Posts Tagged ‘Publishing’
Consumerization of Enterprise Software
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/3055802287/
Figure 1: Consumerization of IT
The devastation in traditional Publishing needs precious little mentioning. Just think about a brand like BusinessWeek selling for a meager cash offer in the $2 million to $5 million range, McGraw Hill getting into interactive text books through Inkling or Flipboard delivering “… your personalized social magazine” to your iPad. This devastation might not have gotten the attention that the plight of the ‘big three’ automobile manufacturers got, but in its own way it is as shocking as a visit to the abandoned properties in Detroit is.
As most of my clients do enterprise software, many of my discussions with them is about the consumerization of IT. From a day-to-day perspective this consumerization is primarily about six aspects:
- Use of less expensive/consumer-focused components as infrastructure
- ‘Pay as you go’ pricing (through Cloud pricing mechanisms/policies)
- Use of web application interfaces to monitor IT infrastructure
- Use of mobile and consumer based devices for accessing IT alerts and interfacing with systems
- Use of the fast growing number of mobile applications to enhance productivity
- Application of enterprise social networks and social software in the data center
From a strategic perspective, IT consumerization IMHO is all about the transformation toward “everything as a service” [1]. The virtuous cycle driven by Cloud, Mobile and Social manifests itself at three levels:
- It obviously affects the IT folks with whom I discuss the subject. Immense changes are already taking place in many IT departments.
- It affects their company. For example, the company might need to change the business design in order to optimize its supply chain.
- It affects the clients of their company. Their definition of value changes these days faster than the time it takes the CIO I speak with to say “value.”
© Copyright 2010 Israel Gat
Figure 2: The Virtuous Cycle of Cloud, Mobile and Social
Sometimes I get a push-back from my clients on this topic. The push-back is usually rooted in the immense complexity (and fragility) of the enterprise software systems that had been built over the past ten, twenty or thirty years. The folks who push back on me point out that consumerization of IT will not scale big time until enterprise software gets “consumerized” or at least modernized.
I agree with this good counter-point but only up to a point. I believe two factors are likely to accelerate the pace toward “consumerization” of enterprise software:
- Any department/business unit that can get a service in entirety from an outside source is likely to do so without worrying about enterprise software and/or data center considerations. This is already happening in Marketing. As other functions start doing so, more and more links in the value chain of enterprise software will be “consumerized.” In other words, these services will be carried out without the involvement of the IT department.
- Once the switch-over costs from legacy code to state-of-the-art code are less than the steady state costs (to maintain and update legacy code), the “consumerization” of enterprise software is going to happen with ferocious urgency.
If you are in enterprise software you need to start modernizing your applications today. The reason is the imperative need to mitigate risk prior to reaching the end-point, almost irrespective of how far down the road the end-point might be. See Llewellyn Falco‘s excellent video clip Rewriting Vs Refactoring for a crisp articulation of the risk involved in rewriting and why starting to refactor now is the best way to mitigate the risk.
Footnotes:
[1] The phrase “Everything as a Service” has been coined by Russ Daniels.
And Now the Bottle-neck is in Operations
In his forthcoming Agile Austin presentation, colleague and friend Michael Cote will be discussing velocity in Agile development vis-a-vis velocity in IT operations. To quote Cote:
Technologies used by public web companies and now cloud computing are looking to offer a new way to deliver applications by addressing deployment and provisioning concerns. Agile software development has sped up the actual development of software, and now the bottle-neck is in operations who’re not always able to deploy software at the same velocity that Agile teams ship code. What do these technologies look like, are they realistic, and how might they affect your organization?
The topic is important from a few perspectives, such as the new business models it enables. With Agile infrastructure, a closed loop is formed between vendor and customer. This loop operates on the basis of close to real-time feedback. The new functionality in the software deployed in the afternoon could be in response to a specific need that was brought up in the morning. Hence, the business focus and the business design change from software that has already been developed and tested (‘done done’) but not yet delivered, to one that has been developed, tested and deployed (‘done done done’) in ultra fast way.
