Cloud Native Enterprises - Rapid elasticity

Which don't have a lot to do with Cloud Native Apps but everything with truly embracing the paradigm shifts the Cloud has brought IT within the realm of businesses.

Read the Introduction first.

After reading the introduction to these posts you know what a cloud infrastructure is and what cloud native applications are, what about cloud native enterprises. Well these are enterprises that adhere to these same 5 characteristics. These enterprises, or organisations in general, cannot be modelled according to traditional enterprise models because of their specific market, competition, growth-stage, etc. These enterprises need to be, for all accounts, be cloud native in order to grow, succeed and be sustainable. Interestingly, but not surprisingly they require The Cloud and Cloud Native Applications.
In coming posts I will address every essential characteristic of The Cloud as defined by NIST from a perspective of the Enterprise. Unlike most cases, I will post these within the next 7 days and I certainly do hope before coming weekend.

• On-demand self-service. When online services and core systems really seamlessly integrate.
• Broad network access. When customers, partners and users are distinct groups treated equal.
• Resource pooling. When synergy across value chains makes the difference.
• Measured services. When business resources are limited.

Rapid elasticity. When business is extremely unpredictable.

Very few organisations can say that year round they experience the same amount of business. Almost every organisation experiences something like a 'season'. There are always highs and lows in an organisation's load. This can be 'Black Friday/Cyber Monday' for retailers, tax-season for the IRS or its equivalent in your country, or for example hotels during the summer holidays.
But not only in sales, there are highs and lows, often very predictable, but in production companies there are peaks in order fulfilment.

In order to deal with these fluctuations in 'business load', organisations need to be elastic. The more elastic an organisation is, the better it will be able to handle the fluctuations. Mind, this is not the same as being agile. Being agile is being able to change direction as needed, in a timely manner. Being elastic is being able to change scale as needed. Also in a timely manner. Arguably, being elastic is more difficult to accomplish than being agile.

Elasticity is a matter of scaling up, and down. The more elastic an organisation can be, the more efficient it can do its business. Efficiency here is a matter of spending just enough. Another difference between elasticity and agility. The former being about efficient in using resources, the latter is about being effective in resource utilisation.

From the Cloud we know that elastic means scaling up, or down of the IT infrastructure in order to manage fluctuating load. Thus not having to worry about under-utilisation of IT infrastructure, thus paying for infrastructure that is not being used. And at the same time, not having to worry when load increases and the stability of the environment isn't compromised due to over-utilisation of that same infrastructure.

In the Cloud Native Enterprise, we project these traits onto the organisation itself. Onto the business.

Traditionally, scaling organisations are hard to accomplish. Extremely hard in fact. For one there is always the challenge of resource availability. Where resources are of course human resources. The most common way of addressing this is through contractors. The hiring and firing processes around contractors are far more flexible than for permanent employees. Thus bring some elasticity to the organisation. But getting the 'bodies in' is only part of the challenge. Getting the 'right bodies in' is another aspect. Adding personnel with the right skills is possibly even harder. First you need to find them, next you need to validate that you found them. The hiring process is cumbersome and the further you need to stretch the organisational elastic band, the harder it becomes. The amount of effort needed is not increasing linear, but almost exponential.
Organisations need to be able to scale up quickly. Which often also means that the HR department needs to be elastic as well. Again, the same challenge apply.
In an economy with an up-beat, there are more companies that are looking for the same scalability and resources become even more of a challenge to find.
I haven't mentioned the strain on the organisation itself due to growing too large. More management layers need to be introduced in order to be able to grow and manage this. And this is where scaling down becomes a problem. Adding more management layers in the hierarchy to handle the size of the workforce, is relatively easy compared to removing these layers again.

The more seasonal a market is, the more of a challenge elasticity becomes for an organisation. Tax-offices will be overloaded with calls to the help-desk as the deadline for submitting your tax-forms nears.

At one point I was involved in a court-case as one of the expert witnesses where my client succumbed at its own success. The client was in a business where 98% (!!!) of its revenue was generated in 5 consecutive days of the year. It couldn't handle the increased business as it couldn't predict what that load would be. Especially since in the months prior to their 'peak' they took over their largest competitor.

Organisations can't scale their workforce to the point where we can talk of elasticity. Scaling up and down is a matter of weeks. Where elasticity is the ability to scale up and down in a matter of days, hours or even minutes and less.
This is where the Cloud comes in. It is not so much the elasticity of Cloud infrastructure that plays a role, but the ability of an organisation to utilise the Cloud such that it can scale its business efficiently. Cloud infrastructure is an important part, where it comes to handle IT load. But the true business elasticity comes from handling at a business level the fluctuating load.
Extreme automation of business processes allows an organisation to reduce its dependence on specific business knowledge of its employees. Everybody can press a button or enter data when the 'system' does the heavy lifting in applying business rules and execute repetitive tasks. Understand that by following this paradigm, the reliance of the organisation on less-educated employees is reduced to a bare minimum, and it can focus its efforts towards attracting higher educated employees. Employees that require less managerial guidance which allows for a more flattened hierarchy. Flat hierarchies are more elastic.
Automated processes can in addition, benefit from the technological elasticity of the Cloud. Thus having a double edged sword.

Elastic organisations are not trivial. Far from it in fact. Main reason being that traditionally, organisations scale with their business by either increasing its workforce through short term contracts, i.e. contractors, which can be hired and fired as needed. Or by attracting permanent employees and assume a positive attitude towards the future. Or laying off personnel in advance when the future is perceived less positive. It is how organisations are used to manage the seasons.

The Cloud Native Enterprise on the other hand is far from traditional. At its core it will embrace technology resources not to replace human resources, but to complement them. It invests in senior, higher educated experts, to reduce the reliance on management. In effect, pay more to less, in order to reduce the need to scale the workforce.

Concluding

And so the Cloud Native Enterprise is the enterprise where IT is part of the business when it comes to delivering business products. Allowing a business to grow and shrink as needed, just ahead of time and with the flexibility of a rubber band.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect


The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Cloud Native Enterprises - Broad network access

Which don't have a lot to do with Cloud Native Apps but everything with truely embracing the paradigm shifts the Cloud has brought IT within the realm of businesses.

