All business has to become digital. Just imagine what becomes possible when one starts combining functionality or data offered by all sorts of Things, mobile, AR/VR, Internet of Things, cognitive computing, all sorts of bots, even drones and geolocation services.

This is exactly what we can help you with, disconnect (“unplug”) from any organizational, OT or IT legacy you may have, start thinking from scratch about which services would address you business’ needs or give it an edge and build it.

We have an extensive toolset to help you, including, but not limited to, organizing or supporting Ideation, Creation, Design Thinking Workshops, facilitating Hackathons and co-creation.

Change and disruption, often digitally driven, dictate business models. Therefor an enterprise architecture has to be flexible and dynamic. Equally, the solutions architecture has to be agile by design too. This agility can be obtained by taking each of these views into account:

• The Business View
• The Functional View
• The Data View
• The Technical View
• The Implementation View
• The Operational View

In organizations with an OT and an IT systems legacy, which is the case for all digital migrant businesses, this translates into treating Mode 2 Systems (Systems of Engagement) separately from Mode 1 Systems (Systems of Record). That is, in Gartner’s Bimodal IT terminology, for the sake of defining solutions architecture, we temporarily “unplug” Mode 2 from Mode 1 Systems. While working with sister companies in the group for dealing with Mode 1 systems, Innovation Unplugged mainly operates in the Mode 2 area.

With respect to OT and IT convergence this approach boils down to:

• Treat Operational Technology like IT Mode 1 Systems. That is, create a, Mode 2 like, Edge OT Connectivity architecture which provides for learning from experimenting, without disrupting the operational technology or putting it at risk
• (Industrial) IoT platforms are treated with a Mode 2 philosophy in mind

By promoting a DevOps like approach we blur the boundaries between development, test and deployment. Hence, while the production environment is important and while there is choice, no text about it here. Assessment and choice of deployment options are dealt with when setting out the project architecture.

We do want to highlight though that, with our affiliated network, we can offer end-to-end monitoring and managed services. If desirable we can provide the customer co-view on our monitoring and alerts dashboard for his services.

Identifying the right strategy for this is tough. Nevertheless, since it significantly influences several attributes of your system making smart decisions and setting out a smart roadmap is import. Some decisions to make:

• If possible, should you decompose applications into microservices? Microservices, when deployed in containers are very portable, and easy to scale.
• Or should you consume microservice elements of applications as pay-per-use service?
• Or should you use API proxies to connect Mode 2 applications and services to Operational Technology or Mode 1 services?
• Share your digital assets, processes, and information with your ecosystem using API Management?
• What about security or charging, or offering services for free and using community sourcing?

The answers to these questions and many others do matter because they determine your agility, integratability, the cost of ownership of your systems, etc. Innovation Unplugged can help you making informed decisions.

By architecting distinction between Mode 1, Operational Technology and Mode 2 Systems into the design and applying agile and componentized methods, with or without automated deployment, we facilitate functionality and technical life cycle management.

We believe the business potential or viability of products and services should be tested and, if needed adjusted, early in the process. Likewise, we believe being capable of testing applications by releasing updates faster and more frequently leads to more reliable applications as well as to better user experiences. One could describe this as Deploy Fast, Fail Fast and Improve Fast, applied to business testing as well as to applications testing. Platforms that provide for automated applications release, including roll back capability, help achieving this level of agility.

While DevOps may not be the holy grail it has – particularly in Systems of Engagement or Mode 2 systems, which is often where new business models are tested – the merit of speed of deployment and agility.

We make devices smart or connected by making them talk to remote applications and services using Machine to Machine communication technology. When people carry or wear such devices we call them wearables. Wearables make people connected. Eventually everything becoming connected is shaping the Internet of Everything (IoE) or Internet of Things.

Connecting Things is Innovation Unplugged its core business. Among other, we do:

• Technical design and manufacturing of devices
• Development of device embedded software
• Design of data pre and post processing, network and communication between devices and back end services

The manufacturing and process industry are drastically changing because the fourth industrial revolution is blurring the boundaries between physical and digital. Not only the manufacturing industry but the entire world is becoming “Phygical”. With our Cronos engineering and manufacturing business partner we turn your business into phygical factories of the future.

Last but not least, we see that companies often need change management or coaching support when rolling out new applications. Or, closely related to Ideation or Design Thinking, need mindset change coaching altogether. In order to be able to deal with this aspect of innovative or transformational projects we have agreed an internal partnership as well.

Should your innovative application or service require marketing support, we are ready to work with other companies in the group who can help you with, among other, branding, communication, digital marketing, etc.