Architectural 2-way doors: why your current design process is holding you back

It is an exciting time for the public sector, as digital technologies disrupt the way people interact with healthcare, transport, education, and community services, opening doors to new worlds of opportunity for citizens. The potential for transformational, repeatable, and sustained change is huge.

Creating new and effective ways to interact with citizens digitally is partly dependent on technology and partly on the mindset of technologists. Innovating in today’s cloud era requires them to actualize new thinking and bold decision-making, underpinned by the security of architectural two-way doors.

The fact is, big and hard-to-change decisions invariably need to be made early on in the design process. However, innovation by its very nature, is experimental. It involves learning and? iterating along the way. There are “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”. In all probability you are going to come across them all.?

High stakes innovation

Now imagine you are innovating within procurement processes that lock you into your early design and purchasing decisions; such as database licenses or your operating system. But along the way you discover that a graph database might have been a better idea than a relational database. Or that you overestimated the capacity you thought you would need. Maybe there are even one or two features in the Enterprise version of a system that are important to you, yet getting your hands on them would mean forking out for the entire upgrade across your implementation. Each one of these costly scenarios will undoubtedly ring true for technology leaders across government.

The consequence of innovating within environments that require irreversible decision-making and significant up-front capital investment is compromise. You inevitably end up building around the design decisions you make, instead of staying true to your vision for the citizen experience.

Architectural two-way doors? ?

The pain of innovating public sector services within inflexible architecture can be easily alleviated by architectural two-way doors. These metaphorical doors exist within cloud infrastructure that allows digital transformation leaders to change and adapt the solutions they are building as they evolve their understanding of the problem.

Examples of two-way doors

One-way door decisions cannot be reversed: at all, or at least not without great pain to the organisation. These are decisions where the door only swings one way, such as buying an office building, ending a vendor relationship and - critically for innovation roles - a non returnable CapEx investment in a potentially under-utilised, on-premise IT infrastructure.?

When you think about all that you go through to make these decisions, including: gaining approval for an on-premises server, vendor selection and ordering, up to months of delivery time, rack installation and networking in with existing infrastructure, installation of an operating system etc, is it any wonder that there is little appetite to start over? Even when the OpEx proves virtually unsustainable, you’re committed to throwing good money after bad.

By contrast, two-way door decisions are eminently reversible, and with minimal consequence. The door swings in both directions. They are things like testing an idea in a closed pilot, or choosing almost any kind of service within a true pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-use, cloud environment. In the cloud, if you need to spin up services you can do it quickly. When you no longer need them you simply stop paying for them and it ends there.

Even seemingly big decisions that inform architectural design can be two-way doors. Imagine you build around an Oracle database and then three months later realise that a Postgres database suits your architecture better. Then stop paying for Oracle and start paying for Postgres. Modern cloud migration includes logical tools that map data to new configurations automatically and relatively effortlessly. Long gone are the days of migration meaning a complete rebuild; plus a good supply of aspirin.

Instead, with cloud services,? you are free to embrace the experimental reality of innovation and arrive at successful outcomes far faster than ever before.

Adopting the two-way door mindset

While the 2-way-door rule made possible by secure cloud services is an intelligent way to remove emotional decision-making from architectural design, and to build a bias toward taking action, it does require a new mindset. It calls upon public sector technologists to become good at quickly-recognising and correcting decisions. And perhaps this goes against everything we have been taught about succeeding within a government environment up to this point.

We are talking about an industry steeped in caution for the aforementioned reasons of high costs and intense resources needed for building in legacy environments. These historical conditions gave rise to an extreme level of governance that has stuck with us, even in this new digital era.?

However, if you can easily reverse a design decision, why waste money on excessive governance? That is what today’s technology leaders are tasked with asking themselves. They are called upon to be bold. To innovate with seventy percent of the information they need at hand, trusting that the agility and security of cloud computing will support them in discovering the other thirty percent along the way.

That’s precisely what happened when Queensland’s Department of Resources moved its entire geoscience data ecosystem into the cloud with AWS; making it fully accessible at a sustainable cost. The migration succeeded in breaking a 25-year new minerals discovery drought. In moderninsing its data storage and compute functions, the GSQ (Geological Survey of Queensland) adopted agile delivery; testing design and operating concepts among internal and external stakeholders as the build progressed.?

Needless to say, they achieved their objectives in record time, reaping the benefits of a 92% reduction in data storage costs and a 42% reduction in the need for IT support.

While you were reading

So there you have it. Building government services is not what it used to be. The stakes are lower and the rewards higher for those with an innovation mindset, who are ready to take a leap of faith into the cloud. And I’ll leave you with this thought. While you were reading this article, you could have set up your cloud environment.