Strategic APS Integration: Preparing Your Organization for Autodesk Platform Services Enablement

ANNA MOSKVITINA: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Strategic APS Integration Session, Preparing Your Organization for Autodesk Platform Services Enablement. My name is Anna Moskvitina. I am digital delivery practice lead New Zealand and computational design community lead global in Mott MacDonald.

Basically, my experience spans from architecture, urban design. And later on I switched into civil infrastructure design and do some work on the energy sector. Currently, I'm focusing on deploying digital technologies within the company and also leading some digital upskilling implementation of new technologies and optimizing internal digital processes.

I will dive into why and how your business can implement Autodesk Platform Services. If you are already somewhat familiar with APS and its capability but not quite sure what it is and what should you do next to start implementing APS in your business, you are on the right session. I will give an overview of our company journeys as I was tasked to lead Autodesk Platform Services implementation across the company. That is why I'm presenting to you today to share our path and learnings.

Before I start, I wanted to thank all the people who were involved on the task. This task we undertook required knowledge and skills and specific technology implementations, as well as clear vision of how APS can support the wider business.

Just a quick overview of how this session will go. I will start by discussing the overall technology adoptions. In the second part, I will touch on infrastructure readiness and IT processes and guidelines. And we will finish with how actually create a team that can enable APS benefits for your business.

Let's begin with the first part, adoption, the path of digital transformation. When dealing with company-wide adoption, one should have a bigger picture in mind. Why would you adopt some technology and not others?

Basically, you should step back and ask yourself, why do I need to implement any new technology and what sort of issues and strategic goals do we need to achieve and can that technology actually help the business? And as we are stepping back to see the bigger picture, there is an interesting question emerge, why do companies need to innovate at all?

I wanted to start with a short story of how I came across the theory of innovation and companies. When I was studying cities and urban design, I came across the concept of scalability presented by Geoffrey Brian West. He introduced a theoretical framework that describes and predicts the life cycle of most organisms on the planet.

Essentially, he asked, why all living organisms have the goal of the cycle of development, stagnation, and decline? Why do organisms grow and then stop growing? Are there any laws and regularities that can be applied to any living organism?

It turns out that there are such laws and regularities using this framework. Geoffrey claimed that by knowing the mass of mammal, one could estimate other life characteristics on average, such as metabolic rate, heartbeat, growth, aging, and repair patterns and, based on that, predict, on average, the longevity of an organism.

They expanded this theory from nature to companies, cities, and economies. Geoffrey and his team started to ask a question, are cities and companies just a very large organism adhering to biological laws? And does this mean that we can predict the lifespan on companies and cities.

Basically, it's nature. It's considered good that organisms stop growing. However, it is considered detrimental if companies or economies stop growing. According to the theory, companies can't grow infinitely. At some point, they will reach a phase of stagnation and then collapse.

The interesting part is that-- sorry, the interesting part is that there is one factor. Well, one of the factors that can postpone that collapse, it is innovation. Theory suggest that the rate at what company innovate can predict the eligibility.

Basically, as companies start to form, they are quite innovative. They test and adopt the methods and new technologies quicker. But as the company grows, it tends to have quite dominant culture, which makes it harder to innovate. So we know that innovation is the essence of companies' growth.

OK, where can innovation manifest from? In this day and age, the digital space is the fastest growing industry. All other aspects of life are changing because of the digital advancements. I think everyone who has worked in a big organization has observed how quickly new technologies emerge in the market and how slow big companies can be in adopting them.

To keep up with-- to keep up with it, organization must shift from a static to a kinetic transformation mode, basically, moving from transforming every two years to state of constant evolution. Its cycle of technological advancements we miss put us in the future disadvantage. These losses can accumulate further disadvantage in the company and leading to loss of competitive power.

So why is digital transformation important to make companies fitter and more adaptable to ever changing business environment to create a competitive advantage, to implement new ideas quicker, and to optimize better existing processes? You might say, OK, we know that, but what relevance does it have to Autodesk Platform Services. I would tell you that all of these digital transformation challenges apply at the high level when you start to bring any new technology to the enterprise level.

Sorry, firstly, there are varied definitions of digital transformation. For some, it could mean performing more sophisticated tasks using Excel, while for others it could mean improving overall data management to enable AI. This leads to the overall digital strategy. Because there is a different level of understanding what digital transformation means for the company, it can create ambiguity in the overall strategy. For example, challenges in aligning organizational goals with technology strategy or inconsistent adoption of digital transformation across the organization.

Secondly, there is often a lack of leadership buy-in. It can be challenging to convey value of digital transformation to the business leadership. Subsequently, any further actions or support may hold.

