Let's use the example of wedding planners to understand digital platforms. Wedding planners help couples create a great experience for this really important day in their life. They allow for many vendors to come together to provide an amazing experience for the couple's. Right from the flower arrangements, to the cakes, to the food, to the budget, to the drinks, the photography, the calendar invites, and the venue itself. All of this information about the different vendors are stored for wedding planners in an operational backbone which is the common source of truth. Now, on top of this operation backbone, there is a digital platform that allows for the data to be collected and create new digital offerings for the consumers. Now, let's consider one of these digital offerings. Payment services. Once all the events is done, we get the pleasurable experience of paying for all this. Now, when you are paying a one-shot bill with a wedding planner, you might want to know, hey, what were the individual items costing like? What did the cost of flower arrangements was? What the cost of the food was? Et cetera. Now, to enable the service for its customers, the wedding planner system should be able to tap into the wedding database, which has details about the couple and the number of people they invited, and to the databases of the external vendors about the flower arrangements and the catering services, and then collect all of this information and present it in a nice format on the website. That is the job of infrastructure services. Now, this infrastructure services works with data components. The data components taps into the operational backbone to identify the details that are necessary. If the infrastructure service tells the data competent, I want information about the couple, then the data component takes that command and goes to the operation backbone and finds, who the couple are, what the venue is, what the rental rates were, how many people were invited, and presents it into the infrastructure services, which then combines the data with the payment services and with the vendor database to present this bill to the consumers. The same services are useful even at the early stages of the wedding planning process. If you want to figure out, hey, what is my budget going to be looking like? What happens to my budget if I change a particular catering service, or if I change a particular option within a catering service? You can imagine the same infrastructure data and business components getting reused. This component structure allows for modularity. It allows for reusability of the same activities across different stages of the wedding planning process. You still have a common source of truth in the operational backbone, and the data component is your interface to the operational backbone. Now, this setup also allows you to change your Cloud Data Service Provider easily. The cloud Data Service Provider is normally used for the operational backbone, and if you're changing from say, Microsoft Azure to Amazon Web Services, all you need to do is change the data component structure, and you can still leave the infrastructure services and business components intact. This allows for flexibility in also changing the different cloud services if you wish. The digital platform is a repository of business data and infrastructure components that can be used to rapidly configure new digital offerings. It connects with the operational backbone, which stores the raw data in a secure environment and ensures reliability. It provides access to data and has tools to develop new products and services. It has utilities that can be combined and recreated to create new services. The digital platform hence provides modularity and flexibility in allowing for innovation while also keeping the data reliable and secure in the operational backbone.
