Introducing the new world
IT is changing. IT is forever evolving, and in line with that, the business market adapts, evolves in turn, and enhances itself. IT used to be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Programming had a reputation for seeming alien and techy, distancing regular people from the task – making the task ever harder to accomplish. Welcome to your first step into a new world.
As a former Microsoft Trainer, I have been watching the evolution not only of Microsoft's software as it adapts to needs but also how businesses adapt to the changing landscape. In 2016, Microsoft published its new strategy: Digital transformation: Seven steps to success. This highlights several changes afoot in the current climate, or as their strapline puts it, How businesses can stay relevant and competitive in today's new digital era. More information can be found here: https://aka.my/3AE.
The document explains how technology has become pervasive in modern society. How it has gone beyond the computer lab, the office, and the factory floor and into homes, fridges, and wearable devices. The Internet of Things (IoT) requires an ever-growing amount of data that is ever more complex. Moreover, we are not only interested in managing this data but are also seeking to make sense of it. Through advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we can track patterns, make predictions, and determine how we can make the best decisions, or even let these technologies make them for us.
Microsoft focused on seven key areas of change:
- Leadership matters: Technology, and the ability to be clever enough to perform a task, does not make you a leader. By removing the technical barrier, leadership remains solely focused on vision and strategy.
- Cultural change is driven by effective change management: Becoming a digital enterprise will change how the organization makes decisions.
- Connect your customers, products, assets, and people: Through this connection, customers will be aware of what is being planned and can shape strategy through dialog and demand. People will be able to interact with your system seamlessly. Here, "people" refers to company staff and stakeholders, whereas customers are buyers who are not interested in the mechanics of the system you have built to sell to them.
- Adopt a data culture: As the amount of information required grows, the Microsoft cloud platform offers a hardware-invisible, pay-as-you-go solution to your data needs at all levels. The focus is less on how much upfront cost you will need to get started, or what you need to build your IT hardware infrastructure, and instead on a turnkey model that is provided for the business. Everything you need to get started is at your fingertips from day 1.
- Experiment and fail fast: By adopting short planning and implementation cycles – or even better, an Agile approach – your team can develop, test, go back a step, try again, and refine until they reach a much faster and less expensive solution. The concept of the fail fast and learn fast era means that accelerated development produces accelerated learning and maturity of the product in a much, much smaller timescale.
Note:
On the topic of point 5, I have experienced first-hand how, when embraced correctly, the Experiment and fail fast methodology can be a force for significant change within the company in many ways. I work for a large organization in the UK with a small development team that traditionally worked on highly technical programming projects. They were seen by the wider business as experts, and sometimes only communicated when there was an absolute need for their input. Most of the business was operational in nature, so the office was awash with administrative staff, managers, and analysts. Project work was an essential part of the change, but that change had to be embraced by the wider business. To assist with this, and as a conduit, business analysts and change officers would inspect developments and then sell these to the wider business for adoption. Project rollout was phased, per department, and over time.
While all of this was happening, the developers were adopting an Agile approach. They quickly learned how to use Azure as the new key area for IT project development and would experiment with the use of logic apps and Power Automate (Flow) to create logic tasks, integrating systems and building the requirements that would then be tested and demonstrated by the business change team. The need to engage developers and change agents, plus the need to think about the solution in a more technical way, was a culture shift for the business as it planned to incorporate Agile working alongside PRINCE2 or Six-Sigma project management.
- Think ecosystem and become an enterprise software company: The structure of the company will need to alter to embrace the changes demanded of it by wider engagements with its supply chain, providers, partners, IT systems, creditors, communication channels, and so on. Change is needed as the company goes from thinking about making a product or offering a service for one specific partner, business, or group of people, to instead adopting a holistic approach. The business is now encouraged to think end to end in relation to its supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution.
- Who is my Uber?: Through 2015-2019, I followed the legal battles between London taxi companies and their unions and Uber, the emerging company whose strategy undercut the incumbent and dominant provider. I found this to be an interesting test case – Uber had no fleet of its own, no assets, no big offices. Everything was virtualized and socially focused, and, as such, cost margins were lower and the customer, in turn, benefitted from this.
- Following on from the example of a virtual world, companies such as Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and Uber share one thing in common: they don't manufacture a product but instead offer a marketplace. If I wanted to sell an item a few decades ago, I might have held a stall at a flea market or traded it in at a pawn shop. Now, services are offered for consumers to consume without the need for handling goods, negotiation, waiting for production, and so on. This was extremely apparent last year when the UK entered the COVID-19 lockdown; everyone bought takeaways, shopped for groceries, and bought items online, and got them delivered the next day. We went from an owning society to a renting, disposable society, and this social and cultural shift is very important if you are a person who can operate holistically and offer an end-to-end service.
Hopefully, the paragraphs so far will have provided interesting content for you, but you are reading this book to understand not why we are where we are today, but how you can benefit from the situation, and how you can use modern change development tools and build solutions quickly and efficiently.
Forgive me, dear reader, but I don't know your skill set, your career path, or whether you have also thought about some of these seismic changes to our industry. The change is potentially so great that the expression The King is dead, long live the King! is rather apt. We have no choice but to change because change is inevitable.