For companies, an agile IT model can be a significant competitive advantage. Applications, which have always been the heart of the IT department, have moved outside and are no longer the exclusive responsibility of the IT team. It is now well established that all companies today offer software solutions and that the ability to quickly provide new services and features to customers is one of the main elements of differentiation from the competition that a company can offer.
Agile IT can allow startups to gain a significant competitive advantage over large competitors. Several generations ago, there were IT departments in the years of technology. They were internal departments focused on maintaining infrastructure and services within the company. Some companies may have had external services, mainly web services, but this was generally still a marginal and restricted area. It was not a strategic or revenue-generating department but a support environment seen and regarded as a cost center.
An infrastructure-focused IT environment caused developers to lose sense of what their code was intended to do, and too much time passed from when the code was written to its implementation and subsequent release. Release cycles were long, and changes were slow. A developer working on something would develop code that would undergo a very long testing phase and then be released months later.
Because of this long period, software engineers lost the joy of developing something because they ultimately had no way of seeing it work in the real world; or, even worse, when this happened, the code written was considered obsolete and no longer aligned with company processes, therefore completely useless. Digital transformation generates significant and influential cultural and technological changes, reintroducing the joy of creating and writing code. With new technologies and new ways of writing code, developers can create something and see it work.
This is a powerful change. Reports the immediacy of code creation. Seeing the application life gives developers a fast and immediate feedback loop, allowing them to redesign and improve their code in a virtuous and agile cycle by continuously enhancing their creation. Your organization is often a victim of this. It’s as if it were an elephant moving awkwardly and slowly. The real challenge lies in transforming the elephant into an agile classical dancer through a digital transformation path and using new technologies (microservices) and new software platforms (cloud).
The Meaning Of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is a strategic change for businesses. However, there is no standard definition of digital transformation other than “changing things.” Digital transformation sometimes indicates new architectures, such as microservices, new processes, such as DevOps, or new technologies, such as software containers and Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
Digital transformation is not a specific thing that can be achieved. It’s something that every organization needs to define uniquely for itself. There is no single architectural model or technology platform that works perfectly in every single environment. Organizations that succeed in implementing digital transformation have a clear understanding of their objectives and culture, which is different for each company. For example:
- Walmart deployed its code on Black Friday when 200 million people were online.
- Amazon performs code updates every second (50 million times yearly) across hundreds of applications and millions of cloud instances.
- Etsy runs 60 deployments per day with a monolithic application.
- On a complex distributed architecture, Netflix deploys hundreds of times a day, where a single code change goes from check-in to production in 16 minutes.
These companies work with different team structures, code bases, and architectures. The point is that they focused on something other than this model or this technology, and everything worked. They all started with assessments of their teams, current technical debt, and business strategies and then intentionally and consistently moved their businesses in the direction they wanted. Ultimately, we also obtain excellent results.
This is the process to follow “to make the elephant dance.” Wherever your business is located, you can complete the transformation process (correcting technical debt, design flaws, etc.) by following a defined strategy and set of steps. For this to happen, it is necessary to establish the objectives and what it will take to achieve them.