Digital Transformation

The speed of innovation has accelerated significantly, with technology becoming cheaper, faster, and easier to implement. In fact, in a survey of 500 C-level executives in the U.S. and Europe, two-thirds of executives believed 40% of Fortune 500 companies would disappear within the next ten years due to digital disruption. It’s crucial for organizations to start planning for their digital transformation now. Organizations must rapidly adapt to the constantly evolving digital landscape. To help companies survive and thrive, CIOs and other leaders must first shift their mindsets and push for innovation by thinking beyond the status quo.

 

To start, view digital transformation as an organization’s ability to identify innovative uses of both emerging and current technology. Together, the organization must respond by transforming its strategy and operations to maintain and grow its market position. One common error organizations make when implementing digital transformation is to ignore the old components and focus only on the innovative new ones being introduced, resulting in the duplication of functionality between It systems, multiple technology architectures, and a lack of cost transparency. Successful transformation efforts impact all areas of the organization, including processes, policies, and training.

 

Barrow Wise designs a clear digital transformation plan that takes into account – the dynamic marketplace and an organization’s unique culture, customers, and capabilities; we consider these important questions:

 

  • How are customer needs changing? What products and services will they need?
  • What are our capabilities?
  • What opportunities are emerging? What will we need in order to take advantage of new opportunities?
  • What PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental) factors need to be considered?
  • How do customers experience the way we deliver products and services?
  • How do our employees and technology support the customer experience?
  • How do other organizations perform?
  • What technologies do they use?
  • Is there a better way of running the business?
  • Can we use technology more effectively and efficiently?
  • How will performance need to improve over time?

 

An organization’s business strategy encompasses its purpose and vision and outlines the specific initiatives required to achieve those results. It is supported by various functions, each with its own strategy, depending on the complexity of the organization (i.e., marketing strategy, product strategy, and supply chain strategy). Each one must be linked and coordinated to ensure there is no overlap, duplication, or omission.

 

Barrow Wise designs a clear and comprehensive digital strategy that identifies the future state of the organization. It describes how customers will interact with the organization’s products and services and what its people, skills, and overall company will look like in the future. A true digital vision for the future should promote digital transformation and foster an understanding of its importance at all levels of the organization. Barrow Wise’s collaborative approach helps to engage all team members to assist in realizing the company’s new reality.

 

Barrow Wise accelerates digital transformation by providing custom software tools to measure progress iteratively while collecting and incorporating feedback, fostering collaboration across boundaries to obtain greater buy-in and increase the likelihood of long-term success. In addition, we incorporate Agile methodologies and develop small-scale prototype projects before enterprise implementation to ensure the new systems are designed for optimized productivity and interoperability for the enterprise.  Lastly, we clearly communicate the ROI achieved through technology-enabled business initiatives to demonstrate the value that the IT organization consistently brings to the table.

Enabling International Megaprojects  

Megaprojects encompass a wide range of fields, including research and development, cyber infrastructure, scientific discovery, defense,  aerospace, energy, food security, biotechnology, and more. With the increasing number of megaprojects, project management practices have struggled to find solutions to address complexities that go beyond technical engineering concerns. These projects transform landscapes rapidly and require coordinated applications of capital and state power, ultimately revealing society's ambitions, challenges, and future prospects. 

Barrow Wise utilizes The Oxford Economics Outlook, which reveals where investment is most likely to fall short, and, therefore, where the needs are greatest across 50 countries and seven sectors. It considers what investment is needed and what is likely to occur based on a range of factors, such as a country’s historic infrastructure spending levels and how its population and economy are changing, hence identifying investment gaps. These insights will help governments identify and respond to infrastructure needs and guide opportunities for private sector investors. Many countries are increasingly focused on the role of infrastructure in improving economic growth and community well-being.

Megaprojects can not only make huge impacts at local, regional, and even international scale but can also be significantly affected by the complex project environment. Megaprojects can inevitably create opportunities for economic revitalization and technological innovation for a sustainable future. Barrow Wise offers comprehensive analysis and evaluation of various aspects related to megaprojects, including the use of innovative technologies such as digitization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. We also assess the social, economic, and institutional value of megaprojects and explore emerging challenges in their implementation on an international level. Our expertise extends to megaproject finance, value creation, and the resilience of mega infrastructure. Additionally, we evaluate corporate social responsibility and human rights concerns about these projects. 

Barrow Wise has established a rigorous evaluation process for megaprojects, consisting of four phases: Project Conception and Selection, Project Implementation, Project Closure and Transition, and Project Evaluation and Operations. Each phase involves an ongoing assessment of the project's progress. The most critical evaluations occur during the Project Conception and Selection phase, where the project's worthiness, feasibility, and sustainability are determined. Additionally, during the Operations phase, after Project Closure, the benefits are assessed to ensure they are being realized and that they remain sustainable throughout the project's lifecycle.

