THE ALIGNMENT OF TECHNOLOGY IN BIG CORPORATIONS

Technology plays a vital role in the operation of every business worldwide. Beyond mere efficiency, it provides businesses with competitive advantages. Consequently, even non-tech sector enterprises heavily depend on tech sector companies for products and services, yet they must also maintain their own technology infrastructure, including source code and human resources.

In the non tech sector, the primary focus is clearly on the core business. Whether it's a shipping company, a bank, or a retail business, the emphasis remains on their respective domains. The leaders in these organizations are experts in their fields, and technology has often been considered an afterthought. Therefore, the tech strategy ended up on the back seat.

Corporations are typically organized based on their size, with divisions into Line of Business (LOB) or departments, which can, in turn, be subdivided into various business functions. A business function, whether it's part of a department or constitutes the entire department itself, represents an autonomous, revenue-generating, and self-contained segment of the company. Each of these functions is characterized by a well-defined business process that provides guidance for employees and clients, facilitating interactions and the completion of business transactions. Usually, the technology is introduced at the level of these business functions rather than through a top-down approach. This approach creates the perception that technology and its associated teams serve as dedicated enablers for each business function, akin to their private IT service providers.

As technology awareness and maturity continue to increase, some common tasks are consolidated into a shared IT department. However, the fundamental principle remains unchanged: each business function funds and maintains its own IT resources, treating them as if they were their own personal vehicles. Although, on a different note –the rise of public cloud strategyputs a question mark on the existence of these shared IT/Technology departments.

This alignment of business functions with dedicated technology services creates an environment prone to redundant work and budget inefficiencies. Each business function ends up building its own foundational blocks and infrastructure, which do not provide differentiation for the respective business function. These include elements such as Authentication, Gateways/Traffic management, Tech Observability, Business Observability, User management, Entitlements, authorization, reporting, UI libraries, Email notifications, Archives, and more. When there's a need to modify or update these building blocks, it results in repetitive efforts across multiple business functions. This not only hampers the speed to market and stifles innovation but also necessitates a significant level of effort to coordinate changes that affect multiple departments or businesses.

While there is a constant encouragement to seek synergy, reuse, and coordination, the fundamental structure of the organization often doesn't inherently support these objectives. Finding synergy at the Line of Business (LOB) level is nearly impossible due to differences in budgeting structure, their objectives, and prioritization. While the potential for synergy exists within a LOB, achieving it at the business function level is also challenging for the same reasons. Typically, it relies on individual efforts, and when successful, these efforts are rightfully celebrated.

This document serves as an attempt to introduce an alternative approach to aligning technology with business functions. This approach is designed to address the fundamental challenges, allowing both the business and technology to focus on elements that set your business apart, rather than on generic components that lack specific business value.

Within this model, technology should not be viewed as the exclusive domain of each business function. Instead, technology should be classified into two categories: foundational and incubator, spanning across all business functions.

The foundational space comprises strategic, well-architected, mature, self-contained, scalable, low-maintenance, and reusable technical building blocks. These building blocks are intended for digitizing business functions or parts of processes that support a business function, known as features. Features within the foundational space must inherently possess both technical and business observability, as well as technical and business administration capabilities. Consequently, there should never be a requirement for a technical resource to manually intervene in any of the internal components of a mature feature or core component.

Moreover, envision the foundational space as constructing a skyscraper. In this analogy, we don't prioritize building the 4th floor first due to its perceived importance, higher cost, greater manual labor, or potential to slow down business processes. Instead, we must begin by investing in creating the foundation space, focusing on the foundational elements before proceeding to construct the first, second, and subsequent floors. Building a feature using unstable components will inevitably lead to instability. The foundation space must maintain a searchable catalog of capabilities.

The Incubator space will serve as the home for our initial MVPs, rapid tactical process automations to support new business initiatives & experimentation and evaluate new vendor products in real word. It's important to note that this is not a proof-of-concept (POC) space; all the work undertaken here will be production-ready and utilized in the real world. The implementation approach in this space allows us to combine foundational capabilities, manual steps, MS Office productivity software, vendor products, and custom-built tactical solutions to support a business function for 1-3 years. If the business proves to be profitable, the plan is to eventually move it to the foundational space.

One of the advantages of commencing in this space is the learning curve. It's simply not feasible for humans to fully comprehend every aspect of a business process during the initial discovery phase of automation. We gain a deeper understanding of use cases as we build more functions and put them into real-life use. Ideally, a mature agile process should address this issue, but factors such as attraction to shortcuts, team size, and the innate desire to reach point B from point A as swiftly as possible often work against it. This can leave technologists with the feeling that if they knew then what they know now, they might have approached things differently.

Let's illustrate this concept with an example: Imagine you're in the process of planning a shopping mall. The initial investment, which includes purchasing the land and creating the mall's blueprint, falls under the category of foundational investment. In case circumstances require it, and you encounter resource constraints, you have the option to temporarily pause the project and resume it at a later time, picking up where you left off. Similarly, the process of laying the foundation for the actual building is also considered foundational investment, as you can choose to continue construction at a later date if necessary.

However, if you wish to assess the viability of, let's say, an ice-cream kiosk in that location, and you decide to set up a temporary tent to start selling ice cream, the investment in the tent belongs to the Incubator space. This is because the tent cannot be expanded to accommodate additional floors. Nonetheless, it's a prudent strategy to evaluate the market's interest in the business in that area before committing to a permanent ice-cream shop on the mall's first floor.

There could be numerous advantages to adopting this approach:?

1.???? Cost Efficiency: As the foundational space expands, the cost of future process digitalization decreases, as you can leverage existing components, reducing the need for costly development from scratch.

2.???? Enhanced Maturity: Teams gain valuable experience in building and operating capabilities within incubator. This increased experience leads to higher process maturity, including non-functional aspects such as performance, scalability, and fault tolerance, which are often overlooked.

3.???? Reduced Redundancy: This alignment creates opportunities for checks and balances, preventing duplicate work and encouraging the reuse and enhancement of existing capabilities.

4.???? Accelerated Time to Market: The incubator space allows for semi-automation and the combination of tools to model business processes, speeding up the time it takes to bring new products and processes to the market. This flexibility enables businesses to experiment more effectively.

5.???? Vendor Product Evaluation: This approach provides a safe environment to assess the strengths and weaknesses of vendor products by using them in the incubator space for at least 2-3 years in production scenarios, going beyond the scope of traditional proof-of-concept testing.