
know the employees within your company
adopting these technologies you're not
going to see a successful digital
transformation
so to enact any sort of transformation
you need to start thinking about the
culture
this means adopting approaches like
agile methodologies
maybe moving from waterfall techniques
so that's some of the things that i'm
going to be covering today in the garage
methodology
and i'd say there's six facets that kind
of surround
the key of it all that's the culture and
the first one that we're going to start
with today
we'll call it discover
now here's when you're identifying key
objectives
within your organization so for a lot of
organizations this can be something like
tco or total cost of ownership this is
critical cost savings are a big
concern for a lot of clients moving to
the cloud and in addition
understanding what taking advantage of
some of these latest and greatest
capabilities
is going to cost them but it's more than
just that it's about understanding
objectives of you know what you want to
accomplish
so say for example your company is
growing and you're getting more and more
support tickets and your support team
just can't handle them
well you could throw money at the
problem and increase your support staff
but that's not always scalable
or maybe your applications aren't
performing as well and there's higher
latency
so how do you start maybe taking
advantage of the elasticity in the cloud
to tackle that so in the first facet
discover here's where you start laying
out some of those objectives
next up let's talk about envision now
here's where you start identifying
solutions to some of these problems
now there's key techniques for this so
for example you might want to create an
mvp or a minimum viable product this
allows your team to work towards an easy
you know cupcake size solution that
drives value and results and then start
building on top of that
in addition there's a concept called
design thinking
and we do this a lot here at ibm before
we start developing any feature or even
a bigger solution or capability
we make sure that we understand how
users are going to use it and that
design is involved in every step of the
way
so here's where you start thinking of
solutions so for example some of the
problems that we laid out in the
discover step maybe your applications
are not performing as well
well take advantage of the cloud to
re-platform
and kind of take advantage of maybe a
kubernetes platform
to enable better scalability in addition
maybe for that support ticket issue
take advantage of a chat bot so that
easy questions are answered by
an automated system before escalating to
a real human being that can support an
issue
so that's the second facet in vision now
the third one i want to mention here
i'm kind of going through the flow here
is going to be develop
now here's where we're starting to think
about quality code
now say you've got a number of legacy
applications that you've got
and you're bringing them into this next
decade a developer that you hire five
years down the line
are you really going to feel comfortable
with them diving in
and kind of making changes to this older
code
well if not now's the time to start
thinking about clearing up some of that
technical debt
you can start taking advantage of
refactoring strategies to maybe move
from older school programming languages
to newer ones maybe use container-based
technologies
so that's one clear thing another one i
want to mention a lot of us have heard
of tdd
which is test driven development
basically writing the tests before
writing the code
so the code matches the functionality
expected but there's a new approach
called
bdd which takes up one abstraction layer
higher
called behavior driven development now
this enables you to focus on the
features and how people are going to
actually use them
this involves user research and so this
is a key step that's going to enable
you to focus on first the behavior of
using the capabilities
and then actually dive in deeper and
start thinking about how they're
implemented maybe then writing the test
cases and then finally the code
so bdd is a very interesting piece of
this develop flow
and one more i'll mention is ci and cd
continuous integration continuous
delivery
this enables development teams to really
keep up with the speed
of agile methodologies and so i think
it's a critical part with any you know
devops cycle and life
and flow it's really important for your
teams to start thinking about
continuous integration and continuous
step four that i want to mention is
reason now this is about infusing ai
across your business processes and all
the data that's being generated
so i'm going to simplify this one and
just say
data science now the main thing here is
that kind of encompasses ai and machine
learning as well
so for example say your logistics
company this is where you can
start taking advantage of something like
demand forecasting
so instead of waiting for the demand to
come in and then scrambling to
prep your distribution centers what if
you use the historical data of
the last time there was a lot of demand
and then use maybe the weather channel
apis for you know inclement weather
situations
and then use that to find correlations
to you know
respond to demand and forecast it before
it even comes in
now that's a great way to take advantage
of data science
and infusing that into your processes to
drive new value
next up we've got operate now operate
is a key phase here we're going to be
thinking about things like
operational excellence there's new
modern strategies for
operations so things like a dark launch
a dark launch is going to enable you to
release a feature
behind the feature flag and see how
people respond to it see how your
infrastructure responds to it
if it doesn't do so well turn that
feature flag off figure out what went
wrong
that leads me into a b testing now
a b testing enables you to release two
kind of variations of a similar
capability to
different subsets of users to see which
ones they react to more positively
so this is a great way of identifying
you know which approach to take moving
forward
so a b testing is a really critical part
of the operational steps
and i think the last one i want to
mention here and it's one of the
objectives that we laid out in the
beginning
it's auto scaling so we mentioned that
you know maybe you need to take
advantage of the elasticity in the cloud
maybe your operations team manually
scales up before every major holiday
today
if you're kind of a sales company well
instead of automatically or having the
operations team scale up manually what
if you could do it automatically
well that's where auto scale comes in
and it's a part of this kind of
operational excellence
in this facet of the garage methodology
now the last one that i want to mention
here is learn
because at the end of the day you need
to be able to learn
from the the processes that you've put
in now a simple one here
is something like a retrospective and
this is part of an agile
flow your team is implementing a lot of
processes
so let's see you know what worked well
and what didn't it's the time to take
take that into account another one that
i want to mention
kind of going on tdd and bdd is hdd
which is hypothesis driven development
so we're all aware of requirements that
come in from customers who respond to
them
and if they go well you know everyone's
happy but sometimes that's too slow
what if you could create conjectures
instead capabilities that your customer
might want to use and then develop those
well maybe you won't always be right but
when you are right
that enables you to get ahead of the
competition and drive value to your
users in new ways
so hdd is one of the key things in the
learn step
now if i wanted to summarize all of
these i think i would
call them into three major steps create
execute and finally
operate now i see these as kind of a
cycle
a life cycle for digital transformation
and so with these three steps
you can kind of feel like you're on the
right step using some of these
technology or approaches that we've
talked about
but with ibm garage you're not alone you
can co-create
you can co-execute and you can
co-operate
essentially it's the speed of a startup
at the scale of an enterprise
that's what ibm garage offers you you
don't have to be alone in
learning and kind of instilling all of
these different approaches
ibm garage can help you with those so if
you want to learn more about ibm garage
or you know dive into a lot of these
facets and
more of the things that i couldn't cover
in this video check out the links in the
description below
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