Summary

  • 3 minutes

In this module, you learned how Azure technologies can support you along the innovation cycle (build, measure, and learn):

  • DevOps practices and modern application technologies reduce the duration of loops in the innovation cycle, to accelerate the creation of business value.
  • You can use data obtained from the application to analyze whether innovation hypotheses are correct, partially correct, or false. This data also allows you to correlate technical aspects of the application to business metrics.
  • Data democratization makes sure that the collected data is used to learn from the innovation cycle, and that a growth mindset culture spreads across your organization.

Tailwind Traders is using Azure to power its innovation engine in multiple ways:

  • Azure DevOps allows Tailwind Traders to introduce application changes frequently and reliably.
  • Tailwind Traders has chosen to re-engineer their e-commerce platform into a microservices architecture, to facilitate introducing changes.
  • The company has decided to containerize their e-commerce platform's microservices and deploy them on Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • Tailwind Traders wants to enrich its applications by using Azure Machine Learning and AI technologies. The company has decided to add a chat for customers to open support cases, a modern product search portal, and a recommendation engine that suggests additional offers to registered users.
  • The e-commerce website has been equipped with Azure Application Insights telemetry. These insights allow Tailwind Traders to gather data on the utilization of new features to confirm or reject hypotheses about the business value that each innovation adds.
  • Tailwind Traders chose Microsoft Power BI to disseminate data across its organization. The goal is to ensure that decisions are data driven and that a growth mindset becomes pervasive. This data-driven decision process allows Tailwind Traders to formulate, build, and verify innovation hypotheses quickly to continue improving its customer experience and business impact.

Next steps

For more information about the subjects described in this module, read the Cloud innovation in the Cloud Adoption Framework documentation.