Digital Twins - Human and Business
Human Digital Twins promise breakthroughs in personalised health treatment. The AptumX Business Digital Twin already offers a similar solution to organisations.
There has been some fascinating media coverage recently about the potential to use Digital Twins to enable personalised health treatment - here’s a piece from the Guardian: How digital twins may enable personalised health treatment | Medical research | The Guardian
Amongst the many intriguing benefits are the use of virtual organs to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs and the development of patient-specific organ models to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications.
Put simply, this involves capturing data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems and then overlaying them with patients’ personal data to create virtual models of their organs, and eventually their whole body. This technology is already being deployed in the treatment of some heart conditions, and before long it’s expected to benefit cancer patients too.
Digital Twin technology will be revolutionary for management of our personal health – but all of this potential applies equally to businesses, where a similar solution is much closer than many people would realise.
The Business Digital Twin
Where the Digital Twin of a human will contain data about how the human body works and then overlay a patient’s personal data, the Business Digital Twin similarly contains data about how businesses work:
The activities they perform and how they connect to one another
The resources those activities consume and the relationships between these resources and the activities to which they relate
The structure in which the activities are performed and the resources consumed.
Just as the Human Digital Twin will overlay personal data onto its data-rich model, so the Business Digital Twin does the same for each individual organisation that uses it, enabling every unique aspect of how that organisation works to be understood in a model that is already wired up with the integral connections between activities, resources and structure provided by our proprietary Enterprise System Logic language. And because the Digital Twin contains all the components of an operating business, it not only models reality, it automates it and becomes integral to it – controlling the flow of work, orchestrating use of systems, enabling the design and execution of changes to process and activities.
The unique power of the AptumX Digital Twin lies in its construct as an integrated model of business. No change can be made without all the impacted areas of the business being considered and the necessary ancillary changes modelled and implemented. This reduces the risks associated with how change is made today, not really knowing - without a lot of cross-checking - whether or not your change will destabilise the business. The model makes it feasible to make changes, large or small, as soon as the opportunity arises and the business case has been made, as part of business as usual.
Consequently, in the same way that the human Digital Twin will make it possible to accurately predict how the body will respond to medical treatment, so we can use the Business Digital Twin to evaluate decisions and changes, from the small, day-to-day to the long-term and strategic, and make informed predictions about the implications of these decisions:
How they will play out
Which parts of the organisation (and external parties) they will impact
What the options for execution are
Where pressure points will arise – on resources, processes etc
What additional resources will be needed and what they will be required to do.
The AptumX Business Digital Twin is already being used in this way, and as we roll out future developments including use of machine learning and artificial intelligence alongside our new virtual WorkPlace platform that puts this leading edge functionality into the hands of every employee, the potential is only going to grow.