Accountability as key element of modern architecture

The business economy is going through a phase of transformation. Digital is the new keyword – driven by technologies like social, mobile, analytics, cloud and IoT. These technologies offer three unique capabilities: ubiquitous data, ongoing connectivity and processing power. Whole industries are on a journey of digital transformation. Companies don't need to guess anymore, what a customer might desire – they learn and find answers based on data. Anywhere and anytime. New digital offerings can facilitate growth in new business areas and ensure the continued existence of a company through its digital transformation. 

On the other hand, customer expectation is growing as well. Today companies face clients who are connected, well informed and demanding high-class services. To leverage those expectations, companies have to evolve themselves and create a new working and collaboration model to create digital offerings. In the past companies expect from their upper management to know how to achieve business goals and how to lead others – mostly in a very hierarchical way. This model might work in the world, where you exactly know the problem, but on the other hand, it kills any kind of innovation. But while transforming to digital innovation is more needed than ever. Therefore, companies should empower their employees to take charge of, and be more flexible in, developing successful products that meet the increasingly complicated needs of their clients.

 The power of the people

Based on my experience with implementing Salesforce (internal or external) the toughest hurdle is not the technical dimension. Salesforce as a platform offers a significant set on capabilities to solve nearly every technical problem. Guiding the client to change the structure of a team (from an architecture point of view) is the area to focus on. Jeanne W. Ross, Cynthia M. Heath and Martin Mocker have defined some principals in their book "Designed For Digital" to address that problem, most of us faced already in reality.

In the past company’s view on architecture was driven by business processes, features, builds, systems and projects, but all this impeded innovation, as this traditional architecture approach was largely inspired by non-digital company frameworks. Today, people need a modern architecture instead.

Most companies rely on project managers when they are thinking of delivering products. At the end of the project, managers hand over their work to an operation team (e.g. a Service Team). This methodology follows an old-fashioned way – and mostly results in silos, where different business units think and act independently from each other. Often further reinforced by cultural differences, the worst-case outcome is a largely failed implementation.

Instead, a clear ownership model is needed. A component (slices of code that perform a specific task) needs an owner along with clear responsibilities. Owners don’t wait for instructions from other units – they manage their component throughout its lifecycle and react on changing customer demands. The ownership model enforces a team-driven architecture approach with less formal hierarchy and structure and more space for continuous innovation. An agile DevOps approach (e.g. assisted by SalesforceDX) allows a component team to develop their offering on a daily – if needed even an hourly basis. Code can be released as soon as it is developed. Teams don’t have to wait for a scheduled release or feedback from other business units. This requires some architectural decisions - e.g. how to slice components.

To ensure that the ongoing development contributes to the company’s goals, component owners and teams need a clear mission statement. This statement is objective and sets out the boundaries of each component. It structures the component's journey along its lifecycle as well as separating the team from other component teams. Thus, the mission statement ideally leads to reduced coordination needs and interdependencies between the components. This setup enables the component teams to experiment. Components can be modified easily to measure the reaction of customers, or new digital offers can be tested as PoC. In the end, there is additional room for innovation.  

Trust is the backbone of Accountability

Incidentally, this independent setup also addresses the most significant problems large companies have with their existing matrix structure. Often, they have created dozens of bottlenecks with their hierarchy-based decision-making processes. If the mission statement of a team is well designed and a team has all resources at its disposal to be able to fulfil it, nothing can go wrong. Of course, mistakes will happen – as they invariably do, but instead of managers coming to the rescue in trying to fix it, in this accountable framework leaders act more as a coach in helping to understand what went wrong. Coaches assist in setting up processes to complete the mission. This different leading behavior strengthens the autonomy of the individual and changes the culture of the company. It empowers people who are living for their ideas who want to create something unique, and it enables the team to grow together instead of getting tired over ongoing conflicts while trying to coordinate with each other's business lines.

The transformation to digital will force companies to change the way they work. It can’t happen overnight. Starting the digital transformation with a small innovative team seems to be crucial to gather learnings. Beginning the digital transformation with a Center of Excellence or an Innovation Hub could minimize risks for a company and enable curious people with a desire for change to come together, create innovation and drive the company’s transformation. If a company has no desire to create a new framework, it will likely end up simply transferring their analog processes to digital, without any value added for the customer. It makes itself redundant.