The IT Organization in the Hybrid Age

(by-liner published in IT Manager magazine, Colombia, October 2014)

We have entered a new age of innovation and for companies to thrive through it they need to put collaboration at the centre of their agenda. In this new age of runaway innovation, the ability to collaborate turns into competitive advantage and time to market has become critical.

In our conversations with business and public leaders, the majority of them are placing a clear emphasis in the openness of their organizations seeking a better understanding of ‘the art of possible’ whilst ‘foreseeing the future’ in their own words.

Nowadays, senior leaders acknowledge the strategic value of information technologies, but at the same time express their discontent with its efficacy, especially in bringing off the required innovation and transformation of their businesses. Consequently, information technology organizations and officers must revise and adapt their beliefs, principles and practices to this new age.

Increasingly business information systems consist of integrating services and have less custom development. The cloud is not only a massive server farm, but has a number of companies offering services that can be integrated to unleash new and differential value and competitive advantages. Notwithstanding the massive availability and apparent simplicity of technology, the reality is that business information technology systems are becoming increasingly complex being more ambitious.

Coincidentally to Ayesha and Parag Khanna definition of the Hybrid Age, hybrid IT architectures are becoming overtly relevant as means to unfold value in an increasingly connected world.

Hybrid architectures are the result of combining internal and external services; usually in the cloud, where they already exist and are commoditized to be consumed, to build differential products and services to both internal users and end clients of the organization.

IT organizations barely start to transform their systems to hybrid architectures to integrate with external parties aiming to build new cohesive systems and build value out of collaboration. This will allow them to benefit not only from infrastructures as a service, but also from available services and most importantly integrate with clients, partners and new market players.

Nowadays, multiple services can be integrated as cloud applications (software as a service), social networks can be exploited, users geolocalized or SMS via Twilio can be sent to users on demand, only to name a few examples. It is not only about integrating published services, but also about building, thanks to platforms as Bluemix, cloud applications, ‘born in the cloud’, integrated with the business back-end systems.

The challenge for the organizations facing an inevitable technological modernization is to reconcile its current landscape, its future vision of the architecture and the organizational strategy. Its current landscape has been determined by its application architecture, probably with a combination of custom developments, customized packages, standard packages and point to point integrations in between this portfolio of applications. The future vision has in most cases clear initiatives of application portfolio modernization, best practices deployments, superior IT governance and upgrades to the core products.

Confronting the challenges and yet reaching the desired modernization can be achieved through building a hybrid architecture underpinned by a clear architecture and its overarching principles. This approach allows the integration of its diverse components either from external providers or custom development software. To apply appropriately this approach, firstly providing the right responsibility to each component and secondly an early identification of the services that solve these responsibilities is required.

A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the basis of the systems of this new age where the services and data bus becomes the central piece of this universe and the architectural discussions become progressively more complex. The enterprise service bus (ESB) with proper master data management is nowadays the heart of the systems, allowing evolving services around this central piece. Many enterprises have today multiple buses which obliges them to have federated enterprise services connectivity practices. This will have prepared them in advance for the hybrid architectures that require the management of multiple services as connectivity, visibility, security, management and governance.

In this new age, the other big challenge will be talent and culture alike. With integration becoming the key role of the IT organizations, new personal competences and skills are required. Business acumen with the understanding of the key business dimensions, the ability to truly team work and systems thinking will become skills as important as the technical skills. This is necessary to turn the IT organization from an IT supplier into an orchestrator and integrator.

Successive waves of cost reductions across entire geographies have left behind a mantra of unit cost purchasing and in-sourcing. However the IT organizations will not enjoy the benefit of time to equip with the required skills and competences and they should better seek those in the market amongst service companies, communities and resources that allow leapfrogging their efficacy and finding those new value models.

Integrating existing services shortens development cycles, but requires these new competences, especially amongst the domain of application lifecycle and development where renewed practices and tools are required, such as DevOps and Urbancode as an example.

Finally, Testing has become overly critical being these hybrid architectures, in most cases, exposed in one way or another in the net. The quality of the testing systems that ensures data integrity, security, data quality and platform availability is cornerstone.

Ensuring the platform availability is key. The frantic pace of innovation can by no means put at risk the availability or even worse the company data. In consequence, testing should have become a widespread discipline across IT and incorporated early in the integration efforts.

Indeed DevOps is all about continuous testing as everybody is responsible not only to develop, but also to operate and bring quality assurance through the software development and integration lifecycle.

Target security breach left a balance of 40 million compromised credit cards. Ulster Bank, from the RBS group, had to accrue more than 100 M Euros because of the problems that arose on June 2012 that left many clients without service for almost five weeks.

In summary, there are three vectors that are key in building a successful organization in this new age. Firstly, it is to become a transformation agent with integration as the toolset for that and the business and corresponding IT architecture as the centre and lighthouse guiding the IT organization actions. Secondly, it is to revise the culture, operating principles and competences of the organization accordingly. And lastly guaranteeing quality and an absolute managed risk through the process where speed cannot jeopardize by any means the stability of high availability platforms.