The Hellcat and the Optimization Imperative

It only takes a moment to realize when something is out of tune. When an instrument, an automobile, or a piece of equipment isn't working like it's supposed to, everyone - and everything feels it. One single instrument out of balance creates the sonic equivalent of driving on the freeway and a window rolled down. In an ensemble or an automobile, the impact is immediately visceral. But for a company, the negative effects may not be felt until its much too late.

Performing a successful concert is difficult. A flexible design, a sophisticated execution, and a high level of coordination amongst the musicians is necessary to deliver a moving experience. Integration, teamwork, and communication is required - and a high level of collective skill is required for each individual component to perform to its potential. When it doesn’t work, the people depending on this performance suffer.

Organizational Tuning is crucial to operating a world-class organization. Each company, regardless of industry, has grown out of a particular set of investments in people, processes, and technology to get them to where they are today. These investments are ideally geared towards propelling the company towards financial and social goals, business strategies, and risk tolerances. When investing in technology, company leadership needs to have an understanding of the opportunities and constraints of their chosen combination of technology, both new and legacy, in relation to their goals and your organizational capabilities. There are pros and cons to each choice.

One of our Managing Directors loves driving his American muscle car. His car is a Dodge Hellcat with a supercharged V8 engine under the hood that puts out over 700 horsepower. Its performance is completely configurable and my friend loves to make changes to it to maximize its performance. Performance tuning in this vehicle is almost limitless. You can tune it for performance handling, you can tune it for speed, and you can even tune it for fuel economy (which has never been done on that car, for the record). High performance is due to the intricate relationship that all of the engine components have with one another. Simply upgrading the spark plugs, a routine task performed on millions of cars every year, can drastically improve the performance of a car. Each option has tradeoffs and every component should be constantly evaluated in relation to the changing company's goals.

Technology platforms work the same way as high-performance automobiles. Take Databricks for instance. This platform is one of the fastest growing data platforms on the market today, and it helps companies make sense of their constantly growing and changing data to make better business decisions. Full disclosure, we are a Databricks partner and customer. Still, it’s one of the most powerful analytics platforms on the market, and many organizations leverage it to solve both their data and their customer problems. But like owning and operating a high-performance automobile, using Databricks can be a complex and challenging endeavor. The benefits to the organization are game-changing but operating it poorly can feel like driving one hundred miles an hour with both of your back windows down.

Treating data as your company's most valuable asset is more important than ever. Every company struggles with competing priorities and limited resources. Size does not make you immune to technology atrophy no matter how large of enterprise you lead - in fact it's often worse because it's disguised. Inertia promotes complacency making irrelevance the norm. Getting access to data, managing data, and delivering data to business stakeholders is one of the toughest operations for the enterprise. Leveraging data to increase revenue and improve margins is the holy grail, but the an inflexible and out of tune technology design can hamstring an organization. We prioritize optimization in four categories:

1.??????Plan and Build: Fundamental to designing and architecting a modern data estate is having a data strategy consistent with your company's business strategy. A flexible data architecture based on patterns, practices, and principles is critical to making sure the entire enterprise has buy-in and alignment. Each of your leaders must be invested and participating in the design process with improving their teams as their goal. Begin with optimization in mind.

2.??????Run and Scale: Data operations in the cloud is fundamentally different than running on prem. Mistakes in estimating consumption forecasting, capacity planning, and organizational change management can all result in considerable cost to the company. The level of technology complexity has increased, and teams must leverage the latest services available to maximize value from their platforms. Companies must be constantly monitoring and optimizing to proactively anticipate future change. Most importantly, companies must understand which business units are leveraging the technology so that attribution can be measured. If you can’t measure it, it’s waste.

3.??????Modernize and Accelerate: Companies that delay to modernize their legacy technology fall further behind their competitors year after year. Reliance on large technology appliances with the delusional expectation that they will power operational excellence is the equivalent of hiring Accenture - it will only just not get you fired. Companies must continuously leverage lightweight applications and microservices that specifically address business problems particular to their industry and, at the same time, defer engineering risk to their data partners. The simple truth is that modern technology practices are updating and accelerating faster than ever, and each company must modernize in order to improve, not maintain, its competitive advantage. Your legacy investments are holding you back – let them go.

4.??????Innovate and Grow: World-class data platforms like Databricks are perfect catalysts for facilitating innovation, opening up new lines of business, and unlocking new revenue streams. Experimentation at scale is crucial to unlocking new ways of working, and proving that these experiments will be useful is the only way technology scales. Modern data platforms help you iterate faster, perform rapid prototyping, and get real-time feedback to help develop scalable and extensible solutions for your business. Innovate AND maintain Operational Excellence.

It feels amazing to be part of a company that is operating at its full potential. Maintaining a high performing company over time is difficult. Your company must be tuned organizationally to your overall strategy or else it will be optimized for the wrong outcomes. Our MD's Hellcat accelerates quickly from 0 to 60 but it accelerates even faster from 60 to 100 the way he has it tuned. He maintains its components constantly is always looking for upgrade opportunities. He also burns three times as much fuel than I do every month, but he considers it very much worth it. Prioritize optimization, do not wait.?