Read the Introduction first.

After reading the introduction to these posts you know what a cloud infrastructure is and what cloud native applications are, what about cloud native enterprises. Well these are enterprises that adhere to these same 5 characteristics. These enterprises, or organisations in general, cannot be modelled according to traditional enterprise models because of their specific market, competition, growth-stage, etc. These enterprises need to be, for all accounts, be cloud native in order to grow, succeed and be sustainable. Interestingly, but not surprisingly they require The Cloud and Cloud Native Applications.
In coming posts I will address every essential characteristic of The Cloud as defined by NIST from a perspective of the Enterprise. Unlike most cases, I will post these within the next 7 days and I certainly do hope before coming weekend.

• On-demand self-service. When online services and core systems really seamlessly integrate.
• Resource pooling. When synergy across value chains makes the difference.
• Rapid elasticity. When business is extremely unpredictable.
• Measured services. When business resources are limited.

Broad network access. When your business hours are truly 24x7.

This is an interesting aspect of the Cloud Native Enterprise. Because many organisations are already 24x7 businesses. Especially in the online world, being always on is a requirement to stay in business. 

Network here is not referring to the the computer network on a technical level as we know it. According to NIST, one of the characteristics of the cloud is broad network access, which from the definition, this means that the cloud is always accessible through the internet. The computer communications network.
Within the context of the Cloud Native Enterprise I am referring to the communications network of the business. On the one side, this encompasses all parties a business has dealings with. Think customers, users. partner, employees etc. I will get back to this later on in this post. But it also encompasses all means through which this communication takes place. Think devices and associated channels.

So, when we look at the business that is truly cloud native, when we talk about broad network access, we mean that the business is accessible by its complete business network, via a variety of devices and channels.

The Cloud Native Enterprise exposes its services, all of its services, in the same way to customers as it will to users and partners, as well as employees. Every member of every group enjoys the same level of service and the same constraints. Distinctions are made using the concept of role-based access to services. Still all services are always accessible to all members of the network through the same channels. In addition, it will provide the same level of service through all channels on all devices. Ideally. Of course contextual limitations are to be taken into account.

Traditional Focus - Cost vs Value

Consider the more traditional enterprise, where customers are assigned a specific account manager. The account manager maintains the relationship with the customer. She has specific KPI's that need to be met and she is more or less free in determining how to achieve this. Users of the customer are not aware of the account manager, instead they interface through a help-desk with the enterprise which will consists of self-service functionality for the more mundane support, automated systems like chatbots and more complex interaction through a help-desk agent.
Partners of the enterprise on the other hand, will work with peers within the enterprise. Informal contacts are more prevalent and accepted. Where customers and users will need to follow the formal processes in order for the enterprise to be more efficient, partners will follow the informal communication lines in order to be more effective. We see in traditional enterprises that with customers and users, processes are cost driven. Partner oriented processes are value driven.

Cloud Native Focus - Revenue

In the Cloud Native Enterprise, all interactions are focusing on revenue. Key aspect here is the homogeneous approach towards interaction with stakeholders. Customers, employees, users, partners are all considered stakeholder of the enterprise. Access to the enterprise is homogeneous across the full network, and processes are optimised for revenue. Sometimes resulting in focus on efficiency, other times on effectiveness.

What you will see is that business scalability, both temporal and geographical, is addressed explicitly. Every stakeholder in the enterprise's network can access the enterprise 24x7 and from any location.

For every organisation this is a challenge to manage. But for the Cloud Native Enterprise the mere premise of the Cloud as an IT facilitator, it becomes a matter of survival.

Consistent User Experience

The Cloud is great for realising products and services that scale with your business. Not talking about elasticity here, but about the ability to have a single approach towards addressing your stakeholders' needs and demands.

Leveraging the characteristics of the Cloud, including its technical aspects of broad network access, means that it is possible to provide all users of all services and products with a consistent user experience. This entails the same experience provided to customers, partners, employees etc. This consistent user experience across all services will allow for a seamless transition for a user from one role to another.

Concluding

As with its technical counterpart, (broad) network access is a key characteristic for the Cloud Native Enterprise, as it will provide a homogeneous approach towards accessibility of products and services across the full breadth of the business network

(Special thanks to my colleague Mandeep for pointing out some much needed clarifications in the original post)

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect


The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Cloud Native Enterprises - On-demand self-service

Which don't have a lot to do with Cloud Native Apps but everything with truely embracing the paradigm shifts the Cloud has brought IT within the realm of businesses.

Read the Introduction first.

After reading the introduction to these posts you know what a cloud infrastructure is and what cloud native applications are, what about cloud native enterprises. Well these are enterprises that adhere to these same 5 characteristics. These enterprises, or organisations in general, cannot be modelled according to traditional enterprise models because of their specific market, competition, growth-stage, etc. These enterprises need to be, for all accounts, be cloud native in order to grow, succeed and be sustainable. Interestingly, but not surprisingly they require The Cloud and Cloud Native Applications.
In coming posts I will address every essential characteristic of The Cloud as defined by NIST from a perspective of the Enterprise. Unlike most cases, I will post these within the next 7 days and I certainly do hope before coming weekend.

• Broad network access. When customers, partners and users are distinct groups treated equal.
• Resource pooling. When synergy across value chains makes the difference.
• Rapid elasticity. When business is extremely unpredictable.
• Measured services. When business resources are limited.

On-demand self-service. When online services and core systems really seamlessly integrate.

This is the post where I'll address the aspect of the On-demand Self-service. An aspect which for many organisations is rather challenging. Just like the aspect of Measured services, this aspect is addressing internal governance structures. Although the governance implications will touch on the financial governance of an enterprise, the challenge is more of an organisational nature and in fact  the financial parts are not always relevant.

In any case. When we talk about on-demand self-service within the context of Cloud Native Enterprises we talk about an enterprise where tools and technologies needed to explore or exploit business models can be obtained when needed, by the person that needs it. Often we talk about IT resources, software and or hardware. But think in terms of services, which are often IT services.

