Digital Transformation

Few years ago, IT Department was a support internal cost center with no revenue generation with no connection to strategies. In order decrease innovation cycle in terms of time and increase productivity, companies took to digital Transformation and adopted revolutionary technology of DevOps which made faster deployment of applications incrementally as also facilitates live deployment, debugging and improvement of versions thereby assisting in Continuous delivery process which achieves the aim of faster development and deployment of applications.

The path to digital transformation for every organization is unique and the same needs to be defined by the leaders as its strategic vision keeping sight of goals, objectives and timelines. This can be undertaken by carrying out internal assessments of the existing processes, resources and drawing a path to the final goal. This path should be defined by intermediate objectives and timelines for total transformation (Where are you today and where do you want to go). This process though simple is challenging to be implement in well-established organizations with deep rooted legacy systems. In this light of the Phases or Continuous Evolution related to Digital Transformations is discussed below:-

DevOps (Similar Process Changes)           First step towards this would be to bring all stakeholders in development discussions. This should including how operations maintain applications, software, infra and how partners and customers use the software/apps. This opens the discussion Forums and sets up the stage for Transformation.

Self-service infra      This is an important phase that initiates tech centric change within the organization which would work as an catalyst to reduce the delivery cycle drastically.

Automation & Orchestration        Adaption of Agility in all aspects of management particularly in changes and risk management is the only way forward to improve processes and adoption of latest technologies.

CI/CD Pipelines        This enables the ability to deliver on demand. In other words CI/CD Pipelines makes a commitment to carryout changes to software rapidly and iteratively. The pipeline ensures faster adoption of processes and technology to reduce the risk of deployment of an application of substandard quality (with broken code).

Advanced deployment paths        Once the processes and infrastructure are in place, these can be utilized for rapid deployment of applications as also carryout version as this infrastructure and tech provides for immediate roll back to previous functional version thereby providing in build risk mitigation while exploring the environment as testing ground for new ideas.

Microservices  is a small application that performs a discrete, singular function. It is are part of transformation of IT departments towards a DevOps culture since it brings development and operations team to a common platform in support of an application over its life-cycle and go through a rapid or continuous release cycle instead of traditional long cycle.

What’s the problem : Technology or Culture

Create a beautiful Architectural Diagram: People and Process can make you fail. Changing the infrastructure or the application architecture is easy. To effectively change what you produce, you need to change your culture first. Changing your communication structure will result in better processes and infrastructure almost regardless of the infrastructure.

DevOps as Step 1: Agile Methodology pulled QA, product, QA Development and Documentation closer. Leading to shorter iterations. DevOps is a cultural shift that tries to break down the separation between developers, operations, and business stakeholders.

Developer when spend time with operations on the roll outs know their pain points and Operations team understand how many steps or service tickets it takes for a developer to request a new virtual system. Seeing how other teams functioning are is a powerful force to encourage teams to change their processes or to open up communication. Speed is one of the key benefits of DevOps

Whether your ultimate application architecture is a more refined monolith or distributed microservices, changing your team structure and communication is a requirement. Communication should flow both before an application is planned and after it is deployed. A team per service can easily break into a silo per service, unless you’ve created and enabled a culture that supports open communication and feedback.

New application architecture is the final stage of digital evolution but you need to have a very clear understanding of your strategic priorities and goals before this.

“If you don’t have a clear understanding of your business, product, or where you fit in the stack, breaking things out prematurely into a bunch of services without knowing how they are going to be used is not going to be a fun outcome. … think about architecture, but it’s also important to do it in a way that is incremental and allows you to test ideas and validate them rather than trying to turn on a dime and build totally differently. That’s going to fail and turn into a nine-month project that finishes with you telling your VP of engineering that, while you learned a lot, in the end the team decided not to ship it. That’s not what you want to do. You want to be providing value and impact to your customers and business through planned and well-thought out processes.”

You start with what your strategic goal is and then design the architecture that supports that. That puts the application first.

There are three prominent application architectures today, based on the relationships between the services: monoliths (tightly coupled), microservices (decoupled), and (though falling out of favor) service-oriented architectures (loosely coupled)

Assess each stage of digital evolution: DevOps, self-service or elastic environments, automation, CI/CD pipelines, advanced deployments, and microservices. Build your digital transformation strategy around the level of evolution that best matches your business needs. Focus on building your culture, and balance technology changes with corresponding process changes so that your technology is fully supported by your teams. As your processes mature, begin evaluating your application and architecture. As necessary, isolate or develop independent services, and create an agile architecture that can be adapted as business priorities change or emerge. Lastly, foster an ability to innovate. This means having some tolerance for risk and failure (within the limits of your business objectives and customer needs). It requires the discipline to set aside resources in time, money, and infrastructure. Experimentation is at the root of innovation, and it sets up a better chance for digital transformation success. It also recaptures some of the initial joy that drew so many developers and operations people into technology in the first place—the ability to create and see that creation.