Introducing Digital Transformation

I can imagine that many of you, while reading the first part of this introductory chapter, will have remembered your very own unpleasant experiences of working with infrastructure, applications, and architectures that started to grow and run out of resources due to a limited physical or virtual on-premises environment, a monolithic or overcomplicated initial design that made the application or service die of success after growing much more than expected and that you had to fix for good, or data split among so many databases in the organization that a minor update in the schema of a supposedly rarely used table broke most of the corporate applications.

The situations I just pictured are quite common among organizations that are still using an important amount of their IT time to decide where their infrastructure should run. And that’s probably because they haven’t completed their Digital Transformation yet. Even if you work for a start-up in its first stages, you may still be asking yourself these kinds of questions today. If that is the case, you should embrace the practices of digital transformation starting today.

The reason is that all these sadly common situations are incompatible with innovation. And IT professionals in organizations where innovation is constantly postponed because there are other higher priorities will become either outdated or burnt out, if not both, over time. If we combine this golden jail scenario with the burden of system and infrastructure migrations, there is a lot of precious time wasted on tasks that developers and engineers hate, and that don’t add any value to the organization.

Let’s say it loud and clear: if you want to innovate and if you want to be disruptive, you should focus your efforts on transforming or creating an organization where everyone can drive innovation. Otherwise, you will be wasting precious time and resources focusing on the wrong tasks.

Rob Enslin, former President of Global Customer Operations for Google Cloud, mentioned a few areas to focus on during a digital transformation process in a blog post from the Google Cloud website: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/innovation-in-the-era-of-the-transformation-cloud. This list is, in my opinion, a very good summary of four of the main pillars of digital transformation, where organizations should put their efforts to free time and resources and be able to innovate more.

Let’s comment on each of these pillars:

• Accelerate the transformation, while also maintaining the freedom to adapt to market needs. This is a very important point because while the digital transformation should happen in a reasonable amount of time, the process itself needs to be flexible too; otherwise, it may fail miserably if either the market or any other important external variable suddenly changes without prior notice. For example, during the pandemic, many companies were forced to speed up their digital transformation, and those who were ready to provide remote working capabilities for their employees earlier suffered less from the effects of the lack of productivity during those months that all of us had to spend working from home.
• Make every employee, from data scientists to sales associates, smarter with real-time data to make the best decisions. First-party data is power; however, it is often split into silos across an organization. A digital transformation should break down these silos by centralizing, deduplicating, and consolidating all data sources so that all the information is available to all members of the organization together with real-time insights that each department can use to make their own informed strategical decisions.
• Bring people together and enable them to communicate, collaborate, and share, even when they cannot meet in person. After the pandemic, it’s even more clear that physical distance should not be a stopper, and all cultural elements of the organization should be replicable for people working remotely too so that people can also collaborate and share comfortably when they are far away from each other. Consider this as flexibility seen from a very specific angle.
• Protect everything that matters to your organization: your people, your customers, your data, your customer’s data, and each transaction you undertake. Security is more important than ever, especially now that companies are using the power of technology to provide better services, and it should be a key element in any modern company transformation plan. Your data is your treasure and, together with your intellectual property, it might be what differentiates your organization from the competition. But it is also your responsibility to keep all your data safe, even more so when it probably contains personal and private information about your customers.

Rob summarizes these four pillars into their corresponding objectives: application and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. Any organization able to meet these objectives will have much more time and resources to dedicate to innovation.

If you read the previous paragraph carefully, you will realize that we developers are the key players in each of the four pillars of Digital Transformation, one way or another. During the digital transformation of an organization, developers will be working hand in hand with engineers on application and infrastructure modernization, which should be achieved by simplifying monolithic architectures by splitting them into elastic microservices. These apps and services will be using data as an input, and probably also generating data and insights as an output in many of the cases, so they will benefit from both the data centralization and the democratization mentioned earlier, and code should become simpler once data is easier to access.

And being connected to the rest of the team will also be important to make sure that our code meets everyone’s needs. If we work using sprints, we need to be aligned with the rest of the team, even if each of us is located in a different office, country, or even continent. Finally, security is the key to ensuring that our apps and services are safe to be used and that our customers trust us more than ever.

Designing a Digital Transformation plan is not easy, and that’s why there are a lot of companies working to help others succeed on their transformation journey. Some companies can help you design and execute the plan, but many others have created platforms that can make things much easier.

Some years ago, tech giants had the idea of abstracting the infrastructure up to the point that the customer wanted, letting organizations focus on what they love to do: architect, write, and run modern applications, centralize their data, make the most out of it, and get people connected, all of it in a secured platform. And guess what – Google Cloud is one of them.