In a traditional environment, IT services are obtained by the IT department. This is where the IT experts are and this is where the required frameworks for 'proper IT' are defined and used. Business departments will request, based on functional specifications, certain IT solutions, experts within the IT department will make sure that the best solution for the lowest price will be procured, installed and configured. Hassle free operation for the business people as a result.

Traditionally the reason for an IT department is centralisation of these resources in order to make as efficient use of these experts as possible. Actually, what I most often see is that within IT departments there are separate teams for specific expertise, so called Competence Centres or Centres of Excellence. Efficiency has been a key objective for many years within organisations, often because IT resources (computers as well as personnel) were relative expensive compared to other resources.

As efficiency has been a key objective in these traditional environments, the scheme above played out nicely. Scarce personnel is being utilised optimally in terms of keeping them busy and in the meantime, their experience and knowledge ensured the best value for money possible. Time was not a factor until recently. Of course, it always took too long to provide the solutions to the business, but offset against costs, this has always been a small price to pay. Relatively speaking, and yes, pun intended.
But things have changed and the old timelines are no longer acceptable. Timing becomes more and more an issue. Business ideas can no longer wait to find their way into the hands of users. Not only because lean, agile and nimble Start-Ups will chip away the market shares of enterprises, but because enterprises between themselves are leveraging technology to get the competitive edge.
We see that the introduction of The Cloud in the IT departments of enterprises has resulted in extremely short timelines when it comes to delivering solutions to the business by their IT departments. Enterprises with an IT department that can't leverage the characteristics of The Cloud as defined by NIST will perish. You can't move fast enough? You're shark food. It's a dog-eat-dog-world nowadays.

The CIO v.s. the CDO

We see that CIO's are being complemented by CDO's, Chief Digital Officers, in those enterprises where the CIO has not been able to transform the IT department from a traditional silo'd business enabler into a heterogeneous multi-disciplinary flat business partner. CDO's are introduced to drive the digital transformation, a transformation that has been going on since the advent of computers in enterprises. But where it focused on efficiency and controlling cost in the past, now the transformation is focusing on effectiveness and creating value. Often the CIO hasn't been informed about this new direction as often the CIO is not in the boardroom. Understand that in many of the organisations I've been, the CIO reports to the Chief Financial Officer, instead of the CEO, COO or the Chief Marketing Officer. IT is associated with cost in these enterprises and not with revenue.

Product/Platform Paradigm

But in the Cloud Native Enterprise, it isn't the IT department that delivers IT solutions, not even when they can do this with the speed of The Cloud. In these enterprises, the business services it self.
When IT solutions are needed, the business will obtain them by themselves. Here the IT department is no longer delivering the solutions, but the platform onto which the solutions will run and integrate with the core IT systems. Systems like Identity and Access Management, Monitoring and Metering, Resilience and Disaster Recovery. Integration of solutions in the platform is what IT is about. Products and business solutions is what the business is about.
The IT departments in these enterprises are basically nothing more than in-house system integrators. But extremely sophisticated at that since integrations are subjected to profound automation.

It is with Cloud Native Enterprises where we see the true value of the Product/Platform paradigm. IT delivers the platform, the platform is its business product. Business delivers business products. This is where the concept shines as those that understand how to valuate the product from a business perspective are accountable for the product that creates the value to the business.

Concluding

And so the Cloud Native Enterprise is the enterprise where IT is part of the business when it comes to delivering business products. Allowing business solution to be created using IT on-demand, through self-service. This also means that the traditional IT department has become a business department as well, run as a revenue catalyst and not as a cost centre.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect


The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Cloud Native Enterprises - Measured service

Which don't have a lot to do with Cloud Native Apps but everything with truely embracing the paradigm shifts the Cloud has brought IT within the realm of businesses.

Read the Introduction first.

After reading the introduction to these posts you know what a cloud infrastructure is and what cloud native applications are, what about cloud native enterprises. Well these are enterprises that adhere to these same 5 characteristics. These enterprises, or organisations in general, cannot be modelled according to traditional enterprise models because of their specific market, competition, growth-stage, etc. These enterprises need to be, for all accounts, be cloud native in order to grow, succeed and be sustainable. Interestingly, but not surprisingly they require The Cloud and Cloud Native Applications.
In coming posts I will address every essential characteristic of The Cloud as defined by NIST from a perspective of the Enterprise. Unlike most cases, I will post these within the next 7 days and I certainly do hope before coming weekend.

• On-demand self-service. When online services and core systems really seamlessly integrate.
• Broad network access. When customers, partners and users are distinct groups treated equal.
• Resource pooling. When synergy across value chains makes the difference.
• Rapid elasticity. When business is extremely unpredictable.

Measured service, when business resources are limited.

This is the post where I'll address the aspect of the Measured service. It is an interesting aspect of the cloud native enterprise because it addresses the financial governance model of the enterprise.
Let me first start with what I witness in most organisations regarding the financial governance model. Great and small, old and new. And even in start-ups. The model is in about all cases one in which there is an annual budget allocated for pretty much everything that costs money. Often times, the budget is based on past experiences. It's a copy of last years budget corrected, or extrapolated, based on last year's developments, revenue, target met or not, etc. What I often times see, and I'm actually pretty sure I have seen this in all but one or two cases, is that once a year there is a prediction as to what the business will look like in the coming year. This is not the strategic plan, but next year's plan. There's a project portfolio, or more recently a product portfolio, that covers the coming year. Predictions are made about next year's resource needs etc.
The most common thing here is that the more resources an organisation has at its disposal, the more anal the enterprise is about these plans.

Being ambitious as a business

What I hardly ever see is a prediction of what the enterprise's ambition is with respect to its market position. Its business ambition. Do not mistake this for a strategic ambition, or a mission statement. What I am talking about is an 'objectives portfolio', an overview of the enterprise's objectives. Each of it's value chains, lines of business, P&L areas, however the enterprise's business is divided should have objectives, and ideally a roadmap littered with objectives. This is the objective-portfolio.

