Choose your own adventure: (Business outcomes via Technology)
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Dominic Maidment - Technology Architect at Total Gas and Power Like a 'choose your own adventure book', attaining the business outcomes that your organisation needs to survive or flourish usually involve educated choices around implementation approaches. The industry is full of vendors which claim to have an answer for everything and consultancies that have a five year plan that involve them, how do we make sure we are listening to the right voices and how do we know when we are finished changing the world? Don't just skip to the end, (after an expensive transformation programme) try to make choices that lead to business outcomes.
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Choose your own adventure: (Business outcomes via Technology)
- 1. Choose your own adventure Business outcomes via Technology Dominic Maidment
- 2. Choose your own adventure • Start at the beginning • Live with your choices • Did you achieve your business outcomes?
- 5. Voices you hear along the way • "Our offering does everything!” • "Don’t talk to them” • “Its all your fault”
- 6. Example Cloud Adventure Don’t skip to the end
- 7. Maintain Existing Offerings Translate them into to the Cloud Innovate For New Offerings Actual Needs
- 9. Approaches to cloud migration The six Rs
- 10. Example Cloud Adventure Re-platformand consolidate Existing legacy Architecture Target Architecture Private Cloud Public Cloud OnPremiseOnPremise Transitional hybrid Architecture Retain essential services, prepare to migrate Migrateworkloadstoappropriatecloud Non-Prod Prod Non-Prod
- 11. Success Criteria Use case driven Simplicity Business Driven Business Value Reliability Balanced AdoptionAccuracy Evolution Maturity
- 12. Considerations and advice Vendor lock-in exists in the cloud as well as in your datacentre Build on standards rather than products Consider your integration strategy
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for your time this morning, it’s a great pleasure to be speaking in front of you, there is some time for questions and answers afterwards, a meaningful dialogue is probably more useful to you than dry pontification on my part. I was reading a report on IntelligentCIO revealing that Digital Transformation projects are stalling due to a ‘hesitancy gap’, as enterprises struggle to navigate the risks and complexity associated with turning innovation from concept to reality: “The complexity of connecting a mix of cloud services and other technologies together adds a significant challenge to overcome before transformation projects can turn into a reality. Adding further strain, there’s the risk that even just a Proof of Concept could have a negative impact on live production systems, leading to service failures that result in reputational or revenue damage. This is understandably causing enterprises concern, resulting in many projects falling behind and innovation to stagnate”
- Much like a ‘choose your own adventure book’, which I fondly remember from my youth, we have to start at the beginning when approaching our transformation programmes, we have to be clear on what we are trying achieve, down to the macro level in order to derive value from our efforts and expenditure. Avoiding a place where we start trying to cram a business process into a tool rather than starting with a business process and finding an appropriate tool to create a solution with, for a set of requirements is paramount. In a ‘choose your own adventure book’ you can if you like, fold a page or make a mark and roll back to the time before you made that choice that perhaps sent you plummeting off the edge of a cliff. The market is awash with tools and offerings which claim to service the needs of our businesses, our desires to change, to remain competitive, to offer new services: quicker, faster and better. That’s why making choices, is really important as you have, to in most cases live with the impact for around 5 years. Lastly, measuring the value presented by your choices and communicating them achieves reassurance for your stakeholders and helps resist the fatigue which is inevitable in a transformation programme.
- There are a myriad of Digital Transformation blockers contributing to this ‘hesitancy gap’, I previously mentioned, including cost constraints, reluctance to move out of comfort zones, corporate complacency, lack of energy and corporate culture, among others. For businesses, perhaps the only way to avoid disruption and being swallowed up by competition is to drive change and embrace the changes playing out in your industry, quickly. To thrive in a new and evolving market, companies need to implement new technologies which enable improvements to their business processes rather than just presenting dated ways of working on a shiny new screen. For some companies, their legacy estate, infrastructure, systems, skills can be the limiting factor as previously mentioned. Its worth noting that due to the enormous impact of COVID-19, those companies that have been able to respond to changes quickly have increased their market share, while those that could not are having to rapidly rethink their business models.