With business case, you may find the best solution for your organization in the world. But if the business case is weak on why that solution is good for the business, the whole process may come to hold. Slow adoption speed of new technology. That leads to competitive disadvantage of the company, insufficiencies, and missed opportunities.

Dependencies on a technology supply chain, suppliers themselves may not always keep the pace with the latest technological advancements. This can slow down the company's ability to innovate and stay competitive. The same applies for outdated infrastructure.

Dependencies on absolute manual processes, that leads to insufficiencies, [INAUDIBLE] scalability issues, and any further integration challenges, high cost, et cetera. And there are obviously more to that. It's not enough to adopt technology and new processes quickly. You have to be very strategic about which technology you should be adopting.

It's not about blindly implementing new technology but carefully adopting suitable technology. If you're not quite sure what the suitable technology could be on strategic digital transformation scale, this research may give you some insights. According to Columbus, which is digital transformation solution company, enterprise digital maturity is aided by seven levers. Of these seven levers, two, data mastery and intelligent workflow have the biggest impact on driving digital maturity related to business outcomes.

In fact, 50% of revenue growth is enabled by these two levers, data and integration workflow alone. So to grow your digital maturity, overall, you need to put an effort into data mastery and intelligent workflow. Just a side note, APS Capabilities are well aligned with this and can play a pivotal role in these two areas.

So narrowing down the biggest strategy to actual solutions that can support that strategy, what role can APS play in that? Well, effective data management, as previous slide shows, effective data, harness, and utilization can drive your business success. Data analysis and business insight by providing access to proprietary data from a wide range of projects-- APS can reveal surprising and unknown patterns that can later be utilized to build further business strategy.

Intelligent workflows-- IPS can streamline manual processes that slow down business flow, making it easier for organizations to achieve higher levels of automation. Unified customer experience. Ensure that all customer interactions are consistent and streamlined and providing a robust ecosystem connecting data and workflows across different industries, industry cloud, sorry, and products in addition to accommodating scalable solutions.

It all sounds good. But APS implementation could be quite challenging. Let me give you an example from our experience at Mott MacDonald. So Mott MacDonald Group is a management, engineering, and development consultancy with offices all around the world. This is the scale we had to work with. Company itself adopted APS from the time it was known as Forge.

However, the initial challenges were lack of cross-company APS capability awareness. So some offices would really utilize and benefit from APS while others would not even know what it stands for. We had isolated pockets of application development. Those who benefited from using apps often did so in isolation and their success stories were not widely known.

Absence of centralized information resources. There were no company-wide guidelines, playbooks, or any other information on how to start with APS or how to use APS under the company's IT and data policies. Lack of usable solutions. If some solutions were developed, there was a potential that these solutions could not be applied-- sorry, implemented to other projects.

And lack of awareness of available APS skills. If a project wanted to speed up the adoption of APS and harness all its benefits, they would struggle to find internal experienced personnel to help streamline the adoption process. They would essentially have to start from the scratch to try and adopt them themselves. But even knowing the challenges, adopting APS on a large scale is still a big task.

Understanding APS capabilities. It is hard to explain APS to non-technical people. It is not an easy task to convey what APS can do. High entry barrier. APS is not ordinary software where you can ask a person with a general software user knowledge to produce anything using APS.

Management buy-in. Basically, it's just hard to explain APS benefits and what it can do for business. And if management does not understand, they will not support or provide a budget for the development. Integration complexity. You would need people who understand systems and connections to integrate multiple sources and training requirements.

APS requires a period of learning and training. So that should be taken into account. Even after extensive work we've done, we still got questions like, what is APS? And, after all this work we've done, I realized I shouldn't take it personally. It's just a not easy concept to grasp for non-technical or non-digital people. So you have to get creative on how you would introduce APS or APS capability to the business.

OK, we're starting to build an overarching approach here on how to adopt APS across business. First thing first, make sure that APS adoptions aligns with the bigger picture and overall digital strategy within your company. Since you will have to work with data a lot, ensure that you cross-reference all the data and information security protocols which you have within your business.

For example, all the data you host under ACC account, does it belong to the company? Or does it belong to the customer you're providing service to? Are they in a security risk associated with APS that your company would consider a high risk? All of these things need to be considered.

How can you ensure that APS development or implementation will fit for purpose and fulfill the needs of the sector you are working in? Or the clients you are working for should also consider overall integration readiness. Probably Autodesk should create some kind of tick box questionnaire for overall integration readiness for the company.

OK, who needs your buy-in? This is the hardest exercise. If you are, let's say, the boss, you can say, OK, let's do that. Let's start using APS. Here's the team. Here's the money. Let's go. No question asked, no problem here. But if you're the person who understands the benefits and needs to convince other people to undertake the adoption task, you are on a journey here.

