It’s no secret that creating digital platforms and ecosystems demands a faster paced-IT capability. But is moving to a two-speed IT model the best way to go?
IT leaders are challenged to keep innovating while over 60% of IT budgets remain focused on keeping the lights on. Consumers and workers alike expect apps that ‘just work’. They expect IT innovators to rapidly source always-on, powerful, and instantly intuitive solutions to capture, access, manage, and share information.
To keep pace with the need for near-constant digital re-invention, a new kind of IT rapid DevOps team is needed and a ‘fail-fast’ prototyping approach that in itself requires a high-productivity applications platform to support it.
Management teams recognize that they can’t ignore the importance of digital technologies and their influence on markets and business models. Organizations have a stark choice; to embrace digital, or die.
Buy or Build
In this new digital market reality, enterprises are faced with the option to buy an existing digital platform and ecosystem to support their business model orchestration, or build their own. In most cases, the only way for organizations to achieve a competitive edge is to do the latter. Recognition of this change makes IT an intrinsic core competency of any business, not a support department only there to keep the lights on.
McKinsey & Co. suggest companies with digital platforms enjoyed an annual boost in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of 1.4 percent, compared with the 0.3 percent gains of non-players. They go on to state that performance effects are cumulative, with EBIT improvements adding to early-year gains, so over a five- year period, platform players may capture an additional 10 percent in EBIT growth—a company’s 2 percent EBIT growth, for example, would increase to 2.2 percent in year five.
‘The right digital-platform strategy’, Insights Report, McKinsey & Co, May 2019
DevOps – The Right Approach?
Enterprises are creating DevOps teams to support and speed up their digital transformation, embracing digital innovation, enabling them to reduce operation costs. Sometimes, these teams are carved out of existing in-house resources and continue to report to the IT department, but in other cases, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) roles are appointed to ensure a new culture is stitched into the design of this key enabling team.
Which Route? Two-Speed or Integrated?
It’s only an opinion, but my experience of two-speed team structures for digital transformation hasn’t been satisfactory. There’s a risk that some great people get left in the ‘slow-speed’ IT team that end up feeling disenfranchised. Also, the leadership of the two teams can end up squabbling. creating disruption and distractions that are at best unhelpful. That said, if both teams accept that their roles are important, and the right personalities are placed in the right seats, perhaps it could work.
The Third Way
My preference is a third project structure. It’s what German companies call the ‘Organization Department’. It’s a department responsible for managing change – a continuous improvement team that includes IT, analysts, legal, HR, marketing,and program management competencies in a single unifying team that sits within the body corporate led not by IT but the CEO.
Why this structure? Because agility in business these days is a process. It has a life-cycle like any other process. Organizations must accept that change is not an intervention, it’s an always-on aspect of organizational performance.
Use Encanvas AppFabric to supercharge your Digital Transformation
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88% of businesses say they are already under-going a digital transformation
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On average middle-managers spend a quarter of their time searching for information... only to find that 50% of the data they find has no value
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47% of job categories may be taken over by machines in the next two decades.
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85% of businesses believe that cloud technology will transform their business or industry
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On average over 60% of enterprise budget is spent on 'keeping the lights on' technology
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40% of business managers cite a lack of urgency in the company as the biggest barrier to digital transformation
Source:
1. Altimeter Group Digital Transformation Survey
2. University of Oxford
3. Gartner (2112)
4. Gartner (2112)
5. Oxford Economics and SAP (2012)
6. MIT Sloan Mgmt. Review
Tool Kits Matter
Without the right tool kit, it’s not sensible or practical to consider in-house development of the technology you’ll need to orchestrate your business model. When businesses continue to use manual coding of apps, they inevitably fall foul of its inherent weaknesses.
Encanvas software, and similar tools like Mendix, ServiceNow, and OutSystems equip businesses with the ability to design, deploy and run their own self-authored apps. Encanvas is specifically engineered to support the project process for orchestrating business models through a series of software developments modules. This way, it removes the technology obstacles of creating enterprise-scale applications, such as coding, integrating, and testing new applications.
Live Wireframing Make Fail Fast Prototyping Affordable
a fundamental principle of rapid app development is that it’s best to start small with the minimum set of requirements and get something working so it starts delivering value. The alternative to this is building a mammoth software requirements specification (SRS) document that conjures up so many ‘nice-to-have’ features that it becomes impossible to economically produce. When creating a best-fit app module, involving stakeholders (ie Customers, Partners, Users) directly in the design process always works better.
Removing code and presenting WYSIWYG results in a workshop environment is the best way to do this.
A Live Wireframe is a fully functioning application prototype (pre-UAT) that proves the red-flag issues that the project team determines as being the biggest risks to project success. The task of producing a Live-Wireframe is performed by having stakeholders work ‘across-the-desk’ with a business analyst who creates the resulting live-wireframe design in near-real-time.
As soon as line-of-business stakeholders get presented with a screen of code, they shy away from feeling they should contribute to the development process – it’s just too overwhelming. With Live Wireframes, stakeholders get to see during the design workshop, the live system they’re going to be using in all of its glory. Seeing instant results makes an enormous difference to project success, but it requires built-for-purpose development tools; a unifying design and deployment ecosystem that removes the need for IT to master a dozen different technology components before they can produce any outcome.
Two-Speed IT is unnecessary when enterprises create an Organization Department and install a culture of prototyping by employing Live Wireframes. This way digital platform design and management becomes an embedded capability of the enterprise, ensuring agility is seen as a constant (and is appropriately resourced).
How To Run Live Wireframing Projects with Encanvas >
Ian Tomlin
Author
Ian Tomlin is a marketer, entrepreneur, business leader and management consultant. His passion is to help make great ideas happen. Relentlessly optimistic about the potential of technology for good, Ian’s 30+ year career has focused around the intersect of strategy, technology and marketing. He writes on subjects including enterprise computing and organizational design. He also works as a consultant and advisor to the executive teams of PrinSIX Technologies, Answer Pay and INTNT.AI, helping to rethink their marketing in order to tell their brand story.
Ian has founded a series of successful businesses including NDMC Ltd (2003), Encanvas (2006), and Newton Day Ltd (2019). He has written books, articles and guides on brand, digital transformation, enterprise applications, data science, workforce management, and organizational design. He can be reached via LinkedIn or Twitter.