Is that Technology Ready?

The Technology Readiness Level tool is incredibly handy for Enterprise Architects. It’s a simple Maturity Model that predates, and is better than, many you will see today. This great TRL article covers many of the main points. But there are a few areas I’d like to expand on, based on my usage of TRLs inside and outside of Engineering and IT.

The TRL scale has 9 levels, ranging from a literal science experiment, to a fully mature technology for the organization. The first 3 levels are exploratory and hypothetical. The next 3 are mostly work in the lab, and the final 3 are deployed in some form into the wilds of production.

Like many of the best measurement scales, the highest TRL scores require coupling to another area. In this case, TRL levels 8 & 9 require proper Organizational Support. No technology should be considered ready for production, unless production is ready for it. Level 7 is a production Pilot, and requires much babysitting and external monitoring to be reliable and to capture lessons learned on the journey to level 8.

TRL is typically applied to the internal end-to-end DevOps, CI/CD or equivalent organization that goes from exploration and build through deployment and operations. But it can also be considered from the point of view of the industry, suppliers or customers. Will this product drop right in or will the customer need extensive training to run it well? Does the vendor have the support ecosystem if we adopt this product and deploy it to multiple cloud sites around the globe?

As an exercise for the reader, perhaps apply it to blockchain from various viewpoints, and share the results with those discussing it. You just might surface an important issue or ten…