However, those investments only lead to transformations if they are coupled with the serious works helping people adopt and use the technology in meaningful ways. I added here the example of roles that could be in your business and who they would be in relation to digital adoption.

For example, management would be a sponsor where your message could be that this technology will transform how we do the business, giving us more insights into our customers processes and projects, saving time and money, and providing us with competitive power.

Sorry. For the project leads, you could be more specific like, what is-- projects that you could be more specific. For example, we can optimize workflows and bring data in a timely manner. So all partners and stakeholders can make informed decisions quickly.

For projects or end users-- and I'm giving example projects here because we work predominantly on projects-- we can say, we are providing you with a project that can enable you with A, B, and C, like what are those benefits you can outline. And developers and technical leads and ITs would be product owners and stakeholder in this. And they will partner with you along the way of adoption and utilization of APS.

OK, for company-wide adoption, you have to be quite specific in terms of what you are going to do and what you need to achieve. So based on that, consider the following. You will need the business case with very clear stated program and approach. You need to state your objectives and what you're going to be delivering. You have to outline everyone who will be involved in the process of adoption, their roles and responsibilities.

You have to very clearly state your success metrics, basically, measure from start of the business case to end what you achieved, how you measured it, and what's the outcome. You have to be quite specific about the overall cost of that adoption process. And you have to have a communication plan in place. You will need to have a dedicated team to undertake all this process. And you have to have a training program in place to upskill people within the business.

We'll start how to raise a general awareness about APS. These things we tested in the company. And, generally, it worked. So webinars and workshops, where we hosted online webinars and explain what APS is, demonstrated use cases, showcase how it can be implemented on projects, and what it can do for projects-- We have to be very careful how we demonstrate the business benefits, basically emphasizing on tangible benefits when it is correctly implemented, such as cost savings, time savings or resource optimization.

Training, basically, undertaking or providing the training, you will get the people to the certain level of expertise where they can grasp what APS can do for business. And if they have some business insights, they can take in further and produce some profitable products, for example, and community engagement. It would be amazing if you can establish a community or user groups with the people who are using or know of APS so they can learn from each other and expand on their knowledge.

OK, now we're diving into-- the second part of this presentation is infrastructure readiness and guidelines. Generally speaking, we worked with data security and confidentiality to ensure how we adopt APS aligns well with overall business processes. And we also created a step-by-step playbook how to use and manage APS application within our organization. We also had to work with IT a lot to make sure that everyone who is working with APS is actually not creating a high-risk situation or anything IT would consider high risk.

So in terms of guidelines, we had a document called APS Acceptable Use Book. And I will provide more details on information there in the session handout. But just to give you an overview of what that acceptable use stated, basically how you can access the platform in the system requirements and any ACC permissions or any elevated rights you should have to start.

Development. We stated what is the cost of using APS, how should be tested, how it should be reviewed and approved, moving from the test to the production environment and any supporting documents you have to produce along the way. We also have to be clear on the data compliance and security in the internal and external use, if it's applicable, how to access any application developed any data access and usage permission, and basically have a clause about any external sales if it's applicable.

APS Playbook, it's more soft version. It's basically introducing people or developers on how to use APS. It will outline how to get started with APS internally, how to access developer portal in your recommendations on development and tools, creating an application basically step by step how you can start with any application development-- reference the development and best practices.

Just mentioned, APIs is the case. And any connectors help on learning and examples. For examples, it would be good if you have something within your company develop which people who learn can grab and maybe just even to duplicate what's being done in a quicker and easier way. So get them introduced, or it's something they can grab and build on top.

Into development, so generally speaking, we have a sandbox. It's a dev account which is used for test practice. Any development which is not related to live projects, where we use clone or synthetic data for the training purposes and testing purposes-- only when the testing is done and application received all levels of approvals, that application will move to the live project. This is how we ensure that the data is protected and we are delivering the acceptable quality products to the live projects.

OK, now training and upskilling. In terms of training, you can have multiple options here. Sorry. Basically, we found out there is online training, online developer documentation, and online resources where anyone with developer knowledge and skills can go and read those documents and get themselves introduced to APS. That would require more time because it's self-learning. And you basically need to guide yourself through all this information.

Autodesk also provides developer accelerators. Those accelerators are a week-long opportunity to get some training and get support from professionals who work with Autodesk Platform Services. Those are scheduled throughout the year. It's not something you can request. So you would need to go to the link of accelerator sequence, next one, where they scheduled, and see if you actually can join and participate.