At Barrow Wise, we offer valuable insights into global megaprojects and how they can benefit the wider ecosystem. Our focus is on providing frameworks for strategic decision-making, alignment of strategies, and investment choices that can be advantageous for all projects. We foster strong partnerships and alliances among countries, companies, and cultures, which ultimately create better investment opportunities. Our aim is to enable the sharing of knowledge across countries and cultures to make future projects more sustainable and cost-effective. To achieve this, we perform data collection and statistical analysis, which helps with upfront planning and measuring performance and outcomes. Additionally, we analyze and assess perceptions of megaprojects to determine the underlying reasons behind their success or failure. At Barrow Wise, we support megaprojects to drive economic growth and prosperity, both in developed and developing countries, and to advance societal interests.

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Data Mesh

Over time, the analytical data plane has diverged into two generations of architectures and technology stacks: initially, data warehouse followed by data lake, with data lake supporting data science access patterns and preserving data in its original form, and data warehouse supporting analytical and business intelligence reporting access patterns with data conforming to a centrally unified ontology. The challenge of the two-plane data management approach with a brittle integration through pipelines and a centralized data warehouse or lake for access to data is a major driver to reimagine future solutions. Enterprises are monitoring, gathering, and analyzing an incredible amount of data today, to the point where it is becoming a burden rather than a usable asset. This proliferation while using traditional legacy architectures introduces scaling and data complexity challenges. These problems create a domino effect across the organization, causing a backlog of requests, data silos across domains, and a lack of trust in the data itself. Organizations require a modern platform to streamline the analysis of this data while ensuring that it is trusted and reliable.


Data Mesh achieves automation through its technology by discovering, augmenting, and delivering data using AI/ML algorithms. Data Mesh expands by achieving agility through decentralizing ownership, thus increasing the platform's scale. This requires domain owners to take responsibility for the quality of their own data delivered as a product to other stakeholders.


Barrow Wise specializes in delivering the Data Mesh Framework with built-in Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Data Mesh is a new approach in sourcing, managing, and accessing data for analytical use cases at scale. Analytical data is used for predictive or diagnostic use cases. It is the foundation for visualizations and reports that provide insights into the business. It is used to train machine learning models that augment the business with data-driven intelligence. Organizations need to move from intuition and gut-driven decision-making to actions based on observations and data-driven predictions. Analytical data is what powers the software and technology of the future. It enables a technology shift from human-designed rule-based algorithms to data-driven machine-learned models. Analytical data is becoming an increasingly critical component of the technology landscape. Data Mesh calls for a fundamental shift in organizations' assumptions, architecture, technical solutions, and social structure in managing, using, and owning analytical data:

  • Organizationally, it shifts from centralized ownership of the data by specialists who run the data platform technologies to a decentralized data ownership model pushing ownership and accountability of the data back to the business domains where it originates from or is used.
  • Architecturally, it shifts from collecting data into monolithic warehouses and lakes to connecting data through a distributed mesh of data accessed through standardized protocols.
  • Technologically, it shifts from technology solutions that treat data as a by-product of running pipeline code to solutions that treat data and code that maintains it as one lively autonomous unit.
  • Operationally, it shifts data governance from a top-down, centralized operational model with human interventions to a federated model with computational policies embedded in the nodes on the mesh.
  • Principally, it shifts our value system from data as an asset to be collected to data as a product to serve and delight the users.


Cybersecurity

At Barrow Wise, we specialize in helping organizations upgrade their cybersecurity practices from perimeter-based to proactive autonomous operations using advanced techniques. Our approach involves identifying and addressing any potential threats that could exploit vulnerabilities and cause harm to an entity’s operations, assets (including information and information systems), individuals, or other organizations.


It's important to be aware that cyber criminals often seek internal data such as operations, salaries, research and development, and intellectual property that they can profit from. They may also target client and customer information and seek to gain knowledge about an organization's marketing goals and competitors. Falling victim to cyber surveillance and having sensitive information stolen can lead to damaging reputational consequences.


Barrow Wise's cyber intelligence process includes a six-phase cycle: planning and targeting, preparation and collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and production, dissemination and integration, and evaluation and feedback.

Barrow Wise assists organizations in answering the following questions:

  • What threat actors are interested in my organization's industry?
  • What threat actors are known for targeting my area of operation?
  • What threat actors could target my organization to reach another company I supply a service for?
  • Has my organization been targeted previously? If so, what type of threat actor did it? What were its motivations?
  • What asset does my organization need to protect?


