Your Meat is Rotting: Meatware is the Problem

I excerpted a bit from a draft of this post last week, here's some more of it. You can go over to the Pivotal blog to see the full post and series. And, here's the overview of the whole series, the first part on greenfield projects and the second part on legacy projects.

Beyond Tactics: Transforming To A More Resilient Culture

The transformation part of the Cloud Native Journey is largely about how you establish the new behavior and habits of a software defined business. While many of the tactics and technologies I covered in the greenfield and legacy parts carry over here, the transformation journey is focused on building new operating model for IT. Of course, this means changes to responsibilities, processes, and technology. Yet, there is an even more critical foundation—creating and cultivating a beneficial culture. This can seem like “soft” concerns, but just as zombie movies are never really about zombies and instead about human culture, new technologies are rarely about the technology themselves but new ways of using technology. Of course, zombies, and technologies, are more than just MacGuffins and play a major role themselves, but focusing on the human, behavioral, and cultural element is the transformative part.

In our case, the MacGuffin, as covered in the introduction to this series, is the ability to reliably and safely deploy software weekly, if not multiple times a day. Importantly, this addresses a larger goal—you get the ability to start investing more into digital customer experiences or new, digital business models by more perfectly designing and crafting software. The cultural change starts with these goal in mind—leaping at the opportunity to improve your software and more closely aligning your applications with business strategy. To make this change sustainable, you’ll need to change how the IT department is organized and run. The new roles, responsibilities, practices and processes you’ll put in place, intermixed with new group behaviors, will become your new culture.

What You’re Doing Isn’t Working

Companies definitely feel the need to improve the role IT plays in the overall business, as multiple studies have been showing. One of the more illustrative studies comes from the Cutter Consortium and compares the value of IT to business innovation over the past three years (the actual survey question is posed at the bottom of the chart):

The drop in IT being a key enabler for business innovation, from 54% in 2013 to 31% in 2015, is actually shocking. It points to a real need—for leaders in IT to focus on transforming their organization into a strategic business partner.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways IT starts transforming and hopefully reverses this downward trend in usefulness. Many of the practices we’ve already covered are still highly applicable—for example—managing your IT portfolio to free up time to work on new projects, being as strict about test coverage as possible, and using a cloud platform. This last part will expand on some of those concepts and cover ongoing culture cultivation, ensuring you can reap the greatest benefits from being a Cloud Native enterprise.

Your Meat is Rotting: Meatware is the Problem

As I talk with companies who are looking to transform how they do IT, I realize more and more that the problem is not so much technology, or even how that technology is used. The problem is the unhelpful processes, behavior, and culture that is in place. You can think of these as thought technologies, but I like to call them meatware. Much of what it takes—to transform IT organizations into centers for innovation—is about changing the IT culture from a command and control, big planning up-front, organized by function (or silo’d) mind-set. Most IT departments operate in this traditional way, creating teams aligned by function and capability then assigning them to projects as needed. When the problems of IT are well understood, and the IT team’s job is to keep all the processes humming and perform routine maintenance, this kind of approach can be good. However, when your task is exploring new processes and software products—as a Cloud Native enterprise, reinventing and evolving how its business operates—this traditional, keep the trains running on time mindset is harmful.

There are many ways to look at these two modes of operating: bimodal IT, the three horizons, Agile vs. Six Sigma, etc. Out of all the great strategy framings, I like the explore/exploit model. When businesses start off, they are exploring new innovations in products and services as well as how they create and deliver those wares to customers. This process requires experimenting, learning, and risk taking until a team finally finds the right mix of customer need, product, and go-to-market model, ultimately achieving competitive advantage and exploiting a growing, profitable, business model.

Once a company finds that model, they usually switch to the exploit mode of operating. This mode knows exactly what the business is, understands the customer need, has a product or service that meets that need, and understands how to effectively get that offering into a customer’s hand in exchange for money. With organizations like governments and nonprofits, the end goal is satisfying “the mission,” fundraising, or providing a service to citizens. In the exploit mode, companies look to optimize how their processes run and “execute to plan” because the plan is working!

Too often, IT departments who need to be operating in an explore mind-set have a culture of operating in an exploit mindset—they fail to change their culture over to the needed explore mode. It’s little wonder then that Gartner is predicting 90% failure rate in DevOps adoption if organizations don’t address cultural issues. The first step, then, is to become cognizant of which mode you should be operating in. This knowledge—like all good strategy—needs to be spread down the ranks to individuals and become a key enabler of transforming your IT department. Here is how one Pivotal customer explains the transformation:

CoreLogic brought software engineers to Pivotal Labs to learn Pivotal’s extreme agile software development methodology. The methodology focuses on test-driven development, pair programming, short development cycles, and continuous verification and integration of code to improve software quality and flexibility and reduce cost. As a result, the culture of CoreLogic product management and technology groups has fundamentally changed to become more nimble and collaborative.

“For us, it’s been much more than a technological transformation moving to a (Cloud Native Platform). It’s a new way to develop products,” says Leurig. “It’s the most exciting thing we’ve done in the last 12 months.”

See the rest of the piece, with more advice for transforming to a cloud native approach.