“Are we done yet?” – Thriving in a world of continuous change

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“Are we done yet?” – Thriving in a world of continuous change

Software and services vendors are developing at a frenetic pace in an attempt to out-innovate each other. It went from releases every few years to every year to every week for some SaaS services. This pace has also been fueled by the consolidation of the Public Cloud and SaaS markets with just a handful of players left. So all this innovation translates to customer success though right?

Well, sort of.

This ever increasing pace of innovation is placing an incredible amount of pressure on IT organisations trying to deliver value to their stakeholders while the whole world seemingly changes around them. The gap between what can be done and what needs to be done can also seem very wide. There was a wonderfully funny example at this at a conference I was at a few weeks ago. The speaker was talking about how Machine Learning was going to revolutionize the way a salesperson assesses the likelihood of closing a deal. An audience member stood up and asked: “That’s all great, but what does it have to do with me? We have been delivering a pipeline management tool for the last 6 months and have gone through three versions of your product. We can’t even get the basics to work yet with all our other systems.” The speaker replied: “Yes, but when you do, this is the future”.

They were both right.

The real question is: What can organisations to structure themselves for success and take advantage of the constant stream of products and services? In the world of business applications, some of this innovation has essentially democratized the dark arts (like AI and Advanced Analytics) and made these capabilities available to organizations of all sizes. Some of our mid-size customers have deployed sophisticated, tailored IoT and Big Data solutions which, only a few years ago, was only a possibility for large organisations with an army of experts.

A lot of businesses I talk to though are struggling with trying to keep pace so I wanted to share some thoughts on how to navigate this brave new world:

The Baselines of Tomorrow

Customers love to get to a stable point in the project lifecycle where they can call it done, draw a line in the sand and move the solution to maintenance mode. This is a lot tougher to do with the number of moving parts; and even if you manage to get to a baseline, the approach is fundamentally flawed. Most of the solutions we work with these days get updated on a regular basis and though you could just make sure your configuration works as-is when the underlying solution changes (and most vendors will assure it will), you are essentially missing the point.

The idea is to take advantage of these changes and conduct regular ROI analysis to make the best decisions for the business. This of course impacts the level on investment required to maintain this solution but the upside is that the overall solution is less likely to become obsolete as it will continuously evolve.

Designing for Change

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

I keep this quote from Lao Tzu on a sticky note (yes, I’m old school) next to my monitor to keep reminding myself to revisit my decisions. It is quite convenient to stick to a path and drive down it with purpose but very often it’s the path not the destination that becomes more important. The same applies to solving business problems with technology. If you were told that 3 of the 8 solutions you rely on will not exists in 5 years, what would you do different? Would you take on an unsupported workaround if you had to validate (and potentially rework it) every quarter instead of every two years?

Building a loosely coupled best of breed solution protects you from these changes and brings the focus back to the “business value” you are getting back from each solution. You swap it out when a different solution provides enough additional value to justify the cost of replacing it. This will mean that you will compromise on some experiences but you are effectively future-proofing your solution.

Expiring Requirements

I firmly believe that the days of multi-year waterfall projects are long gone – particularly in the business solutions space. A key measure of success is the speed of delivery, balanced by solution flexibility as we discussed earlier. Yet, the software industry is one of the worst proponents of the 80/20 rule. How many times have you heard a customer say “This is absolutely critical and without it, the solution is not complete.” A dimension that can perhaps help this discussion is time. Requirements, like all things, will expire.

You will be amazed to see how that changes the conversation. I like to add a column on the list of high-level requirements called TTL (Time to live – a homage to my networking days) and use it to drive the prioritization exercise. Would you invest £75,000 on something which will be obsolete in 3 years, or would you rather spend the same amount on 3 other areas with a longer lifespan?

Getting Organized

The opportunity is immense but you need to invest. At eBECS we run a dedicated R&D team responsible for evaluating new products and services from Microsoft, identifying areas where they could deliver value to our customers, and extending our offerings accordingly. That function needs to exist in your organisation whether it is internal or expertise delivered via a partner.

It is such an exciting time to be solving business problems with in technology, especially with the plethora of high-value cloud services available that can drive immediate business value. I hope this post gives you some ideas on how best to organize for success and would love to get your thoughts on the topic as well.

Author: 
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