Digital Transformation - how to
Digital Transformation - how to
Digital Transformation is changing how people do businesses. As stated in my earlier article Digital Transformation and Customer Engagement - a must todo, it is happening and it is a must-to-do for all businesses to remain in the market longer term. Even if you have transformed your business still you need to constantly apply “innovation cycle” on each and every product and service as explained in the first article Disruption - the race is on!
Every company is unique in terms of its people, culture and on ground realities with distinct opportunities and constraints. It is very important that the company’s executive management commit to pursue the digital transformation and commit investing on it significantly. They need to pass down the same commitment and vision to their leadership teams and it should trickle all the way down so that everyone feels part of it with the sense of ownership. A task force committee can be formed comprising of SMEs from Business, Tech and Operation teams that can help to look for opportunities for digitization and make recommendations with priorities. There are so many options as it’s like remodeling an entire house so the committee must explain categorically what, why, where, when and how pieces concisely and clearly.
In the past few decades, big enterprises themselves created and developed their own internal “technology/software” divisions to support their businesses and internal process-automation. The companies who were able to deliver better solution internally were able to manage becoming technology companies itself offering those solutions to external clients. It worked well for many but most of the solution were monolithic in nature. These monolithic solutions required heavy maintenance incurring huge costs in terms of both time and money when fixing bugs/issues and doing enhancements. The monolithic solution is like a big mud ball.
Client on boarding was a huge challenge because these monolithic solutions evolved and were not initially designed with that in mind. Additionally, the customization needed for each client made them a nightmare for all stakeholder/teams because of the cost and risks involved. So technologists have to invent better ways to develop and deliver solutions with low cost, low risk and easy to maintain and enhance.
The emergence of Cloud Computing (Cloud for short) and Internet spreading like wildfire has also disrupted the ways we architect, develop and deliver software solutions. In fact, it has totally redefined how the problems are solved ensuring speed of delivery, reliability, and repeatability. These new architecture and development patterns and principles have changed the existing software architecture and development practices making them easy to maintain and enhance!
The software is now designed and developed mostly cloud native, apps auto-scale up and down based on demand, are highly available and fault tolerant (designed to handle failure gracefully). This is huge a leap and I will talk about it in my next article. For now, I will leave you with a mantra “an idea in the morning running in the production in the evening”