At Barrow Wise, we have expertise in implementing full-lifecycle cybersecurity, including:

  • Cyber Strategy: Defining cyber, risk mitigation, and regulatory strategies, aligning security to business priorities.
  • Cyber Protection: Protecting the business as it transforms—applying zero trust principles to secure the entire digital core.
  • Cyber Resilience: Pressure testing defenses, understanding emerging threats, and preparing and responding quickly to attacks.
  • Cyber Industry: Embedding security to build resilience and mitigate risk across critical areas of the value chain.
  • Managed Security Services: Providing ongoing monitoring, detection, and response to cyber incidents using advanced analytics and automation.
  • Security Consulting: Helping businesses create a resilient IT security program and get proactive in preventing and managing threats.





Metaverse

As the metaverse evolves, remote working technologies will become more advanced and intuitive, making collaboration and socializing with friends and family across the digital highway more comfortable than using the current versions of Zoom or Teams. As the technologies improve, work from anywhere will replace (the hybrid model of partially) working from home, first for knowledge workers who have already become accustomed to this new paradigm but later also for

the operational staff as digital twins and virtual and augmented reality tools become advanced enough to seamlessly operate a hydrogen plant or even an entire factory from the comfort of a tropical island. Of course, before we can settle in on that comfy beach chair watching the sunset while

working, organizations must change their mindset and culture by abandoning the traditional “work from here” approach.


We are at the start of a seismic shift, and all organizations must adapt to stay relevant to the workforce of tomorrow. Experts predict that technological advancements, such as 6G and supersonic travel, will result in over one billion digital nomads by 2035.


Organizations should start now to help plan their Metaverse future by developing guidelines on how the employee’s identity and assets will be protected, what are the use cases to gain concrete value from the implementation, how immersion will create a better work culture and transform many areas of health, energy, education, and many other markets. Automated AR headsets and AR glasses developed by our partners at Intel, Lenovo, Apple, and Google enable hybrid meetings. Blockchain smart contracts will safeguard each employee’s identity and access to their digital assets.


The concept of the metaverse involves creating a simulation of the physical world within the digital realm. This allows for enhanced experiences through the use of virtual or augmented reality while optimizing the physical world. Digital twins, a crucial component of the metaverse, enables Barrow Wise to recreate the physical world in its entirety in the digital space, right down to the smallest detail. With the help of advanced sensors, AI, and communication technology, replicas of physical objects, devices, systems, people, and even places, can be created in the digital realm. The virtual model accurately reflects its real-life counterpart, as sensors actively relay data related to its functionality and environment to its digital twin in real-time. Any changes made to the physical object or system will be reflected in its digital representation and vice versa. This data can be utilized to develop new processes and services such as predictive maintenance, training simulations, interactive design and testing, and dark manufacturing.


Barrow Wise provides organizations with an inclusive metaverse where users have complete control over their data, privacy, and identity and feel safe and welcome.  Colleagues meeting in person will be seamlessly copied to virtual reality as hyper-realistic avatars, including their movements and facial expressions, enabling hybrid collaboration that mimics the all-physical meetings of the past. Welcome to the enterprise metaverse and the future of work!

Artificial Intelligence

As the world continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, businesses must stay adaptable and forward-thinking. At Barrow Wise, we recognize this need and offer cutting-edge technological solutions to help organizations remain ahead of the curve. At Barrow Wise, we specialize in identifying problems that can be solved through AI and matching them with the appropriate techniques and skills. Our team achieves precision through multiple iterations and sophisticated AI methods. We work closely with our clients to establish best practices, which include viewing organizational problems through the lens of AI, building datasets to train models and evaluate algorithms, designing AI-powered applications, developing effective solutions through an iterative process, and testing and monitoring AI applications in the field.


Artificial intelligence has successfully brought numerous commercial products and services that affect our daily lives. Its goal is to imitate and enhance biological intelligence to create intelligent systems and processes that can operate and interact independently in various environments, whether structured or unstructured, static or dynamic, and fully or partially observable. To achieve this, AI draws inspiration from human intelligence, such as situational awareness, decision-making, problem-solving, learning from the environment, and adapting to changes. AI encompasses several subfields, including perception (e.g., image understanding, speech recognition, natural language understanding), knowledge representation, cognitive reasoning, machine learning, data analytics (e.g., descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analytics), problem-solving (e.g., using search and optimization), distributed AI, and acting (e.g., virtual assistants and robots).


One of the most exciting and powerful tools at our disposal is generative AI. This groundbreaking technology offers endless possibilities for streamlining processes, enhancing efficiency, and driving growth, giving businesses a competitive advantage and equipping organizations to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.


As generative AI experts, we provide tailor-made solutions that cater to the specific needs of each client. Whether you're seeking to automate routine tasks, optimize complex processes, or obtain insights from your data, we have you covered. If you're ready to take your organization to the next level, contact us today and let us demonstrate the power of generative AI.