IT Enterprise Agility
(7 minute read)
The rise of digital companies over the past two decades has challenged many incumbent business organisations to rethink their existing operating models. This blog draws from research to highlight some core IT shifts that can drive enterprise agility.
Digital companies and the growing shift to digital has challenged many traditional business organisations to rethink their operating models. Many companies have struggled with the scale and speed of change and adapting their offerings and IT services especially in the face of competition for newer, nimbler players who have taken a mobile first approach. Many companies have started to experiment with enterprise agility, creating fluid organisations that continually evolve, capture market opportunities, engaging customers and employees, and boosting performance.
Successful agile organisations approach five key elements: strategy, structure, process, people, and technology, the last one usually posing the greatest challenge. There are five key shifts from the lens of IT that organisational leaders can adapt to achieve enterprise agility:
- Creating cross-functional teams with co-leadership of business and IT
- Decoupling core systems
- Nurturing engineering talent
- Automating software delivery
- Adopting cloud infrastructure
Shift #1: Collaboration and Cross-Functionality
Setting up cross-functional teams can align business and IT requirements. At the core of these teams would be ‘BizDevOps’, crack teams of people who have all the requisite business and IT skills ranging from product and customer experience to engineering, design, and technical expertise. In some industries like banking and telecom, BizDevOps can be a team of teams or ‘tribes’ who take ownership of specific activities for specific segments, markets, or products, and establish platform services. Tribe composition can sometimes include a mini-CEO business lead and mini-CIO IT lead to balance business and IT functions
Shift #2: Applications and Services
All in one monolith IT systems must evolve into more granular sets of API driven applications and services and owned by team of teams or tribes. Traditionally core systems are the hub of a multitude of functionalities, all tightly interconnected. A change in one functionality can however cause a knock-on effect on the rest of the structure. Moreover, many of these systems have been configured for the pre-millennium brick and mortar operations and are not cognisant of web, mobile and other digital channels of the last two decades and replacing these systems may be cost-prohibitive. Under pressure to deliver better customer services, many companies are adopting the ‘Strangler pattern’ which involves identifying those functionalities that change the most and assigning ownership to BizDevOps tribes. These tribes create a ‘one service – one function’ principle, carving out functionalities that don’t belong in a legacy system and leaving a leaner core.
Shift #3: Sourcing and Talent
Owing to costs and shortage of talent, many companies outsource their IT, creating new opportunities for vendors. Enterprise agility cannot be over-reliant on vendors and partners as tech needs shift rapidly and organisations need a continuous renewal of development frameworks and patterns. Vendors are also offering many API-accessible SaaS and PaaS solutions offering specific turnkey functionalities that can be consumed off the shelf.
Shift #4: Delivery Process
Waterfall processes in traditional organisations can be extremely slow, leading to delays in production and functionality upgrades compared to agile, digital natives who often release upgrades even several times a day. By switching to agile processes, many traditional companies have achieved true enterprise agility. Organisations can also ensure quality through Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and frequent incremental releases. All stages of service delivery processes can be automated in DevOps pipelines, also known as DevSecOps. Some companies adopt a differentiated approach, allowing API-ready systems to release any time.
Shift #5: Infrastructure
Infrastructure discussions must include cloud – public, private, or hybrid. Cloud infrastructure allows companies to obtain computing and storage capacity on demand. Apart from SaaS and PaaS, many companies use Infrastructure-as-Code Concept IaCC to secure capacity through an API, directly requesting additional environments from the software rather than through physical hardware configuration. Cloud infrastructure can radically improve several key metrics including waiting times, testing, productivity, overhead costs, asset usage and flexibility. Many cloud providers are offering increasingly sophisticated solutions such as Big Data and Machine Learning services. Cloud allows companies to accelerate time to market and quality of service.
The five shifts identified above can provide companies with numerous advantages alongside their efforts in addressing strategy, structure, process, and people aspects of enterprise agility.