Why this is so important is that an enterprise should be working to meet these objectives in any way it can. And the reason why this is so important, is that these objectives are in fact the key drivers for business sustainability. From a strategy perspective, the business objectives should be completely in line to support the strategy. By working towards these objectives, the strategy is implemented, which in turn will increase sustainability.
An important key take-away is that objectives can be met in any number of ways. There is hardly ever only one way to do so. But in general, out of all the different ways to achieve an objective, there are only one or two that are the best. The best within the context of the enterprise at a specific moment. Which means that what is the best way now, might not be the best way in the next quarter. There could be a missed opportunity, new regulation, or a shortage of resources. So re-evaluating the the proper course of action continuously, should be a given.

For enterprises resources in terms of money are often not considered a bottleneck, instead I see often that the availability of the right people to do the job to be a problem and in even more cases the precious resource we call time is a problem of its own magnitude.
For smaller companies I see that often money is the issue and people and time not so much. Reason being that smaller companies tend to focus more on a limited amount of business solutions. Where enterprises are straying all over the place, small companies are equipped with laser sharp focus.

"Now where's the Measured service coming into play?", you ask.

Measuring achievements not performance

Working with a roadmap based on objectives, with a portfolio of objectives, allows for embracing the concept of validated learning, and metered funding.
Like I stated earlier, objectives are met by choosing one of many implementations, where the choice is based on the context of the moment the choice is made. For example the timing to introduce a new consumer product just ahead of the holidays. Or the introduction of a key competitor's product that will pave to way to broad market acceptance of something controversial. Or the abundance of developers that can code in specific programming language. By consciously choosing the seemingly best implementation to meet the objective, you know what to look for in order to re-evaluate that decision. Staying on track with the calendar to meet the holiday boom, monitoring market acceptance of that product, keeping an eye on Craigslist for job postings for those coders, etc.
Obviously this requires monitoring of the results of your efforts, but that is exactly what it means to apply the concept of 'validated learning'. You determine based on what your efforts are contributing to the bottom-line (whatever that is to you) or not or is even counter productive, this is your hypothesis. You undertake whatever action you've got up your sleeve and once you're done, you check your hypothesis and determine what your next move should do. It's actually pretty close to just being agile.

Turning variable into fixed

Now the trick is, and this is where it becomes extremely complicated for enterprises, to allocated resources in such a way that you can continuously work on meeting the objectives, but change the way you do so, throughout the year. From a financial planning perspective, this is rather different from most enterprises I've seen over the years. Like I stated earlier, budgets are allocated annually, based on plans. The the bigger the budget request, the more assurances need to be given to get the budgets allocated. Business Cases are written, plans are drafted, dreams are... well often the most realistic and accurate of these three.
The way I often see it addressed is by introducing pre-funded teams. Which basically means that one of the larger portions in the budget is fixed, namely human resources. In fact, this only addresses the problem when an enterprises HR strategy is relying heavily on out-sourcing, contractors or a combination of these two. When most of the work is done by own staff, HR costs are already fixed, and working with pre-funded teams is merely an HR-planning issue. I would prefer this situation, but it is often just not feasible. With pre-funded teams, a large part of the budget is fixed, which is an accountant's dream, or so I've been told on various occasions. How to fix all other variable costs? That's a challenge, but this is where a cloud environment helps, as it will not fix IT costs, but it will allow these to be limited to the bare minimum as needed, so costs are not fixed, but risk is contained and limited. Another dream coming true.
Your measured service at play here is now that for one a large chunk in the budget is no longer variable, so planning is straight forward, no measuring is really needed as the teams are based on objectives to be met and not work to be done. I understand this is the first time I phrase it this way but it is crucial to understand the different. I leave you to think about it for a second.

Concluding

Measuring is needed for the remaining chunks in the budget. Although still variable, this chunk, the IT resources costs are contained and limited and investments are only needed when the IT is required. And more importantly, revenue is generated shortly after investments are done, or else further investments are stopped. So we measure the revenue, off-setting it to the limited costs.

I hope you understand the paradigm shift in the financial governance from a mainly cost driven concept where revenue is mainly a matter of wishful thinking, educated guessing at best, to mainly realised revenue based.

Re-iterating. Measured services relate to the fact that the in the cloud native enterprise, the enterprise is governed such that costs are considered investments. But only concerning those costs that can't be fixed. In other words, variable costs are considered investments. Investments are related to business objectives to be met and not work to be done. This eliminates in a large part the risk that the focus is on work already done instead of objectives still to be met when it comes to new investments.




Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect


The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Cloud Native Enterprises - Introduction

Which don't have a lot to do with Cloud Native Apps but everything with truely embracing the paradigm shifts the Cloud has brought IT within the realm of businesses.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to do a presentation to a number of mainly (project) managers on the topic of "The Cloud". I think one of the reasons I was asked had to do with the fact that I usually tend to be (a bit) iconoclastic and another reason might be that I have been a huge proponent of The Cloud. Look at previous posts of Arc-E-Tect and you should be able to find a number of posts on the topic. In any case, I obliged.

While preparing the slides, digging into my archive of presentations as I remembered a presentation I did on the topic a couple of years ago to a group of mainly lawyers and auditors I decided that it was the perfect time to not talk about The Cloud as an IT phenomenon but as a business phenomenon. As you might have gathered when reading my posts on this blog, I do tend to see IT from a business perspective. Pure simple logic dictates that we apply IT in organisations to strengthen our businesses. The decision was made, I was going to talk about Cloud Native Enterprises.

The Cloud According to NIST

What are Cloud Native Enterprises? First of all you need to know what The Cloud is, and I always use the NIST definition of Cloud. NIST made it easy to define The Cloud by naming 5 essential characteristics of cloud:

• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
• Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations). 
• Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.
• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
• Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

(source: The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing)

There's not really an order in these characteristics, but they are essential. You have to keep in mind that these are related to IT systems, typically infrastructure hosting services.
I'm not going to re-iterate these characteristics and explain what The Cloud is, instead I'll go over these essential characteristics to explain what a Cloud Native Enterprise is.

