Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ed Granger, VP of Product Innovation, Orbus Software
Digital twin technology is well established in helping transform how physical products like spacecraft, airplanes, and vehicles are designed, built, and maintained. With companies facing increasing pressure to accelerate transformation efforts in order to compete and reduce costs, they need a way to gather forensic insights across their business. As a result, companies are starting to explore the idea of directing digital twin capabilities towards their operations. The digital twin of an organization (DTO) creates a virtual avatar of an enterprise, combining process mining, enterprise architecture (EA), and business performance to deliver these observations.
As we head into 2025, here are some DTO-related predictions I expect to see come to fruition.
1. Digital Twin of an Organization Comes Out of Stealth
In 2025, DTOs will start to be adopted as a way for companies to gain visibility into their entire operations. The virtual avatar of an enterprise uses real-time business data such as sales and customer satisfaction and process mining to help model and understand the intricacies, interdependencies, and impact of new initiatives.
A DTO enables performance to be understood in the context of business model design and technology platforms and enables scenario/’what-if’ analysis. If organizations can successfully integrate a DTO, innovation will be accelerated, delivering a competitive advantage. The early adopters of a DTO will be enterprises already utilizing digital twins. In the coming years, you can expect a technology arms race around DTOs to occur.
2. Gen AI will Become the BFF of a DTO
For the Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO) to realize its potential, AI is essential to analyze the vast volumes of data and provide predictive insights. The benefits of the technology span productivity, synthesis, insights, and personalization, impacting every step of the DTO journey. AI enhances data integration, analysis, scenario testing, and deployment and is the key to unlocking a successful DTO. However, the non-deterministic nature of AI brings risks that will increase regulation to ensure it is reliable and trustworthy, making human oversight essential.
3. DTO > SaaS Enterprise Architecture
In 2024, EA platform vendors integrated more process mining into their products to improve customer outcomes. That’s a clear sign of the way EA is evolving heading into 2025 and beyond. EA models found in organizations today, which guide critical transformation, are typically based on static data – leaving business design and performance essentially divorced from one another.
New possibilities to integrate data via event stores, APIs, and real-time operations promise an overhaul of this old way of doing things. It’s going to move the world closer toward DTOs, becoming practical realities. Disregard voices in 2025 that try to equate a DTO solely to SaaS-based EA. The truth is that we’re just at the start of the journey. DTOs are going to become embedded in organizations across the world over a five to ten-year period. It’s going to be those companies that are already taking steps towards real-time, data-led business modeling techniques that will benefit from DTOs first and be the envy of their competition. After all, which board wouldn’t want a real-time digital replica of their business to understand its inner workings and use this to improve transformation outcomes? It’s going to be nothing short of a revolution.
As enterprises grapple with complexity, they will need a DTO to navigate the intricacies and interdependencies. And with many struggling to execute on digital transformation initiatives, DTOs will increasingly become the foundation for successful and agile organizations.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ed Granger is the Vice President of Product Innovation at Orbus Software where he’s responsible for executing product roadmap innovation. Ed is vastly experienced in the enterprise architecture (EA) space-previously serving as a Product Strategist at software vendor Ardoq as well as working as an EA practitioner in multiple capacities.
