Digital Speed Versus Business Continuity - Do We Have To Choose?

Do you recall those graphs we used to show each other that illustrated the speed of uptake of new technology? We had graphs that showed the number of years it took for a light bulb to reach multi-millions of users compared with the number of days it took for the latest iPhone to achieve the same. By any measure, the level of change in 2020 has been intense. Some commentators have claimed that we have seen 20 years of social and 5+ years of digital change crammed into it, so it's going to be interesting to see what the updated graphs look like!

In these challenging times, your digital presence is your business. And now more than ever it is critical that organizations can monetise their ability to adapt and respond to rapidly changing circumstances. That means having the capability to optimize processes and make decisions quickly in response to complex factors such as supply chain risk, market disrupters and customer preference signals. Getting this right will result in higher quality, more secure products and services that are delivered faster, have a faster uptake, and drive stronger customer and employee engagement. 

Many commentators have warned of the perils of rolling out digital change too fast. Suggesting that companies making rapid changes must be taking technical short cuts or that they do not have the time or resources to properly maintain these new capabilities. Which could mean that by storing up unfinished technical work they are creating a new legacy or ‘technical debt’, which will eventually cause interruptions to business as usual services. Then at the other end of the scale with business stability regarded as sacrosanct, there are those businesses that have decided to implement change freezes. And who would blame them? Change has been regarded as such a risky exercise and in a year like 2020 with uptime more important than ever any outages it might cause could prove fatal for businesses. The problem with the latter strategy is that customers are not prepared to stand still, they have shown how adaptable they can be by being prepared to try out the latest brands and alternative services to get what they want, or put another way if you don’t change and adapt your customers will and go somewhere else.

With the desire for speed and business continuity taking a higher profile do we need to reconsider our attitude and approaches to managing digital change and its maintenance? Even the terms we use such as change ‘roll-out’ suggest an approach that takes time and is uniformly applied. We tend to have different approaches for different technologies applying the changes in batches each month or quarter, or we have freezes when we are closing key fiscal events such as the year-end.  Technical debt is a phrase that suggests we intend to make all outstanding technical gaps good, rather like paying down a money debt or a mortgage. But did 2020 just make these outmoded ways of working? 

As organizations race to compete in today’s fast-moving business climate no one wants to prioritize digital speed over stability or security, leaving businesses vulnerable. Nor do we want to be waiting for the roll-out of layered technical refit programmes before we can make progress. We want it all and now, please. 

Is the reason change still feels risky because we worry that things will get out of step? That change is a threat to the stability of the interconnected platforms, we are using to deliver customer and employee experiences? Many companies particularly those with digital products and services will talk long and hard about how they have combined agile, microservices and DevOps approaches to deliver many hundreds of changes and updates every day for their businesses.  Important as this is, it is often limited to a specific area such as the specialist development of a digital product or channel. But no one now wants a brilliant new product and a hopeless returns process. Or a product that is designed for pay to use but you cannot bill for it. We want both. From a business continuity point of view what’s missing is the ability to deliver multiple changes at the same time in all the processes that wrap around those products to deliver ‘experience continuity’ as well as new value to keep customers interested and revenue coming in. 

Perhaps to go faster we should consider re-framing technical debt as the ‘digital drag factor’ that acts against the achievement of a specific business outcome. Just like we do in automotive engineering, we need to seek out the digital and business equivalent of the poorly designed spoiler that causes way too much process friction and holds us back.  What we would then need are the tools and techniques to systematically consider all the technical and process options we could deploy to reduce the digital drag coefficient.  Important in this approach would be using new technologies and methodologies that would mean we could selectively decommission, rather than retrospectively fix the technical debt such as hybrid cloud. 

Very few companies have the capabilities and practices in agile and DevOps tools to manage change across a combination of enterprise technologies, product technologies and third-party SaaS to synchronise delivery to business outcomes. To deliver changes and maintain a complete business outcome you need a combination of commodity and specialist technologies.  I might argue that it is only by aligning and shaping technology and software change activities to specific business goals and outcomes that it’s possible to take the smart decisions needed to accelerate business results while maintaining business continuity.

There is much scope to influence our communities and vendors to help us with tools that can better model and manage the complete ‘value stream’ that delivers our business outcomes. Smarter tools that can help enterprises to drive cross-process alignment are needed. We need tools that can integrate with security, cloud updates, process changes, audit rules from the beginning of the design and configuration/development planning, and in real-time. It is these integrated ways of working to deliver value what will achieve the level of changes needed to deliver the speed to market we now need and have now started to see a shift towards during the pandemic.   

“Change while you are ahead” was the mantra of a Henry Ford. He felt it kept his competitors on the backfoot and the customers always hankering after his next thing. Adopting ways of working so that change is just what we do, no matter how big or small the change, is the new normal. It’s the way we can have both our digital speed and business continuity.