Challenging IT Traditions To Deliver A Modern Culture

“Cultures grow on a vine of tradition.” -  Jonah Goldberg

Technology development, for many years, followed specific customs, beliefs and harnessed a standard way of delivering software products. These traditions manifested into a defined culture that cut across the entire industry. As consumer expectations started to become more demanding, business became more dynamic, and ‘value’ started to be redefined, technology needed to be more flexible, agile and deliver faster than ever before. Every IT enterprise quickly identified a need to change the way they deliver software to thrive in their business; and hence, looked at disrupting the culture of software delivery. 

But, cultural change cannot happen over night. It requires us to challenge the status quo and transform our traditions. Traditions are customs, beliefs or way of doing something that has continued from the past, and as long as traditions stay constant, a dream of a new culture will be distant reality. Application modernization is about changing the way to engineer software solutions. It is a gradual, constant and dynamic journey to effectively leverage technology for your business. 

With increasing pressure to deliver hyper-connected, advanced and seamless technology experiences, the technology functions of every company are under tremendous pressure to enable expectations of data security, data analytics, seamless third party integration and automation. Incremental approaches were often taken to address specific pain points in the immediate future, but today, it is required technology looks at the larger picture to modernize end-to-end IT systems and be future-ready. 

 Past principles and traditions need to be challenged as the way technology is consumed has changed. Hardware is no longer seen in isolation, and software is now delivered on a platform rather than to be installed as a package. The application modernization journey involves three key focus areas: infrastructure, architecture and process. 

With increasing demands of integration and remote, anytime, anywhere access, on IT, migrating solutions to the cloud is the first step in the modernization journey. It allows for easy data migration, allow for multi cloud environments and fuels containerization as a lightweight alternative to a virtual machine. Architecture modernization allows solutions to move from tightly coupled modules to loosely coupled, independent components. This is fueled by microservices and micro front ends to help create independent, flexible components in the back and front end of any solution. 

Just the infrastructure and architecture modernization is not enough, but it requires new ways of thinking of processes and principles for new age tech teams follow. Embracing test-driven development, Agile/SCRUM, and DevOps processes backed by a strong design thinking based back-bone can help systems to truly modernize. Each of these elements challenge traditions, and help systems to modernize. It is also important to understand that in reality, systems will always be a mix of monolith and modern approaches, and understanding which is which is the strategic key behind a modernization journey. As these traditions get disrupted, it will automatically give way to a new, aligned culture. Culture is a by-product of a new way of thinking, doing and interacting, and as traditions evolve, a new culture will surely be delivered.