You can request training from Autodesk. Basically, if you have an Autodesk account, you can reach your Autodesk account manager and say, we are planning to adopt Autodesk. We need certain amount of people to be trained. Is it under our contract that we can request that service? If not, how we can go about it?

And, basically, appointing APS champion internally, if someone already taken the training, know what they're doing, they can start passing that knowledge throughout the company. And it's basically internal person who really knows how to handle APS. And they will teach others internally. Within Mott MacDonald, we decided to request training with Autodesk to streamline the process and get, I guess, professional team support in terms of onboarding people and starting use APS.

OK, now diving deep into training preparations, you'll have to be prepared in advance before you undertake any training. I would suggest you take your time and have a decent gap between you start advertising the training and have the training period itself because most likely, you'll be collecting people from all over the business.

You would need to notify the managers. You would need to notify whatever regions, offices, et cetera that this is happening and how they can benefit from it. And they have to have a dedicated people to take the training, dedicate the time. So to achieve a decent level of APS understanding, you would need a minimum of four to five full days of training.

You'd need to be clear about the minimal skills and knowledge required to undertake the training. And I will dive deeper into it in the next slide. Basically, make sure the trainees have necessary sources before they start. They have to have certain software installed. They have to have access tokens. They have to have a correct permissions provided, et cetera.

Channels of communications, this is basically preparing or providing people the opportunity. If they have any questions along the way, their training, they can ask questions or even beforehand. So do you need to create a dedicated channel and notify everyone who will be involved in training or potentially involved in training that this channel exists. And they can go and ask the questions before, during, or after the training. And if your organization have basically dedicated IT, just get IT involved to resolve any technical issues along the way.

Trainee profile. OK, so as I mentioned before, it's not an ordinary software. You can just start using from scratch. Your people or people who participate in the training have to be a software developer. They have to be a trained software developer. And they have to have knowledge of C# and .NET at minimum.

Ideally, if on top of that they have some experience working on other business applications, it would be perfect if they understand business challenges and business needs because in that case, they will come up with ideas on how to actually implement APS within the business for the best outcome possible. And they have to have some familiarity with Autodesk software.

Training content. So this content has been provided to us by Autodesk. This was a minimum base, I think, what developers should be trained on to actually have some decent skills to continue. It was split by presentation and code tutorials. Overall, people would be having a theoretical or sessions on how to. And then they will have a chance to actually code and do some development themselves with the support or with the people who oversee the development and can answer questions.

OK, so now all of this, what it will come to and action sprint or, sorry, adoption sprint. Basically, you need to prepare your strategy and plan well how you're going to approach it. You will need a dedicated team to oversee the digital adoptions.

Most likely within the team, you'll have to be-- you'll have to have someone who is managing the overall process. And you would need to have some technical or technically skilled-- sorry, technically knowledgeable person involved.

You need to review and formulate APS guidelines in relation to the company's data security. You need to publish APS guidelines for internal use, develop and review APS Playbook, prepare and publish internal information pages. And all of those actions will form or prepare you-- it's like setting up internal guidelines and internal processes. This is important to do before you go into the training program.

Approximately, those timelines are not necessarily as I state but approximately could take one to two months, depends on the size of the organization, people, and resources involved.

OK, next step, you'll be choosing a training method, identifying potential trainees, and actually undertaking the training. And we can group them as an internal upskilling. Why is it important to set up internal guidelines before you go into training is because you'll be providing those guidelines to the people you train and take it approximately a month to overall process from initiating or scheduling the training to actually finishing the training.

Next step is create users database, start collecting use cases, and maintain APS internal resources. And that will group in internal APS resources. So this information have to be available and accessible for everyone in your business. And also roughly time guidelines to two weeks to one month.

Going forward, this is not just one-off sprint, and you can let it go, and it's all good. This is ongoing process. You'll be identifying areas for improvement and development strategy going forward. Basically, whatever you think you missed notice should be worked on further on or down the line, that will be your gap analysis and next step forward and next business case.

Generally speaking, we notice that it would be good if you have internal guidelines and processes that before you start presenting APS capability in solutions to the broader business. Because in this case, people would have some internal resources to go to and start researching themselves if necessary.

And just wanted to highlight one of the use cases, so William Hamilton was one of the people who took the company-wide training for Autodesk Platform Services last year. And this year he's presenting his use case, a web-based application prototype and centralized platform for engineers to automatically design and configure the platform plant rooms without leaving their browser.

So, last year, Bill took an interest in the training, took the training, had idea how to implement APS. And this year he successfully presented his case.

And that's it. Thank you very much. If you have any questions, I think there will be a link to my LinkedIn profile somewhere. Please feel free to contact. We'll be happy to support or answer any of your questions. Thank you.