Inflection Point: Business Platform Transformation Strategy

In our Inflection Point posts we dig a little deeper and take a hard look at the root of an issue currently plaguing enterprise IT by breaking down the problem(s), offering remediation approaches, and highlighting points of insight we’ve seen work with clients.

Today’s CIO organizations face a complex array of challenges in managing the Business Platform (the group of applications and services that implement the Business Value Chain).  The business expects technology innovation as a business differentiator, demands application portfolio stability, requires change requests to be handled promptly, experiences growth rates that are often unpredictable and exponential, and exerts continuous pressure to reduce product time to market.  Complicating this, these challenges are being made to IT with reduced investment support from the business.  At the same time, the very business model of IT is changing—how applications, content, information, and infrastructure are delivered.

These demands and changes must account for the fact much of business innovation is enabled by the IT Business Platform.  A systematic approach for the continuous improvement of the Business Platform is required to avoid dashing expectations and creating disappointment within the business user community.  The more efficient, effective, and relevant the Business Platform is, the more the enterprise can focus its time and invest dollars on innovating and differentiating business.

Problem: If Current State is a Black Box, then Future State is a Black Hole

Silos, both purposeful and inadvertent, within a CIO organization makes it difficult for application and service teams to collaborate and create an overview of how the Business Platform’s applications and services work together to manifest emergent business behavior.  Each team understands its supported portion of the business well, but not how its applications and services holistically relate to the rest of the organization.  It is common to find significant overlaps in capabilities provided by multiple teams.

The Business Platform bereft of a current state view makes strategic planning highly problematic.  If an organization lacks a systematic means to incorporate business innovation, it is essentially reduced to listening to gut instincts and best guesses of what actions would benefit the business.  This unsophisticated approach to the creation of a future state strategic view rarely leads to a manageable or optimal Business Platform.  Its quality and success is dependent on the skill of individuals, and will likely be meshed with the latest vendor hype cycle, rather than the execution of a repeatable process.

Even with a solid understanding of current state and future state, the transformation path is rarely unequivocal.  The transformation process is full of pitfalls and challenges: limitations within existing infrastructure must be overcome; technical, process, and people barriers to change are rampant; infrastructure capabilities are missing; and all concealed unknowns need to be discovered and resolved.

The nature of application and service team roles make them operate in a largely tactical way day to day to keep up with incremental changes and business events.  This tactical perspective creates an environment that allows for continuing depletion of resources to fund redundant operations, while not closing gaps in the operating model and missing opportunities to affect business innovation.  These resources would have higher ROI if applied to executing an improved strategic vision for business differentiation.  The business has this expectation.

All these challenges must be addressed to reach the full potential of the Business Platform.

Common Pitfalls:

• Supply Driven Management: Most business platform infrastructure is designed and managed from the bottom-up.  The typical approach is to standardize and implement services that are technically well understood and to a large extent are already componentized.  The business workload and service requirements (such as performance, price or efficiency factors) are not incorporated, which result in inconsistent service delivery and a misalignment of needs.
• One Size Fits All: Business Platform infrastructure and vendor strategy are usually built around a few perceived “standardized” application server footprints.   Numerous application appliances now exist that make 10x–100x performance increases possible.  Taking advantage of these specialized appliances can significantly reduce the waste associated with non-optimal asset utilization, increase performance, and provide greater agility to both the business and application teams.
• Not Planning for Change: Managing disruptive business events as one-offs, rather than incorporating them into a continuous strategic change program.  Anticipation rather than just reaction.
• Configuration not Customization: The business platform needs to support a configuration model and not a customization model.  Traditional application teams tend to think about writing custom code for each new challenge faced.   This creates waste in terms of unnecessary development time and reduces the agility of the business by increasing time to market (ROI suffers).
• Silo Operational Model: Typically, business platform lifecycle management is a collection of disparate processes.  This is a result of two primary factors: reactive planning for business platform infrastructure management processes, and bottom-up application silo design.  This creates disconnected management and processes that fail to deliver the services needed by the business.
• Spaghetti Transaction Flow: Application teams rarely consider the transaction flow across the datacenter, which is not organized to consider the proximity of various devices that comprise a service unit.  This results in significant performance impacts whereby compute, memory, I/O fabric, disk, storage, and connectivity to external feeds are provided in terms of layout—not in terms of service delivery.  This approach affects performance by as much as 30x and creates waste with unnecessary network traffic and bandwidth usage—all causing decreased ROI.
• Legacy Skill Sets: Most organizations talent planning is also implemented in silos.  Specifically, personnel are trained for a finite role without any consideration of the corresponding impact of the role/skills on end-to-end service delivery.  This creates a barrier-to-change that must be addressed when creating a new business platform infrastructure.

Solution Approach: Systematically Create a Transformation Road Map from Current State to Future State

It is essential to know how applications and services work together to realize the Business IT Value Chain.  This is fundamentally required to identify areas of unnecessary redundancy, IT waste, and innovation opportunities.  Without this insight, any work on a future state vision is questionable and will likely lead to an ineffective use of resources.

No matter how immature the current Business Platform environment documentation is, Adaptivity has developed a Forensic Method to rapidly discover its current state view.  Rather than being a point in time snapshot, this harvesting exercise becomes a live view of the organization’s environment and sustained via a straight forward dynamic process.