Cloud Native Applications

But before I do this, let me explain what a cloud native application is, because it is important to understand this. First of all; Every cloud native application can run in a traditional data center. Second of all; From a NIST characteristics perspective there is no difference between public and private and hybrid clouds. As long as all 5 essential characteristics are met, we can talk about a cloud environment.

Back to the cloud native application. This is an application that thrives on the cloud. It is one that uses the 5 characteristics to the fullest and doesn't compromise. Let me go over them one by one.

• On-demand self-service. A cloud native application is accessible by a user, which could be another application, but often it is a person. But it is not only accessible by a user, but everything pertaining that user can be done by the user, whenever the user pleases. So the user can sign-up herself, configure her environments herself and do whatever she needs to do, all by herself. Irrespective of the role of the user. So an administrator of the application can do whatever needs to be done, as can a business user. This is hugely different from traditional applications, where you would need to request an account at some service-desk in order to gain access.
• Broad network access. Cloud native applications are network accessible and not only that, they're accessible through standard mechanisms and through common devices. Typically we see that these applications are accessible via the internet, or at least through internet protocols. Often we use http or https to access the applications. Originally through a browser, but with the advent of mobile devices we see that the generic web-browser is replaced by a specialised browser, the client application, that accesses the application's logic via web- and internet-protocols and presents a user experience fully embracing the client device's capabilities.
• Resource pooling. This for applications means that the applications are multi-user applications and the users are not aware nor impacted by each other, unless of course, business logic demands interaction.
• Rapid elasticity. Probably the most unique selling point of the cloud is elasticity. The amount of resources needed to perform a specific task consistently independent of the load on the systems is expanding or retracting as needed. Elastic. No wonder Amazon calls their virtual server environment Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). For cloud native applications the same goes. The application scales up and down as needed by the load on it. Typically this is done using the underlying infrastructure's elasticity, but mind that the cloud 'nativeness' of the application is that we're talking about functional elasticity. The responsiveness of the application is consistent across many workloads. This can mean that the application's functionality scales down when load increases (e.g. loading only the first 3 review comments for an item in a web-shop instead of 10) and scales up when the load decreases.
• Measured service. Here we run into the situation where the usage of the application is metered. At any time it is known what the application's utilisation is. Which user is using what functionality at what time with which guarantees. The idea here is, obviously, that the user will be billed based on her usage (of resources) of the application in contrast to some flat fee or a compute-power based fee. An example is that a free-tier account can access a certain function only once every two seconds, where a pro-tier account can access the function 5 times a second. The key here is metering and billing.

Every time I use the word 'user' above, I want to reiterate, it can be a person, but also another system. Especially in the current API economy, the user mentioned will very likely be another application.

Applications that are cloud native adhere to these 5 characteristics, and they do this from a business functional perspective. There are all kinds of technical implications like a transition from ACID transactions we typically see in traditional applications, towards BASE transactions we see in cloud native applications. Same goes for in depth security in the cloud and more of a focus on perimeter security in traditional data center hosted applications.

Cloud Native Enterprises

Now that you know what a cloud infrastructure is and what cloud native applications are, what about cloud native enterprises. Well these are enterprises that adhere to these same 5 characteristics. These enterprises, or organisations in general, cannot be modelled according to traditional enterprise models because of their specific market, competition, growth-stage, etc. These enterprises need to be, for all accounts, be cloud native in order to grow, succeed and be sustainable. Interestingly, but not surprisingly they require The Cloud and Cloud Native Applications.

In coming posts I will address every essential characteristic of The Cloud as defined by NIST from a perspective of the Enterprise. Unlike most cases, I will post these within the next 7 days and I certainly do hope before coming weekend.

• On-demand self-service. When online services and core systems really seamlessly integrate.
• Broad network access. When customers, partners and users are distinct groups treated equal.
• Resource pooling. When synergy across value chains makes the difference.
• Rapid elasticity. When business is extremely unpredictable.
• Measured service. When business resources are limited.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Microservices on steroids, getting from just agile to business agile [part 2 of 2]

Summary

This is how you get Microservices on steroids; apply them in a Policy Oriented Architecture. Meaning that you need to put a policy handler in between a service's interface and its implementations. The reason why you want to do this, is because you want to provide agility to your business and not just have an IT department that's agile. Or in fact have an IT department at all for that matter.

It’s time for part 2 of a two part series on Microservices on steroids. I already had part of the post ready but today I was in a presentation on the topic of Continuous Delivery and Architecture and one of the aspects that came up was about ‘Product definition’ and I figured that I needed to put that into the mix as well.

The conclusion of the previous post (Microservices on steroids [1/2]) was that adopting a Microservices based architecture, which pretty much is an SOA the way it was meant to be, will only get you technical agility. As you can read in my post on Continuous Delivery not being something for the IT department only (The Continuous Delivery IT Team Fallacy), technical agility is only part of the story and in fact has limited value if you’re not targeting business agility.

But let’s first consider what Business Agility exactly means. It is in fact exactly what it literally means, agility of the business. The main difference with the ‘normal’ agility is that it allows the business to change its course rapidly without a direct need of involving IT to make this change. So without needing to worry about whether or not IT can handle these changes.

And it allows the business to respond to changes in its marketplace when and where necessary with the help of IT. So business agility is an extension of technical or IT agility.

An example of business agility is for example bank XYZ that issues debit cards to its customers age 16 and up. One of its competitors, bank ABC, is in a marketing campaign targeting teenagers and issues debit cards to 12 to 16 year olds when a letter of consent is signed by their parents or legal guardians. Our bank XYZ will lose out on a large customer segment when not also addressing these teenagers. So it will need to issue cards to them as well. Business agility is when bank XYZ can do so, without major activities that need to take place in order to change course. Think about being able to make this business change in 1 two-week sprint.

From experience I can say that an agile business requires an agile IT that has its architecture on track. An SOA, preferably based on Microservices, is the best basis for this. If you ask me, I would stay away from centralized components like single ESB installations for an organization, shared database clusters or API management solutions that are centrally governed. It’s not so much a matter of me disliking these technologies, which I really don’t. It’s about the centralized governance issue, which results in shared resources, which seriously hampers independence. Centralization also means, artificial, restrictions in autonomy. In effect, it means that you reduce your ability for agility.