- Sounds complicated and it is, it can have lots of moving parts, like an analogue timepiece. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the industry or experienced first hand has made me firmly aware of the need for strong alliances and partners in order to effect change or survive catastrophe. Finding those key partners through the right blend of consultancy, industry expertise and the contextual oversight of an organisation’s enterprise architecture function will help shed light on the appropriate approaches. Two things currently stand out for me in our industry: Marketing has ruined the technical language, creating a divide between the business and its IT function, so you can have two entirely different conversations using the same terminology. Anyone these days can call themselves an architect, the most prolific are ‘solution architects’ which generally means anyone that can stitch something together for a project. Vendors now create solution architects in silos ready for hasty pre-sales deployments, true fact.
- From the opinions about converged software offerings from vendors – “Our offering caters for all of your needs – we know you bought our widget for a specific reason, but you should really also only consider these other widgets from us as well, as you don’t get all the value from the first widget unless you have the full set” “Don’t talk to our competitors” – A amazing soundbite from a vendor we were dealing with, which doesn’t make any of this easier, what it does do, is make the act of listening to your own voice as a business in terms of the outcomes you are trying to achieve. “What is this licensing hell we find ourselves in?” It may also come as a shock that not all vendors are friends and indeed some are eating each other’s lunch. There is nothing as sour as realising that you missed the fine print on a vendor’s view on something like virtualisation, or supported workloads, or the cost of egressing data from a cloud provider. I encourage robust discussion with your providers and establish relationships which permit compromises or shading in agreements. Can be easier said than done though.
- To highlight what I’m talking about, I’ve written us our very own choose your adventure book, well, a very short one without all the page turning and starting again. Don’t worry, its mainly pictures. I recall 5 years ago a particular conversation: “Put it all in the cloud!” the salesman said… “I’ll put you in the cloud” I thought at the time looking up from the sprawling pile of accumulated technical debt we had built our business on over the years. Marketing terminology met experience in this instance, creating the cognitive dissonance of knowing they were saying the right thing, but also knowing that we were so enraptured, so inured to the suffering and three am support calls that we couldn’t do that. So – an example cloud choose your own adventure, which is a common theme in digital transformation.
- This organisation like many others needs to consider a staged approach to the cloud in order to realise the benefits of doing do. Business outcomes – They need to maintain their existing offerings, something often overlooked in companies with legacy systems. Hmmm not a lot of business outcomes here. They need to translate them into the cloud. Sounds like a thankless task, some business benefits here potentially, costs savings, datacentre consolidation perhaps. Innovate for new offerings. Ahh that sounds more like it, shame we have to do the other two, but Rome wasn’t built in a day or had a bi-modal enterprise I suppose. So with the end in mind and starting at the beginning we can make some choices.
- Each decision we make has an impact, informs the outcome, just like the choose your own adventure book which is mapped out here. Some choices end up in the same place, but just take longer. Perhaps an AI could help map out the variables of a transformation programme and plot the most likely outcomes using the available toolsets?
- Pictures, I did say there would be pictures - This is a map of the six Rs by S. Orban it’s a linear set of approaches to the same objective for our example company, yet the planning, implementation, tool sets and realised business outcomes will be specific to the business in terms of culture and capability. Given the range of approaches to a cloud migration, advice and flexible tooling is super important. Let’s pick an approach.
- Our example company now has a approach and will know when it gets to the end. Legacy on premise to public and private cloud through hybrid cloud computing standards. So our order is: Maintain existing offerings Transition to the cloud Innovate for new business offerings Or 1. Desired Business outcomes 2. Via an appropriate approach 3. On a suitable technology platform
- This is a success criteria to determine which ending we got, (hopefully an acceptable one). Accuracy (business outcomes achieved? Value derived?) Adoption (Painful? Complicated? Morale destroying? Impossible to support?) Evolution (Mapping the ongoing business requirements to the platform)
- Last notes and thank you for listening to me for such a long time: Vendor lock-in exists in the cloud as well as in a traditional datacentre, its something to be cognisant of especially with proprietary solutions and 5 year subscription plans. Build on standards rather than products. Ignoring the marketing or the special features of a product, focus on standards when choosing the tools, platforms and services. Don’t neglect your integration strategy, especially if you have a legacy estate, integration and data are two of the largest and most expensive subjects in the industry at the moment. Your data assets and services will need exposing to the cloud throughout the journey, so again focus on standards.
- That’s enough from me. Some questions and answers. “Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true.”