Interview with Wilko Visser: About ValueBlue and the Future of Digital Transformation Tools

A short while ago, ValueBlue CEO Wilko Visser was interviewed by CyberNews. Here, Wilko shares the story of how ValueBlue came to be, the organization’s journey so far, and what the future holds. Moreover, Wilko presents his vision on tackling transformation challenges, the current tooling offerings, where the gaps in the market are, and what any organisation must consider when looking for a tool to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

You can read the full interview with all thought-provoking questions on the website of CyberNews. Below is an excerpt containing a selection of questions.

Moving from traditional IT solutions has become the new normal. Institutions are constantly peeking for the right tools to enable and simplify this process.

In the past, many have counted on standard linear planning tools like Excel or PowerPoint. However, today’s technologies and projects require much more advanced Enterprise Architecture (EA) management tools. It is no longer a question of whether EA is needed, as awareness of possibilities brought by such a tool is rapidly increasing amongst industries.

We were curious: what industries can most benefit from EA tools and what challenges could appear while digitalizing the company? For this reason, Cybernews got in touch with Wilko Visser, CEO of ValueBlue – a company that offers a platform called BlueDolphin for Enterprise Architecture and digital transformation.

 

Can you introduce us to your BlueDolphin platform? What are the main issues you help solve?

BlueDolphin empowers organizations to accelerate their business transformation through agile, data-driven, intelligent collaboration. Accelerating business transformation is the core value we want to provide. BlueDolphin helps to define goals, monitor progress, and measure effectiveness throughout the business.

The platform supports teams to work in an agile way, so they can react faster to internal and external changes and innovation. BlueDolphin provides Enterprise Architects with context and the means to evaluate and iterate organizational projects and initiatives.

Access to the right data is vital in making well-informed decisions. BlueDolphin aggregates different sources of information and the connections between the objects within a single repository. Combined with the platform’s reporting features, architects and C-level actors are able to realize data-driven solutions that support the business objectives. Additionally, by providing intelligent analytic functionality, BlueDolphin supports impact analyses and alignment with other projects’ goals.

Finally, collaboration is key to working more efficiently. Enterprise architects, solution managers, and similar roles all need visibility and control over different aspects of a (transformation) initiative. This helps to coordinate daily work on an interdisciplinary level and align initiatives with organizational goals throughout the process.

 

What would you consider to be the most difficult challenges that companies face on their digital transformation journey?

There are three main challenges. Firstly, the ever-increasing need for rapid digitization is hard to keep up with. This encompasses technical innovation, changing customer demands, supply chain dependencies, decentralization hampering easy collaboration, and more.

Second, lacking insights into the current state of digital infrastructure and the ways in which alignment between projects and organizational goals should be managed results in organizations not knowing which initiatives are most beneficial to the business objectives and how to allocate resources accordingly.

Lastly, regulations demand more control and transparency, which is hard to achieve when self-steering teams are working in silos with their own processes, and more of the organization’s digital infrastructure is dependent on applications and services from third parties.

 

Share with us, what does the future hold for ValueBlue?

Since 2014, we’ve continued to develop our product to better serve the demands of large organizations globally, and the changing face of their IT and transformation teams. Breaking down the siloes and aligning corporate strategy with execution in initiatives and projects.

ValueBlue has a clear vision of a collaborative, data-driven future of business transformation, and we work to effectively translate this into market-leading product capabilities that enable architects and project teams designing the organizations of tomorrow to achieve more value from their transformation initiatives, faster.