Now, don’t get me wrong, centralization doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In general it allows you to limit your costs by benefitting economies of scale. It’s a way of improving profitability by reducing costs. There are many situations in which this is the best way to address profitability. Especially in areas where business functionality is established and there is not really a need any more to figure out your product-market-fit, focusing on cost reduction is good. Within the same organization you also want to be able to improve profitability by increasing revenue. This is especially true for those situations or products for example where product-market-fit is a challenge or when the business scope of a product is changing or increasing still.

 

Think back a couple of posts where I explained my stance on Gartner’s Bi-model IT (The BI-Modal Misconception...). The two situations I mention are the closest thing that comes to Bi-model IT that actually makes sense. It’s where the (business) need for change and agility has diminished and functionality is stable vs. where the need for change and agility is absolutely there and business survival depends on it. There’s not a single thing that relates to risk or quality or ability. It’s about the need to be agile or not that defines the need to become agile or not. And typically, Mode 2 is revenue increase focused where Mode 1 is costs focused. Gartner’s emphasis on legacy transforming to the digital world is not relevant at all either.

Back to business agility. This is where the business is agile as established before. And like I stated earlier, this requires an architecture in which the different components are independent and can be independently deployed. Where ‘components’ are ‘products’. Independently deployable components are almost the same as Microservices. And although Microservices is a buzz word, it does have significant merit to base your architecture on Microservices in order to deliver agility to your business. It’s the perfect foundation for business agility.

Which gets me to the point of my presentation on the topic of Continuous Delivery and Architecture I mentioned earlier.

It is a common misconception that Agile and Architecture don’t play well together. Which is over course utter BS, and if you don’t believe me, I posted about this not that long ago (Product Owner and Architect, Agile Tag Team). Agile and Architecture play extremely well together as long as the Product Owner and the Architect(s) play well together. Especially when it comes to Microservices you need the domain architect or the business architect or both when you have that luxury. It is the architect’s responsibility to understand the business domain and together with the PO define what products make up that domain. Every product is a very likely candidate of either become a Microservice in its own right or becomes a composition (or constellation) of Microservices. And the Product Architect, which you might know as being the Application Architect, Project Architect or Solution Architect, is the single one person that together with the PO defines where the Product ends and the Platform on which it runs starts. The Product Architect therefore is the person that defines the (technical) boundaries of the Product and the domain architect defines the product’s place in the IT landscape. And like I said, a product is a Microservice or constellation of Microservices. Ideally, of course. Domain architect and Product architect should also work closely together in defining what API’s to consume and API’s to provide. Again together with the PO since it’s all about the PO’s product.

In this situation, we have a nice decomposition of a product or several products in interfaces and implementations. And that is exactly what we want from an SOA, especially one that is comprised of independently deployable components, services if you will. Or even Microservices.

Once all interactions between products and within products are based on interfaces, we can talk about a true SOA.

Now here’s an interesting detail. Interfaces are nothing but documentation. Be it fairly intelligent documentation or rather very usable documentation, but documentation nonetheless. And everybody that thinks an interface is something else is wrong. We don’t put an interface in an architectural layer because that doesn’t make sense. The same goes for API’s. An API is also nothing more than documentation that conforms to specific standards. Of course it’s a bit more than just a document, but really, just a little bit more. An API without an implementation is nothing and in fact you can’t actually deploy an API, nor can you an interface for that matter.

Having established that, it’s time to start the confusion and get on with it big time.

So, since an interface is nothing but documentation and it’s something you can’t really deploy. In order to provide business agility through an SOA, we need to put something in between interfaces and their implementations… But before I venture into that area, let me explain how you get business agility through an SOA.

We do this by not implementing an SOA but a POA. Where an SOA is a Service Oriented Architecture, a POA is a Policy Oriented Architecture. Basically this is an architecture in which you have services separated into an interface and one or more implementations of the interface. All implementations are available concurrently and based on policies, one of the implementations is selected. The policies are business policies and governed by the business. Business policies are a fancy word for business rules.

An example of such a business rule is that when transferring money between a customer’s own accounts there is no need for additional validation of the transaction once the customer is signed into her internet banking. Another rule is that when transferring money from a customer’s own account to an account of another customer, an additional signature is needed. Both are financial transactions, but based on the context, different business rules apply.

Policies are context driven, which amounts to the notion of under what circumstances a service is consumed as that determines the implementation of the interface to be used. Contexts can be everything imaginable. Within the example of the transaction as mentioned above, it can be the amount of the transaction, the age of the customer, the time of day, the geographical location of either customer in the transaction, the type of accounts, the client device used and the way a customer was authenticated. Or any combination of these contextual parameters or something completely different altogether.

In a POA, there is a clear distinction between interfaces, policies and implementations. The policy sits between the interface and the implementation. And it is business definable, meaning that the business rules can be changed without changing the interface and existing implementations. Either resulting in implementing policy compliance, i.e. some software is developed that implements the functionality to comply with the policy or by implementing another implementation of the service.

Some 10 years ago, Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) was hot in software development country and although this way of software development is more or less forgotten, it is exactly what POA (see the similarity in acronyms?) wants to establish. By injecting new code, or rather new aspects of an implementation policies can be changed.

The problem with AOP was that was not trivial to do and it was hard to debug once there was an error in the functionality. AOP is also at the class level instead of the service level, and it is far from accessible to non-developers. Still the paradigms of AOP are what POA intends to deliver. A more flexible way of changing nuances in an interface’s implementation.

As you can understand is that the role of the architect and the PO is very significant in POA. The Product Owner needs to understand where policies are to be in place from a business perspective. Not every interface needs policies, and sometimes you don’t even want to have the ability to change a policy without strict governance. The architect, and typically the Product Architect, needs to define how policies are implemented. Since there are as many ways of implementing policies as there are use cases for policies, it is important to at least within the context of a product the same mechanism is used. This is where the architect comes in.

