Digital Transformation is about continuous value
A key characteristic of digital transforming organization is to continuously deliver value to their end customers. By continuously, we (at Microsoft) really mean continuous value. Unfortunately, "value" is often distilled to only mean: an incremental unit of shippable software or production ready code. In practice, shippable software is achieved by introducing automation to how code is written and deployed to production. The industry term is called 'continuous integration and continuous deploy' or CI/CD.
"In fact, a lot of organizations hyper-focus on increasing the frequency of shippable software to production, which is a relative good thing but is only part of the story. As an example, continuously shipping bad and vulnerable code to production is not really value adding to anyone."
Another reason for the fixation on shippable software stems from the technology sector and silicon valley culture from California. This is most evident in small to medium sized startup-tech companies with fun names like the ones that have an "-er" or "r" ending like Uber, Twitter, Flickr, Tinder and others. There is equally another list of startup-tech companies that end with "-ly" likely Grammarly or some other fun naming convention. What they all have in common, is a killer-app or single great idea. In truth, continuous value is not only or always a killer-app, a single great idea, or the amount of shippable software.
Instead, continuous value stems from many 'things' (more of that in another memo) that apply both to the organization and the end-user. Enterprise and government agencies may deliver an improved end-user experience or feature while reducing operational cost, avoiding risk (See previous memo "What is Application Innovation - really?"), attracting talent and having a humanitarian impact on the society - like saving lives. To over emphasize the point, the Department of Defense (DoD) is not in dire straits for a single great idea or a killer-app to deliver continuous value to citizens. Nor are citizens (customers) expecting a mobile app with a fun name to solely address all their needs.
Memo: Digital Transformation is about continuous value - September 14th, 2020
