Digital As Usual Themes

Looking into the current marketplace, there are three dominant trends in current digital exploitation:

• Exploiting Cloud Platforms

• Business Agility

• Value Based Management

Most commentators focus on either cost or scalability issues when discussing cloud platform exploitation, citing this as an uninspired approach to mechanisation of what is already there, which has been described as making caterpillars faster (as opposed to transforming them into butterflies). However, cloud platforms and SaaS applications are great for businesses wanting to standardise and simplify their businesses, either as a basis for performance improvement and automation or as a means of making integration of acquisitions (under M&A) easier. The latter often being a tool used to bring new products and know how into a business for further innovation.

Business agility is an evolutionary extension of not just Agile Development and Design thinking, but a full blooded extension of Lean approaches across Integrated Product Teams and DevOps styles of delivery to continuously experiment with opportunities and deliver new value at pace. If a business is not a start up and has not simplified its processes and applications, this can be difficult to achieve. In the end, though it is all about focusing on customer value.

Value based management has two strands of thinking; firstly it connects the dots between market insight, customer experience and business agility to focus on value; secondly it recognises that a digital business will spend proportionally more on digital and information technology than a traditional one, so it needs to understand how and why it spends the money (and other valuable resources) and then to make sure that it balances spend appropriately between maintenance, protection, enhancement and revenue or value streams, as well as innovation.

The Business of IT

I have re-released a book I wrote several years ago, on amazon "The Business of IT". It's a simple primer for the first time IT executive. Its premise is that you need to treat IT as a business within a business and manage for value. It covers most of the main concepts that a new time leader needs to be aware of and points out to many areas of established industry practice.

Digital Adoption Framework

A lot get's talked about Digital, but there are few comprehensive approaches to adoption available for reference. 

This is why I was interested when I came across Vadrim's DAF diagram, reproduced below. Enjoy!

Post Digital Outsourcing - Going for Value

One of the things which always has frustrated me when dealing with traditional outsourcing companies has been the huge gulf between the Sales Proposition and the Reality of Day-to-Day Service.

Companies usually think they are going to buy the best skills in the market and get access to superlative service from a transformational partner who delivers agility and control, so they can forget about the complexities of running IT. In reality they get bland, slow moving and unimaginative bottom up services which are slow and expensive to change. Where people have looked for partnership, this has usually failed to materialise as relationships descend into "Robust User-Supplier Conflict" (or RUSC). In fact the traditional model has been an anti pattern to progressiveness and this has only been made worse by offshoring to Asia, where extreme cultural differences and expectations have only made things worse.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, The Death of Outsourcing, this model is no longer sustainable in the light of all things digital. So what can a Post Digital Service Provider offer now that XaaS threatens to steal outsourcing's breakfast?

The reality is that, whilst XaaS does a lot to free an enterprise from the Tyrrany of Infrastructure, XaaS introduces new complications as the overall technical environment is much more complex; Digital also means that enterprises need to learn to move quicker with disciplined lean practices that enable continuous change. New IoT based models also bring new challenges of scale.

So the new breed of Digital Service Partner needs to position itself to avoid RUSC and focus on Assured Value, Integration and Speed. Where: 

• Assurance covers secure and consistent delivery of change and operations;
• Value focuses on user and customer experience, insight and the right quality at an affordable price;
• Integration deals with the complexity of identity and integrating multiple sources of XaaS services as well as working with multiple SI partners and in-house development teams to deliver joined up services;
• Speed addresses agility, continuous change, innovation and responsiveness to changing business and technical opportunities and risks.

Such services are likely to include 3 key elements:

1. a Foundational Use of IT Access Service - everything needed to deliver a user device centric service, e.g. smart phone, pad, laptop and supporting network, gateway, office automation software, storage, print, peripherals and anti malware based services.
2. a Service Integration And Application Management Service (SIAM) - which integrates and delivers services on a Hybrid Cloud basis. This is likely to include Architecture Management (AMO), Programme Management (PMO), Service Delivery (SMO), and Security Operations (SOC and Security Operational Processes), as well as Activity Based Costing (along TBM or OBASHI lines).
3. a Lean System Integration Service - which can provide specialist development and implementation skills, but also embraces partnering with internal and 3rd party partners and provides support for the full range of Agile and DevOps processes needed to deliver continuous change.

Naturally there will be other more specialist services which may come too, e.g. computer forensics and advanced threat intelligence, Fleet Management for IoT devices, or managing innovation communities as innovation goes social. But these will be value adds building on a core foundation.

Splunk - Digital Automation for CyberPunks

Last week I went to Splunk's event held at the InterContinental next to the O2 tent in Greenwich. 

This was a very well attended event and I got the impression that Splunk has now emerged to be a dominant player in the DevOps area around the automation of Operational Monitoring and Fault Analysis.

What I had not realised before going to the event, although I had coincidentally been discussing the potential the week before with a former colleague at Google's event, is that Splunk now provides a credible Security Event Management toolset for use in Security Operating Centre (SOC) activities, as well as a user activity analysis tool. In fact there were some interesting case studies focusing on building Lean SOC's incrementally.N.B. Gartner now positions Splunk as the leading vendor in its magic quadrant for SOCs.

It was also interesting to hear that Splunk now has a full scale partnering programme with other technology vendors, enabling integration with both new sources of data for exploitation within Splunk as well as value adds to Splunk, thus offering greater levels of automation.

However, Splunk was a little vague about future directions for the toolset. However, there does appear to be an opportunity around Application Cost Management and hooks into general Application Portfolio Management. This arises because to use Splunk effectively, you have to build a model of each application monitored which covers all the infrastructure (physical or virtual) elements used within an application in a similar manner to the models used in OBASHI or TBM (which are 2 similar but competing approaches to cost management) or in architectural tools such as Troux (now Planview) and alfabet used for application portfolio management.

This would enable a more integrated approach to some aspects of managing an application estate, gathering technical condition and cost information together to support continuous portfolio management.