The power of an API, or a Microservice or even a normal service, is so much more when POA aspects are applied as the Product is enabling or rather facilitating business agility. Especially when the used framework for policy definition and implementation is one that allows for doing so by a non-developer. Unfortunately there are not that many frameworks available, most solutions are based on Case Management solutions or consist of glorified Business Process or Business Rules engines. Centralized solutions that require specific expertise to operate and maintain them. Consequently, the autonomity and therefore the agility of the teams and business users are limited. This is where this post more or less started off from. Centralized solutions are limiting agility, and when you want to extend agility to the business, you should limit it in the technology.

So this is how you get Microservices on steroids; apply them in a Policy Oriented Architecture. I hope you liked this post and feel free to comment and discuss. Although the POA is not new, you don’t see it applied that often if at all. I don’t think it’s a matter of complexity or a technology issue. The challenge is typically in that business and IT need to be considered as one and not two separate departments.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contactlist. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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Microservices on steroids, getting from just agile to business agile [part 1 of 2]

Summary

Agility is important, and business agility even more important. With this, the architect has to play a crucial role by defining the right principles, commandments if you will, and seeing to it that the product development teams live by them. Principles like KISS and Independent Deployability are two principles not to mess with. MIcroservices are an important and extremely helpful aspect of this, so is continuous delivery. But you need to get those microservices on steroids in order to be able to move from just agile to business agile. In this first of a two piece post, I am laying the ground works for explaining how you can facilitate business agility in your architecture.

Since you’re reading this post, it’s likely you’re an IT architect or have to deal with one every once in a while. Meaning that you’ve been confronted one way or the other with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Maybe you’re even a proponent of this architectural style.
I’m not going to explain what an SOA is, there’s quite a few very good sources available online explaining what it is and why it’s a good way of building your IT landscape, or not. As always, there are just as many proponents as there are people against and SOA. Over the years I’ve grown to like the premise of an IT landscape where fairly small pieces of functionality can be strung together to realize business functions. And with the advent of RESTful web-services, the premise of a true SOA has become more prevalent as ever.

Nowadays all you see and hear around you are Microservices, even though there doesn't seem to be a clear definition that everybody feels comfortable with, everybody is doing Microservices. One of the most interesting definitions I heard is that it is a really small service. But not as small as a nano service. But just to make sure that you know what I refer to when discussing Microservices, here're two definitions I like to use. The first is from Wikipedia, which in and by itself is no guarantee for it to be correct, but at least it's a common definition:

"Microservices is a variant of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In a microservices architecture, services should be fine-grained and the protocols should be lightweight. The benefit of decomposing an application into different smaller services is that it improves modularity and makes the application easier to understand, develop and test. It also parallelizes development by enabling small autonomous teams to develop, deploy and scale their respective services independently. It also allows the architecture of an individual service to emerge through continuous refactoring. Microservices-based architectures enable continuous delivery and deployment."

The second definition is form Martin Fowler, which is in essence the same:

"In short, the microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies."

Microservices are not easy to develop, much like API's, they require a rather typical level of maturity of a development team to develop them. The hard part of Microservices is typically the "independently deployable" aspect of the services and then in particular maintaining that independence of time. Let's call it sustainable independence.

What I usually see is that over time the architecture becomes convoluted, resources entangled (the whole HATEOAS thingy is not trivial at all) and adversity against rearchitecting the IT landscape to get back to independent microservices.

To develop them,  the Microservices, you need to invest. In general, a Microservice is way more expensive to develop than a regular service. Much like an API being a lot more expensive than a simple service interface. So I would argue that there needs to be a business case to capture some functionality or resource in a Microservice.

Still, Microservices are a good thing to look into, if not only to be able to dismiss them. But more importantly, they are very helpful in becoming agile. I would almost argue that in order to be agile, you need an SOA based on Microservices and API's. Having said this, I need to emphasise that we're still talking about agility of the product development team, the IT people.

Mind that having an architecture with highly independent units of deployment is a blessing for all of us that want to do Continuous Delivery or Deployment for that matter. It makes life so much easier and as an architect you should really make sure that independence of components, services or units of deployments, however you want to call it, is a prime-directive to all your developers, great and small. It should be up there on the wall with the rest of your architecture principles. First of course you mention KISS and second the declaration of independence for your components.

But as I said, agility so far is technical agility. You've designed your software, your product, for change. Which allows you to be agile. Your PO (Product Owner) wants something different, you can change your code easy as can be. But when you think about it, it won't make your business more agile, it will make your IT more agile.

There's quite a bit more to be done before your business gets its agility... more on that in the next part.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contactlist. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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Special thanks to Sytse for pointing out one or two textual errors and helping me correcting them.

Product Owner and Architect, agile tag-team

Picture yourself in an environment where agile practices are adopted as the standard way of developing solutions. Now if you're really ambitious, you're picturing yourself in an environment where there are no projects, only products. Consider yourself to be part of a team working on a product, a product team. The team is comprised of all the necessary expertises to create the product it's developing. The team you're part of is responsible for the product, cradle to grave.
But wait a minute, are you really part of the team? Or are you external to the team, but do consider yourself heavily involved with the team? You might be the Product Owner or an architect.

Is the PO not part of the team? Maybe, maybe not. It's not that important actually. And what about the architect? Is the architect not part of the team? Well, the architect, I would think and this is just my very humble opinion, is not part of the team. The architect is concerned with the team, but not this team, but all the teams that are in the architect's domain. The architect is there to ensure that the products form a cohesive landscape that, by synergy, creates the most value for the organisation as is thinkable. Back to the PO. The PO might own many products in a portfolio...

Your picture. Did you picture yourself in this organisation as part of the team, of a team, or as somebody outside the team? It doesn't really matter too much. Really.

The interesting part of such an organisation, be it a for-profit or a not-for-profit or even something governmental, such an organisation is catering for its business, for the users of its products. And the products are there to generate value, pure and simple, life's better with every new version of the products the organisation releases. The product teams are there to work on these products, to make sure that the users are actually able to use these products and once they have those products at their disposal, they can continue to use them.

