Platforms for Digital Business
The nature of what organisations want & need from their IT systems has well & truly changed. It used to be all about efficiency & automating repeatable business processes; now its about creating whole new products, services and customer experiences using technology. It used to be all about cost; now its about agility & speed to market.
Of course in reality the world isn’t that black & white; like everything else its a balancing act. A range of different platforms is needed to support the efficient and effective operations of a modern organisation - especially if the organisation has legacy systems.
We are adopting what we’ve dubbed the ‘hybrid platform’ approach. That means making use of a range of on-premise, public cloud and SaaS based platforms. This gives us maximum flexibility, forces standardisation in areas where it makes sense and frees us up to put most of our effort into the things that are truly unique (differentiators) to our organisation.
Using a mix of platforms means we have to put in place some foundational building blocks such as identity & access management which supports a federated model, operational & security management tools which traverse traditional system boundaries and processes & practices that support service aggregation & federation. Additionally we need to know which platforms we want to use and will actually work for us. We often refer to these - and other building blocks - as the ‘orchestration and governance’ layer.
Using a range of platforms means we can go at whatever ‘speed’ we need to. We can maintain a core of legacy master data (slow moving) whilst connecting it to a chatbot service (fast moving) to provide end users with self-service functionality in a matter of days, not weeks or months.
Public cloud services and SaaS offerings form the basis for most of our new application development however at the same time we have a fleet of legacy business applications which would need to be re-written/re-factored to operate in a pure cloud environment. For those we need platforms that support a more traditional, tiered architecture. For the bulk of our applications we utilise a mix of virtualisation and containerisation.
Our data centre infrastructure is part of what enables us to operate at these different speeds. VMWare and AWS recently announced a partnership which allows organisations to fuse their on-premise and AWS platforms. The idea is that we can continue to utilise the tools & processes we have in place whilst taking advantage of the services and functionality offered by AWS, all whilst seamlessly spanning data centre facilities anywhere in the world (in our case Wellington and Sydney). This enables the hybrid model and also simplifies any migrations to the public cloud by allowing you to stage & manage them better.
A few weeks ago we completed a proof of concept of the VMWare on AWS offering and we able to successfully create a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) environment which delivered on the promise of the hybrid model. The POC passed on all the test scenarios & success criteria we set out and gave us the confidence that the hybrid platform architecture we want to build is possible, scalable and cost effective.
Careful application portfolio management (another discipline you need to develop) will allow us now to decide how we tackle modernising our legacy IT systems. For some we may choose to rewrite them, however for others it may simply be a matter of replatforming them onto our hybrid platform.
The days of standardisation and ‘one size fits all’ are over. Modern organisations need a range of platforms to enable their business. I think this applies to both technologies and practices - it’s one of the reasons I believe the traditional PMO approach is well and truly dead (did it ever actually work for anyone?!?).
Understanding the drivers for each part of your organisation and what ‘speed’ they need to go at will allow you to respond to (and sometimes even preempt) the platform needs of your organisation.
Disclaimer - I’m not advocating for or promoting any product or vendor in this post, rather the intent is to share thinking & experiences so others can build on those/factor them into their own activities (or not). As always I would suggest you do your own research and figure out what will work best for you.