Digital Patterns

Most software developers are familiar with the concept of a pattern. They use them to describe types of programming problems which can be solved in the same generic manner.

This was originally developed to support the indexing of re-usable code and trading in 3rd party off the shelf code components, with the idea of improving overall development productivity and quality. The quality aspect arising from the assumption that such code would be designed to be flexible and robust in many scenarios.

The idea was not actually that novel as it replicated the concept of group technology in manufacturing, where a group technology code defines the shape, size and manufacturing characteristics of 3D parts or components. The idea being that groups of machines could be set up to manufacture families of parts more quickly than traditional methods where machines were grouped functionally and work meandered all over a factory between the functional groups of machines. 

Anyway, patterns have become such a useful metaphor that developers will often describe what they are doing in terms of what the pattern is and therefore what tools and approach they are using. Consequently, the concept of patterns has also been adopted to describe aspects of solution architecture and encourage design re-use within enterprises.

So I have been struck recently by the fact that going digital or adopting a Digital As Usual model might be facilitated by certain organisational patterns.

For example, Lean and Agile solution development is usually product and product team based. The product team integrates the viewpoints of several functions involved in developing and exploiting the product typically including users, product owners, analysts, developers, testers and DevOps engineers. This might be called the Product Team Pattern.

Some approaches to delivering digital products also look at mass customisation via standard features. The principle being that a product is constructed from a number of features for which there may be a number of standard options. The product is then tailored to a customer's needs by selecting which features and which options the customer wants. This then gives a tailored product experience with most of the benefits of a bespoke product, but better economics and more consistent quality because each feature and each option is standardised. This might be called the Adaptive Product Pattern.

A recent article in the SLOAN MIT Management Review, Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future? described a "Future Ready" pattern, in which it identifies a combination of Customer Experience and Process Efficiency capabilities as delivering this type of pattern resulting in low cost innovation, superlative customer experience, modular agility and the ability to exploit data as a future asset. Whilst this complements the thinking in "The Way of DAU", it struck me that perhaps there are other patterns out there which need to be identified. 

Any thoughts anyone?