METHOdology for DIH: Adding the Remote Macro-Class to the D-BEST Reference Model

Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) support businesses in their digital transformation, providing technological, educational, and financial services, as part of a rich ecosystem of stakeholders. Being quite new-born organisations, the offering of DIHs very often doesn’t follow a common standard pattern. To support DIHs’ daily activities both with customers but also in cross-regional initiatives and to define a sustainable offering matching the customer needs, a structured suite of approaches (called METODIH and grounded on the well-known and widely adopted D-BEST reference model) is proposed. The approach provides four basics tools: service portfolio analysis, customer journey analysis, digital transformation pipelines, and business and governance models. In particular, the paper introduces the addition to the D-BEST model of the Remote macro-class in the artificial intelligence domain. As a result, the DR-BEST model, based on six macro-classes, is presented as an improved version of the D-BEST, i.e., the previous standard framework for classifying DIH service portfolios.