Amanda Blevins

I recently heard this at a conference: “If you haven’t started thinking about Digitalizing Business in November 2016, you are too late.” The speaker was dramatic for effect; But, I don’t completely disagree. Many enterprises I speak with might be in the early stages of focusing on Digital Transformation. Generally, it is something they have already been doing, sometimes unknowingly.

Almost every business today has at least one mobile app to reach their customers. It is much faster for me to board a plane, request a car, or order delivery food with an app. Recently I experienced ordering in restaurant with an app on an iPad mounted to the table. I usually prefer the human interaction that goes along with restaurant dining, but this type of interface makes sense for high traffic restaurants with quick diners, such as in an airport.

The above examples are about digitalizing business. In the case of the in restaurant ordering, this restaurant chose a company that sold a platform for the restaurant customers. This platform company had to think about not their own customers, but the customer’s customer to be successful. My ordering experience wasn’t completely intuitive, but I think it was good. I was able to navigate the menu in a reasonable amount of time, and still have plenty of time leftover to browse through the remaining money-making (shopping, travel, etc) apps while my food was prepared.

Let’s think through the steps the company took to create the iPad platform. First, they identified a gap in the market by watching trends and understanding their customers’ businesses. Next, they had to develop their application and provide it in a way that it can be quickly delivered and updated. This generally is done by building microservices-based applications that rely on application resiliency versus infrastructure redundancy. Because of this architecture, they are often run in public clouds and are known as cloud native applications. This is Mode Two of IT Applications and Operations. Mode One refers to running the traditional applications that are installed on Windows and Linux machines and have the standard architecture of Database Server, Application Server, and Web Server.

Digital Transformation is underway, and Bimodal IT is extinct. While there might be two different types of application architectures, IT should support both of them with the similar toolsets and processes. The idea of a different team to run a select few applications will stretch already thin resources and cause difficulties when it comes to standards, governance, and security. I speak with many IT leaders that already have business units and application owners who use public clouds without partnering with IT. This is dangerous as eventually IT will be responsible for these applications. When such an important group for architecture, operations, and security is left out of the planning, design, and implementation process, there will be gaps in the final solution. These gaps could potentially mean extreme downtime or large security holes in the applications.

There have been many instances in the history of technology where we have transitioned to different types of computing: Analog to Digital, Mainframe to Client-Server, Client-Server to SaaS-based, Data-Center to Cloud, and now Traditional Applications to Cloud Native Applications. Through any transition time, there will probably be two separate teams – one to get started and the other to continue with the previous technology. However, once the organization has started, it is imperative to bring everyone up to speed on the new way of doing things, as it will soon be the standard.