Supercharge your next tech project with virtual co-creation

31 March, 2020
Elisabeth Stahl
IBM

You know your business inside and out. You’re aware of its IT needs and challenges, and you want to take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies. Perhaps you’re looking to get supercharged on the latest tech trends and see how to employ them in your organization. What if your IT team could join forces with infrastructure specialists to co-create enterprise-scale solutions quickly?

Co-creation is the concept of generating shared business value through partnership between a company and its customers. It can be used to brainstorm new products or services, solve problems or boost performance. In the IT industry, businesses might co-create IT solutions by working together to identify potential projects, define their scope and chart a plan for implementing them.

Co-creating with IT infrastructure experts

The IBM Systems Co-Creation Lab provides a collaborative environment where you and IBM IT infrastructure experts work side-by-side to create first-of-a-kind strategies and solutions. IT architects from around the world design and develop applications with you in technologies like hybrid multicloud and AI.

Co-creation workshops with IBM have helped organizations across industries to quickly innovate IT solutions:

  • A major apparel retailer used co-creation to explore a new AI application for fashion recommendations with AI vision capabilities.
  • A financial services company pursued a co-creation approach to help modernize its storage infrastructure for greater cyber resiliency after an outage impacted its business.
  • A large bank used co-creation to discover how cloud and AI could help it address regulatory and resiliency issues, enhance its mobile platform and expand retail operations.

Co-creation workshops led by IBM Systems Worldwide Client Experience Centers can be hosted at your location, IBM Business Partner sites, IBM locations around the world or virtually. Virtual workshops, such as our 90-minute virtual Discovery workshop, have successfully helped businesses quickly explore and launch new IT solutions.

Technology focus areas for our co-creation workshops include:

  • Infrastructure modernization
  • AI, machine learning and deep learning
  • Hybrid multicloud and Red Hat
  • Enterprise security
  • Storage
  • Analytics
  • Blockchain

Working in one or more of these technology areas, you can choose from four types of co-creation workshops, depending on where you are in your IT project.

The Co-Creation Lab workshops

Discovery workshop

A discovery workshop is an opportunity for CIOs and other business executives to work with IBM infrastructure experts to identify market opportunities, discuss their business challenges and brainstorm use cases for potential technologies. This workshop can help you gain deeper insight into your infrastructure and find innovative ways to grow your business by working smarter and faster. A no-cost discovery workshop is a multi-hour event, and you’ll come away with a report identifying the results of the co-creation discovery process.

Design Thinking workshop

Enterprise Design Thinking methodologies help teams learn how to focus their work around users’ needs. A Design Thinking workshop is an opportunity for various stakeholders across a business to align on a business opportunity and use case. Using tools like storyboarding, empathy mapping and retrospectives, this multi-day workshop helps you evaluate current business and IT processes and define the minimum viable product (MVP) for a solution your organization wants to put in place.

Architectural consulting

In an architectural consultation, you work with an IBM Systems Co-Creation Lab architect to determine the design and scope of your project, and to validate a use case with stakeholders. This workshop brings together your knowledge of your IT strategy, users and ecosystem with an IBM architect’s leadership and guidance on architecture design for your project.

MVP build

When you’re ready to develop a functioning solution, an MVP build gives your development team the opportunity to work with agile experts from IBM Client Experience Centers who can help you learn fast, test hypotheses and iterate quickly as you build and deploy your MVP. Your developers and IBM developers work side-by-side to build and deploy the solution. Employing agile and DevOps practices encourages rapid, iterative user feedback, test-driven development, continuous integration and delivery.

See for yourself the difference co-creation can make

IBM Systems Co-Creation Lab can help you achieve enterprise-scale innovation at startup speed. Contact us today to learn more.

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