Part 1: Infrastructure Platform Initiatives Likely Won't Improve Your Organization's Agility

A recent McKinsey Survey showed that 85% of C-Suite Executives are planning to accelerate the digitization of their business. Leaders will be responsible for implementing a growing number of digital innovation initiatives in parallel, and at a greater scale than ever before. The situation is further complicated by what proved to be an intense 2020 operating climate where the need for companies to deliver rapid results have become the norm.

While product teams have made significant shifts in both their technology, and operating model to better meet the needs of the digital age, Infrastructure & Operations leaders face increasing pressure to keep up, and better enable their organization's digitization transformation journey. The big challenge for I&O leaders is to balance the need for service reliability and performance with the imperative for rapid delivery of customer value. Keeping the lights on while becoming a key driver for their organization's transformation agenda is becoming an increasingly complex endeavor for I&O leadership.

Most I&O leaders have responded through initiatives aimed at providing infrastructure capabilities through modern, self-service oriented platforms. Forward thinking I&O leaders are introducing new and innovative technology architectures to enable faster delivery and increased responsiveness for product teams. Gartner's How to Build Agile Infrastructure Platforms That Enable Rapid Product Innovation outlines the architectural principles required to move to modern I&O platforms . While the paper is correct in that the core principles of adaptability, abstraction and agnosticism are necessary, our experiences with clients have proven that architecture alone is grossly insufficient.

The value of moving towards a platform approach won't be fully realized unless I&O undergoes a similar transformation that product teams have. I&O leaders need to transform their group to become both market driven and user centric, and to embrace an agile mindset to value delivery.

It is hard to debate that legacy approaches to I&O architectures are an extremely poor fit for our current age of constant change. Gartner researchers Manjunath Bhat and Dennis Smith are correct in the need to move away from the old ways of doing things. Both also highlight that product teams are increasingly making demands on I&O teams that have strong architectural implications, namely:

• Let us manage our operations through API-driven, micro-services!
• We need fast, automated deployments, provisioning, and recovery!
• Continuously improve the platforms so we better disrupt our competitors!

But the Gartner paper's sole emphasis on architecture, is mirrored by the approach taken by many leaders of I&O platform initiatives. A common perspective of I&O leaders is that the biggest risk in building a modern I&O platform is failing to get the architecture right, ending up with an in-flexible design, and building a platform that doesn't scale gracefully in the face of changing demands.

Our experiences with clients living and breathing I&O transformations paint a very different picture. I'll posit that the biggest risk facing I&O platform initiatives are more closely related to realizing value and fostering real behavioral change that leads to meaningful adoption.

When considering the products and services I&O teams deliver, the core questions I&O leaders should ask include:

• Are the services we are providing valuable to the product development teams?
• Do product teams want to use our services?
• Are product teams enjoying using our services?
• Are we making our product teams’ lives easier?
• Are we enabling product teams to make product delivery related decisions with less oversight?
• Are we growing self-serve capability without sacrificing safety?

Historically, the answer to these questions would be a resounding NO. The Gartner paper pays scant attention to the levels of frustration involved between product teams and I&O groups. Ad-hoc servicing, arcane processes, and inane bureaucracy are all to often what product teams perceive. From the I&O perspective, product teams take unnecessary, and even sloppy risks as they look for short cuts to getting value in the hands of customers. I&O teams will continue to face these kinds of challenges as they look to increasing the agility of the product teams they support. I have seen platform initiatives actually make things worse. Often as I&O attempts to roll out a modern paradigm we get poor services made worse by technical complexity.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I discuss the new I&O Mindset.