It should also be pointed out that the line between developing content and developing software gets really blurry nowadays. From a company perspective both software and contents are entities that are being made available for dissemination. If you accept the premise that the generation of content and development of the corresponding software should be done under a unified Agile model, the desirability, the power and the benefits of managing development and delivery in unison become obvious. When applied to both content and software, an agile infrastructure paradigm could easily transform the publishing industry, and others.
In short, the business benefits Agile Infrastructure begets trump the (very significant) operational benefits it enables.
It Won’t Work Here
Two major obstacles to vetting Agile topics effectively with executives were identified in the post entitled The Business Value of Agile Software Methods:
- Lack of hard quantitative data.
- The “It won’t work here” syndrome.
As indicated in the post, the data provided in the study How Agile Projects Measure Up, and What This Means to You and the book The business Value of Agile Software Methods address the first obstacle. This follow-on post is about the second of the two obstacles – the resistance to Agile transformation in the face of hard data on its benefits to other companies.
Resistance in the form of “it won’t work here” is typically anchored in one or more of the following five beliefs:
- Uniqueness: “Some very unique elements exist in our company. These elements render industry data inapplicable.”
- Secret sauce: “Something very special element existed in the companies reporting great success with Agile. Our company does not possess nor have access to the ‘secret sauce’ that enabled success elsewhere.”
- Cultural change: “For the Agile initiative to succeed, our corporate culture needs to change. The required cultural change takes a lot of time and involves a great deal of pain. All in all, the risk of rolling Agile is unacceptably high.”
- Affordability: “The company is strapped to the degree that investment in another software method is a luxury it can’t afford.”
- Software is not core to us: “We are not a software company, nor is software engineering our core competency. Software is merely one of the many elements we use in our business.”
Various other reasons for not going Agile in the context of a specific company are, of course, cited at some frequency. The five reasons listed above seem to be encountered most often by Agile champions.
Use the following counter-arguments to turn around these beliefs:
- Uniqueness: Very rare occurence. Companies use similar business designs, apply fairly standard operating procedures, utilize common technology, are subject to the same regulatory constraints that their competitors are, have offshore sites in places like India, etc. Discussion of your company vis-a-vis its direct competitor usually suffices to overcome the uniqueness claim.
- Secret sauce: The ‘secret sauce’ is neither secret nor difficult to concoct. For example, the secret sauce used by BMC Software in its successful Agile initiative had four simple ingredient: intentionality, know-how, flexibility and patience. Based on insights by colleague and friend Alan Atlas, I have recently added mutuality as the fifth ingredient. Your own secret sauce might be somewhat different, but I very much doubt that an extravagantly exotic sauce will be needed.
- Cultural change: Myth has it that Agile would only work in the Collaborative culture. Reality is it will work in any of the four core cultures identified by Schneider: Control, Competence, Cultivation or Collaboration. See Four Principles, Four Cultures, One Mirror for an approach to building Agile on the strength of whatever culture prevails in your company/organization.
- Affordability: The question to ask is whether you can afford not to improve your software. Tools are readily available to quantify your company’s technical debt. Monetize the technical debt and include it as a liability line item in a pro forma balance sheet. Doing so is likely to shift the discussion from affordability to how to create elbow room for handling the technical debt.
- Software is not core to us: Indeed, it might not be but it is likely to become so in just about any industry. Use an analogy like the record industry vis-a-vis the publishing industry. The record industry has been decimated by software over the past decade. Chances are a similar decimation is likely to occur in publishing unless the industry transforms itself. (Some of the decimation that already took place in publishing has become quite visible recently. For example, last week Bloomberg LP announced completion of the acquisition of BusinessWeek for a paltry $5M).
You will need to be realistically patient with respect to the time it takes for the considerations listed above to sink in. It could easily take six months just to forge a consensus on the subject in the executive team. It might then take another six month to operationalize the consensus. Chances are there is an elephant hidden somewhere in the “room” if you don’t carry the day with within a one year period of diligently vetting Agile with your executives.
The Agile Executive 