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Joseph Shortino
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Joseph Shortino
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Incubating a sustainable digital twin solution from idea to IP

I partnered with business and technical teams to prepare a sustainable IP solution for launch through accelerated ideation and strategic design support.

Official product page
Launch announcement

Getting enterprises to green with actionable carbon insights

CGI DataTwin is a platform-as-a-service that helps organizations understand and reduce the carbon footprint of their hosting platforms by transforming complex data into actionable insights.

With interactive dashboards and 3-D visualizations, operations teams gain a clear view of their sustainability impact, helping their organization comply with emerging climate regulations and directives.

An abstract, masonry layout of various workshop boards from the Idea-2-IP development program
Previously on DataTwin...

Where we started

Following 4 idea-to-IP development workshops I facilitated, the DataTwin team reengaged our human-centered design (HCD) team for continued support.

During those workshops, we refined:
  • Product ideas
  • Use cases
  • Value propositions
  • Pitch presentation
  • Sales demo
  • Flexible IP name
Before our kickoff, I ramped up our UX strategist and designers on the project’s progress, digital twin tech, and key partners enabling us to hit the ground running during our 2-week engagement.<

Pain points to address

  • Enterprise customers lack knowledge of energy efficiency and emissions, and sustainable management of hosting platforms and software.
  • They lack actionable, granular data to report on energy consumption and emissions of the network, storage, memory, CPU, software, and application.
  • They need to lower operational costs of hosting platforms—potentially up to 10%.

Benefits to realize

  • Optimization into power use and purpose, all while refactoring IT architecture.
  • Data-driven guidance on high-density deployments to assess impacts on energy efficiency and carbon footprint.
  • Actionable insights to identify what needs to be improved, including accurate carbon accounting for organizational targets, benchmarks of current emissions, and reports for compliance.

High-momentum and morale, high-output

Week 1 activities

  • Group discovery facilitation
  • Requirements gathering
  • MVP prioritization
  • Information visualization
  • Technical knowledge shares and validation
  • New design system implementation

Week 2 outputs

  • Presentation collateral
  • UI components and guidance 
  • User journey maps
  • Sales models
  • Click-through prototype
  • Pattern library documentation
A zoomed-out workshop board view from the project
A week of working sessions with the experts

Aligning on the MVP and refining the vision

Expansion beyond the UK & Australian markets

As the organization sells DataTwin in more countries, the content, design, and interactions consider language support, currency and unit conversion, and targets based on regional compliance targets.

Intelligent insights with powerful reports

Beyond individual-element or network-wide insights, DataTwin could cluster elements together by hosted-application data, function, placement, and more. 

One day, machine-learning (ML) models may identity issues, simulate solutions, and proactively present opportunities to conserve resources.

Premium offerings for select clients and industries

After the core functionality is developed, investments in advanced features, third-party integrations, and service offerings could create new revenue streams for DataTwin.

Some ideas included custom labeling/branding, white-glove service delivery with continued support, and other industry- or client-specific enhancements.

Frameworks to accelerate new IP development

DataTwin’s assets, learnings, and success could be reused to jumpstart development on additional sustainability-focused digital twin offerings.   

An array of product names that showcase DataTwins flexibility, including subtitles for industries and use cases, new specialized IP offerings, and custom labelling.
A desktop and tablet view of a digital twin simulation with server heat maps and alerts. Menus show technical performance and emissions data.
An abstract, masonry layout of various workshop boards from the Idea-2-IP development program

My contributions to DataTwin

Co-facilitating discovery activities

After ramping up our HCD team, I handed the reigns to our UX strategist and co-facilitated and supported our efforts where needed—preparing boards, capturing feedback on knowledge shares, and synthesizing findings with the HCD team.

When our team met the initial ask halfway through the engagement, our teams discussed ways we could further socialize DataTwin throughout the organization and ideate a feature roadmap for versions 2 and beyond.

Bringing DataTwin to life

Since our initial development workshops, the DataTwin team successfully pitched to idea-to-IP leadership and secured initial funding.

To enable their team to get buy-in from internal leadership and contracts with interested customers, we produced demo, pitch, and pre-sales collateral to send off DataTwin with a strong foundation.

Gaining executive buy-in

To tell the story of our HCD partnership, and reveal the MVP, roadmap, and vision for DataTwin, we prepared a 15-minute presentation executive presentation.

After a few rounds of storyboard, script, and visual revisions with our HCD leads, our team presented DataTwin to the organization’s UK & Australia President and heads of IP and Global Innovations.

The excitement, interest, and support generated gave new momentum and energy to the project team that led to a successful idea-to-IP launch 6 months later.

Overdelivering, by design

DataTwin was unlike past product ideas that came through our idea-to-IP program, but our practice wanted to replicate the success with similar cross-functional HCD engagements.

I continued to support highly-technical produce teams in future workshops, but funding dedicated HCD incubation for every viable idea that went through the program wasn’t a possibility or priority at the time.

Regardless, we created reusable innovation incubation workshop activities, design system components, Figma templates, and other collateral that could accelerate future innovation incubation work.

Collaborating coast-to-coast and across the pond
Custom components with an unmistakably-CGI design

From idea to real-world impact

Today, the shared vision and core messaging we helped shape continues to guide DataTwin’s commercial and environmental success:

CGI DataTwin360 empowers organizations to reduce carbon their carbon footprint by aggregating complex data sets from multiple sources and transforming them into actionable insights for stakeholders.

Want to discuss the details? Let's walk through my work and process together.

Say hello@josephshortino.com
Two abstract process maps. One has two consecutive processes that diverge near a deadline. The other is a single highly-collaborative process with multiple team members with an earlier delivery.

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A light-mode display of the incident response platform map

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