This Forensic information is used to reveal the current state Business Platform environment via Adaptivity’s proven Alignment techniques, which relates each stage of the Business Value Chain (BVC) and its related products and channels to Qualities of Experience (QoE).  Reference best practice BVC models are available.  QoE is defined by quantitative experience characteristics, such as Latency, Throughput, Resiliency, Efficiency, and Cost; resulting in three views of the Business Platform (Application, Information, and Infrastructure) which are summarized in a Heat Map.

Once captured and visualized, the Design phase of the process begins, where issues are isolated and systematically resolved to meet the business goals.  The Current State Alignment Map makes issues very apparent so they can be addressed in the transformation process, including: current infrastructure limitations; technical, process, and people barriers which will need to be remedied; gaps in the capabilities of the infrastructure; and identification of unknown lurking problems.  The result is a target Future State Design Map of the Business Platform, which will drive Business Innovation and perform for the business with much greater efficiency and effectiveness.

The Current State Alignment Map and desired Future State Design Map are the foundation to the creation of a transformation program built to evolve to the Strategy Driven Target Architecture.  This program heavily leverages change management principles to ease the execution, but can’t be executed against blindly for extended periods of time.  The business environment is a fluid one.  The Future State direction of the Business Platform is a moving target and must be continually evaluated for changes in reaction to business events.  Therefore a cyclical process of improving and revising the Future State Design must be undertaken to keep it relevant.

Step 1: Business Alignment

• Business Value Chain: The creation of a value chain showing how business execution correlates to IT infrastructure implementation of underlying capabilities.
• Forensic Analysis: A process whereby the existing Business Platform and supporting infrastructure are identified and holistically documented.  These details are usually left to the local system managers, so organizations frequently have a lackluster overall view of existing systems, their purpose, and how they interact.  This information is critical in planning a future state business platform.
• Current State Alignment Map: A number of views used to describe how the Business Value Chain maps to products and promotes the desired Qualities of Experience (QoE), including latency, throughput, resiliency, and cost.  Once available, infrastructure gaps and duplicate systems in the value chain become apparent.  Their elimination makes the organization more efficient and effective with its IT budget.
• Economic Model: Define the business and IT linkage of demand and supply.  Orient analysis and model output around the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT.  This needs to be correlated with the value-chain function and the corresponding products or services that are differentiated by business type (liquidity, risk transference, advice), business importance (margin, labor, flow) and cost to transact.
• Product and Portfolio Management: Coalescing business and technical priorities in continuous capability adoption to ensure sustainment and differentiation of your business through IT.
• Dynamic Economic Model: A defined business and IT linkage of demand and supply.  The model must be created around the interactive dynamics of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT.

Step 2: Platform Design

• Demand Mapping: In natural language terms (no geek speak!), define and capture the “day in the life of the business”, what it expects, and where there are problems. Be sure to understand sensitivities to cost, bottlenecks and timing constraints as well—specifically, quality attributes and operational requirements of the business in terms of calendar events, demographics, competitive benchmarking across the straight-through-processing (STP) value chain.
• Future State Design Map: Infrastructure gaps, missing characteristics, and duplicate systems are identified from the Current State Alignment Map.  The Future State Design Map depicts the resulting Business Platform once those issues are resolved.  The end result will be additional efficiency and effectiveness of funds allocated to the IT budget.
• Fit for Purpose Operational Footprints: The categorization of operational qualities based on demand facilitates the realignment of processes, thereby optimizing infrastructure resources to required characteristics.   Tailored and coordinated operational footprints are physically organized to be preformant.
• Abstracted: The design of each infrastructure component and layer needs to have sufficient abstraction so that the operational details are hidden from all other collaborating components and layers.  This maximizes the opportunity to create a virtualized infrastructure, which aids in rapid deployment and simplicity of operation.
• Service and Change Management: Dynamic models of operation require processes and procedures of service, delivery and change management to accommodate the “on-the-fly” and “as needed, when needed” operations of IT.

Step 3: Realization

• Transformation Program: A change management effort needs to be created to move from the Current State to Future State Business Platform, which facilitates breaking down the natural resistance to change, resolve existing limitations in the infrastructure and services, and create the new capabilities needed by the Next Generation Business Platform.
• Business Events: External and internal events (e.g. mergers, changing market conditions, product focus, etc.) will affect the needs of the business.   Therefore the Current State and Future State Maps need to remain fluid and ideally anticipation events so the Business Platform is properly prepared.
• End-to-End Instrumentation: Instrumentation of individual tiers is useful, but do not give a full picture of performance.  Instrument and capture objective factual data of end-to-end user experience.    Watch for trends that don’t match existing assumptions or are growing.  Proactively act.
• Dynamic Runtime Orchestration Management: Runtime control and execution enforcement – ensuring that the right work gets done at the right time with the right resources.  Business operates dynamically in real time; your applications and services need to as well.  Think of it as a composition of service delivery units that can be consumed in a variable manner – on demand consumption and real time reconfiguration.
• Real Time: Application and service allocation, re-provisioning, demand monitoring, and resource utilization must react as demand and needs change, which translates into less manual allocation.  Instead, a higher degree of automation is required, driving business rules about allocation priorities in different scenarios to the decision-making policies of the applications and services which can then react in sub-seconds to changes in the environment.
• Business Policy and IT Security Enforcement: Comprehensive, real-time business and security policy enforcement execution in bare-metal speed timeframes.  The ability to implement point-of-policy enforcement and administration that serves both business agility requirements with guaranteed, non-repudiated transactions and secure data delivery creates a competitive advantage and significant efficiencies compared to traditional, regulatory-driven entitlement strategies.

Easy as 1, 2, 3!

Tags: Featured

Category: Business Alignment, Datacenter Transformation