Rewired, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 31Design solutions for scale and reuse

Imagine you ran a successful restaurant. The food is great, the décor warm and inviting, and the service top-notch. Your restaurant is fully booked every night—in fact, you have to turn people away.

Now imagine you wanted to open a few more locations of the same restaurant in different cities. You wouldn’t try to figure out the menu from scratch or redo the style and ambience. No, you’d take the model of the successful restaurant you had and focus on replicating it, tailoring perhaps for small differences in regional taste or nuances of the specific footprint.

That replication model idea is the essence of scaling.

Scaling is where most Tech & AI transformations stumble, which is a big problem because scaling is also where the lion’s share of the value is.

The key concept behind successful scaling is around replicating the adoption of solutions in different environments quickly and economically. Those environments typically are different customer segments, supply chains, production lines, business units, and geographic markets across the enterprise. We will refer to these replication targets simply as “units” in this chapter.

Successful scaling requires designing an efficient method and supporting infrastructure to reuse and adapt the tech or AI solution to the specifics of different units.

Figure out your ‘units’ for scaling

Let’s start with an obvious point: not all scaling is the same. Sometimes it’s pretty straightforward. ...