10.3 Digital Transformation Program

The purpose of any program is to achieve a predefined result under resource constraints. This is what economic programs and computer programs have in common. In the digital era, the quality of economic, state, investment, and production programs must come as close as possible to the quality and production culture of software. The age of information technology has given society a substantially new understanding of product quality; the means of designing, manufacturing, testing, and accepting it; and the absolute formalization of both programming languages and the data processed by computers.

Under the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, a computer program is a set of data and commands presented in objective form and intended for the operation of computers and other computing devices in order to obtain a specific result.

An analysis of current state and investment programs of Russian monopolists shows that, despite the formal presence of target blocks in programs and resources allocated to achieve them, program goals are not only quantitatively unlinked to measures, but also fail to fully describe the techno-economic state of the programmed system. From the standpoint of software engineering, such programs are non-executable and therefore erroneous. Management science and economics still have to absorb the best practices of software and systems engineering.

The formation of digital transformation programs, which are part of unified development programs for controlled systems, is based on principles that determine the procedure and structure of the future program document:

  1. The main problem and challenge of the CS, meaning the controlled system or modeling object, primarily understood here as an industrial enterprise, is low effectiveness and efficiency in using resources to fulfill its target purpose.

  1. The response to the challenge is a continuously operating CS digitalization program that ensures the transition to objective and precise methods for managing CS operation and development; the quantitatively grounded adjustment of plans, structural-technological and territorial schemes, and organizational and technical decisions; and production and investment programs.

  2. The specific feature of the CS digital economy is the introduction into the management and resource-allocation system of a new element: a digital, continuously operating, integrated CS model or “digital twin”. This model implements a quantitatively expressed cause-and-effect relationship between CS parameters and each organizational-technical decision, or inaction, and the planned CS effectiveness at different planning horizons and time periods44.

  3. The goal of the digitalization program is growth in CS efficiency, reliability, and safety.

  4. The typical scope of program tasks and sections includes:

  • increasing CS productivity;

  • reducing expenses and costs for producing CS output;

  • reducing damages caused by the CS;

  • reducing under-delivery of CS output with specified quality parameters;

  • reducing the probability of damage to consumers and the external environment;

  • reducing the cost of product sales;

  • increasing competitiveness in external markets.

  1. Task decomposition. Program tasks are decomposed sequentially by individual analytical slices of the CS.

  2. Program indicators: the current, forecast, and rolling planned techno-economic state of the CS; the related goals and objectives of the CS digitalization program; and their expression as combinations of three basic indicators: production volumes, costs, and damages in physical, value, and energy equivalents.

  3. Forms of capitalized intangible results for each measure of the digitalization program:

  • regulatory-technical and regulatory-legal documentation;

  • innovative products introduced into the CS: substances, materials, equipment, or technologies;

  • the integrated CS model and the procedure for monitoring, assessing, forecasting, optimizing, and creating a CS with specified characteristics;

  • a repository of experimental and statistical CS data;

  • a training and certification program based on the results of the measures;

  • a mechanism for integrating data on the implemented aspect throughout the CS life cycle.

  1. The source of program financing is the CS digitalization fund, replenished by part of the economic results obtained by the CS as a consequence of implementing the CS digitalization program. The fund’s initial resources, sufficient for implementing the CS digitalization program in the first years, are formed from the current resources of the CS on a recoverable basis.

  2. Responsibility. For every goal, task, result, indicator, program, measure, project, aspect, CS, and separate CS element, specific persons must be designated as responsible both for making the decision and defining its planned results, and for execution.

  1. And in other analytical slices.↩︎