Other than in more traditional organisations where products are developed in projects, where there is a project organisation and a operations department to keep the solutions running. In these organisations teams, the project teams, are only concerned with getting the products out. And in many organisations it doesn't even goes as far as that and the project teams are primarily concerned with ensuring the products are accepted by the operations department. This is how these organisations work, and this is how teams operate. That's not to say that the individual members of the teams are not concerned about the quality of what they create or whether or not users actually like their products and use them. And that's not to say that the people working operations department are not concerned with the development of the software and that the quality is great etc. Organisationally, there's a divide and more importantly there's no one single entity that is responsible cradle to grave for the products.

What about this tag-team, this agile tag-team?

The effectiveness of the PO-Architect team, this tag-team, is the greatest in this product oriented organisation. The more 'agile' is considered a business trait instead of just an IT trait or even solely a software development trait, the bigger the impact the tag-team can and will have on the bottomline of the organisation, in a positive way.

Here's why. The PO, when peeled like an onion is at the core only caring about creating business value. And the PO has two currencies that he can use to invest in order to create even more value. For one there's the crude oil of product development: €'s. Here we have the simple fact that the the business needs to be able to earn more money with the PO's products than the PO had to invest in creating the products. It's a simple matter of cost/benefit and ROI. The less the PO needs to spend, the more the business makes and the shorter the time for the business to earn back the investment the better.
But there's also the second currency, which is time. Time taking to create the product, or a new value creating feature of an existing product. Time has no ROI. You have to invest time, knowing you'll never get it back. You might save time with your product, but the time you invest, you can only invest once. This is important because you want to invest as little of that time in something that generates the most value. Think about this for a second... what it means is that you want to create a new product (or feature) that will generate the maximum value in a minimum timeframe. The crude oil, your €'s are secondary to this, as a PO, because you have a product team available that you need to pay for anyway. Remember, you're working in a product oriented organisation not a project oriented organisation. Your teams are pre-funded! This is also important to note.

So the priority of the PO should be generating as much business value as possible. Therefore the PO needs to prioritise the various products and their features such that the most value creating features are worked on by the product team first. And this is extremely tough for the PO, especially when the PO is not a business person because the PO needs to know what's good for the gander as that is good for the goose.
And in many cases the PO will need to experiment in order to find out whether or not a feature is really needed. Whether it is really going to be used. Whether the form it will be delivered in is the most optimal form. Experiments cost time as well, so the balance between experimenting and applying is critical.

This is where the architect comes in. Without the architect the PO is lost, or at least the PO is susceptible to overspending. First of all, the architect's view is more than just a product and is therefore prone know about solutions to partial problems available elsewhere in the organisation. And leverage them. The architect is the right person to lay the foundation for future features. In part by ensuring that there is a generic (application) infrastructure that can be leveraged throughout the lifecycle of the product. When the PO has the insight to define a product roadmap or a business direction for the product(s) to evolve in, and shares this with the architect. The architect will be even better equipped to pro-actively define the foundations of the products, where a little investment upfront pays itself back at a later stage. See the parallels with the PO, the architect is there to understand where and how best to invest product development time to save more product development time at a later stage.
But there's more, obviously. The architect, and this is the 'secondly' belonging to the 'first of all' from above, is best equipped to define where what corners can be cut for most impact and what experiments to run in order to get the most out of new or specific capabilities. The architect will be the single one person that understands how to scale the organisation's technologies. How to move from a simple, crude yet effective archaic technology to a more complex, elegant and sophisticated version and when to do so. The architect therefore can and will save the most valuable currency of the PO, feature development time, at every step of the way.

Remember that PO and business value creation? Value should be created as quickly as possible, so short development times are important. As much as possible value should be created, so the most desired product features with the biggest impact on the bottomline should be worked on by the team. But which are these features? Well the architect doesn't know these answers, but is perfectly suited to limit the amount of time it takes to either develop a feature or to find out what feature should be developed by devising an experiment. The PO still needs to run the experiment though.

Ah, here comes the hardest part of the post. How to set the right priorities? Which is a question the PO will need to answer. The common way to do this, the wrong way indeed, is to work on the simplest feature to develop. Or the one that can be delivered the fastest. Often these are the same features by the way. This will only result in the PO and the team to feel really good about themselves because they added many features to the product. Something that will in most cases be far from adding the most business value to the product.

Again the architect is a great team member for the PO in this as architecture is not about simple to develop features or quickly realisable solutions. Architecture is about ensuring durability, sustainability. It's about creating a playing field in which complex solutions can be developed quickly, because the groundwork has been done already and therefore a solid foundation is present.

The challenge is with the PO still as business value should be the key to the priority of the feature backlog. So with every feature the PO will need to define how much value will be created, preferably in terms of what will be changed, and what will be the benefit of the change. From a user's perspective, always from a user's perspective. The PO will also need to establish a baseline for each feature he's planning to invest development time in. This is for the simple reason that there's no way to determine whether or not you've improved life as you know it, without knowing what life is before you started your improvements. And consequently, the PO will need to start gathering the right metrics in order to know those improvements. Defining the reason why you want to change something, i.e. defining what the benefits will be, will more or less define what metrics will show progress and therefore what needs to be done to establish a baseline.
Leaves the PO with defining the top priority of all the features that need working on. And this is encoded in the metric used to measured progress and the reason for the change to be developed. From these a projected generated business value can be established.
And this is where the architect can shine again. Not with this little piece of math, but with the part about metrics and measurements. The architect will be the instigator of the existence of a set of architecture principles that allow for metrics and measurements. Principles that lead to the existence of comprehensive measurements, to profound standardisation of those aspects that need no specialisations, to extreme automation of setting up environments. This can be left with the product team, but when there are more than one team, there will be a need and at the least a benefit, of coherence across teams, which is where the architect is acting.

Concluding, the PO and the Architect make a wonderful team that jointly work on the best prioritisation of the feature backlog for the products of the PO. By doing so, they'll minimise the required investments in feature development time for the product team to develop a feature, all the while maximising the created business value. And as icing on the cake, they are in the process ensuring that the hypothesised improvements are validated. You want a cherry on top? With this awesome tag-team you have a perfect opportunity to define a ubiquitous language which is business domain specific and spoken across the whole of the organisation.


Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contactlist. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect