Part 1 — Looking for the perfect landing on your modernisation jump?

Space travel isn’t new, it’s 60 years old. What makes NASA’s Mars landing special then? At the time of writing this article, we are ‘T-72 hours’ from watching a 360-degree view of the landing from our couch, using a livestream feed (here) free of charge. Quite the feat. As one would expect throughout 60 years of innovation, much in the space race has changed. Rather than taking a single-use approach to a majority of their assets, SpaceX has launched, recovered, and reused their rockets 143 times with an astonishing success rate, cadence, and precision (view some just mind-blowing stats here).

SpaceX mastered the perfect landing and in doing so, modernised space travel. The parallels to the evolution of enterprise technology-delivery are evident. Enterprise technology initiatives, projects, and programs we work on share some of the very same techniques, tools, and processes that have propelled the likes of SpaceX. And we can learn a lot from them. So, if you’re looking for the ‘perfect landing’ for your modernization programme, here’s some fuel for thought.

Lay of the Land.

If we think about most of the enterprise technology or delivery function, there are two main aspects to consider before pressing forward a modernisation programme — Cost of Change and Cost of Running.

• Cost of Change (CoC)

While everyone tends to compete for the speed to market, cost of change is one of the main forces of resistance slowing you and your organisation down. From your brand-new product idea to next new feature, you need to consider the cost associated with taking it to your end user. This is overarching the cost of business functions (such as Sales, Marketing, Analysis, Development etc), processes, and the time it takes in your team/organisation to bring that new idea in front of the customers.

• Cost of Running (CoR)

Every organisation has a cost of running. Your traditional Managed Services, IT Ops, Application Support, L1/L2 support, and BAU team each fit into this category, who support the running and maintenance of the software.

One way that we view delivering successful modernisation programmes, which also requires a perfect landing, is the ski jump. If you create a XY chart with “CoC” and “CoR” as each axis, organisations and their teams typically fall onto specific parts of the graph that resembles a ski jump.

When you plot your technology teams and organisation on the graph, you can observe some interesting attributes and observations — including comparisons between different teams as well as the maturity of your collective teams.

Red Zone — On-prem quadrant

While technology itself keeps growing exponentially (check out the Singularity University concepts here), Cloud computing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence related technologies have fast-tracked the enterprise technology functions exponentially in the last five years.

You will notice that the top left quadrant tends to be saturated mostly with teams and organisations still using “On-Prem” technologies. In relative terms, these technology teams and functions still seem to work with the traditional methodologies, tools, technologies, and processes in comparison to lean startups, “neo” setups and early enterprise adopters. Because of this reason, you can see the rise of “Neo banks” and “FinTech” startups growing rapidly even in a conservative industry vertical such as RegTech or financial services.

Teams and organisations in this quadrant still tend to work with concepts such as Managed Services, Support, IT Ops, BAU, etc., while high performers in the bottom right quadrant only see “value” and high performing cross-functional teams working through a strong definition in ‘types of work’.

Green Zone — Cloud quadrant

On the other end of the maturity curve, you have the teams and organisations who adapted to the cloud early enough and businesses that started after the cloud revolution. Some of them luckily skipped the steep modernisation curve and started in the bottom right quadrant. Hence, it’s hard to compare the famous Instagram story of 13 employees creating a billion-dollar business from scratch to a business or technology leader trying to transform their existing enterprise teams and systems.

PaaS and SaaS products plus top tech providers tend to be in this quadrant, where they have optimised their organisation and processes, and have adapted their tools and technology to minimise the Cost of Change and Cost of Running. This allows them to achieve optimal speed to market and creates the agility and flexibility within the business structure to outrun their competition.

Teams who fit in this quadrant tend to fit the profile of a “high performing / elite team” and do really well in DevOps measurements such as “Lead time to change” and “Deployment frequency”. They have mastered the DevOps culture and lean more towards a “No Ops” ecosystem heavily relying on automation.

Modernisation slope — The maturity curve

My view is that it is not accurate to compare the Instagram success story with your enterprise transformation story as those are two different types of challenges. Transforming your existing business, teams, people, process, and technology systems to the cloud is a different challenge to creating a new cloud start-up. It’s not as simple as flicking a switch or building a new green-field app as it is a journey that you need to take everyone through culturally.

As it takes time for an organisational culture to change and transform, transformational technology and business leaders must invest in their people. This covers investment in fundamentals such as your change management process with the business, cybersecurity, soft skills and capabilities, etc. The investment needs to be across the business to educate your own business stakeholders and to get the buy-in. Doing this will help get your organization closer to the point where you can say goodbye to the red zone and enter the green zone.

This investment is part of the careful planning required to identify the modernization pathway with the least amount of business risk, enable you to keep up with the business-critical activities, take calculated delivery risks, make financially sensible decisions without breaking the bank, and not lose out on the opportunity cost.

As you carefully plan your next DevOps initiative and the technology strategy and invest in your people and team upfront, your Cost of Change and Cost of Running tends to plateau until that magic ‘tipping point’ where your team and the business around you start to realise the culture and the value behind all this and creates the snowball effect. That point is where you ‘take off’ in your jump and really start to enjoy the benefits of that free fall. And suddenly, you are in the green zone and belong to the high-performing elite team category and your CoC and CoR drastically reduce, giving you that anticipated return on investment.

It is truly a journey covering your tools, technology, process and mainly ‘people and culture’ which you need to equally support and keep an eye on.

The Singularity

The grid of Cost of Change and Cost of Running puts a different spin into the point of singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, where both measurements become zero. It may be some time away, but it very well could happen in our lifetime. Just consider how far we’ve come in the past 60 years!

I tend to imagine this point of singularity as “J.A.R.V.I.S”, the fictional AI butler from Iron Man franchise. Jarvis, in an enterprise scenario can go build any of your specifications just simply based on a voice command and gives you a production version of your software in no time. This makes the ‘cost of change’ approximately zero. Hypothetically, let us hope this new enterprise version of Jarvis is not another startup of Elon Musk. Let us hope it is a crowd-funded open-source project powered by block-chain bringing the “cost of running” approximately down to zero.

Conclusion

There are a lot of ways to explain the value of cloud modernisation and DevOps journey for your team and the organisation. The ski jump is a simple and fun way to visualise and explain what your teams and the organizations would experience through this journey.

While it’s fun to think about the singularity and to play with this model, I think the important questions of whether or not your team or the organisation is traveling in the right direction, are you happy with the speed of travel in the matrix of CoC and CoR, and how your organization would compare to an industry benchmark (if you were able to get a subset of the data and plot it).

There are number of upward and downward forces that helps you to fast track your journey and sometimes slow you down. And some tools and techniques which can help you and the team on this journey. I will cover these in my next post. Here’s to the jump.

You can find the continuation for the second article “Forces of the modernisation jump” here