Aren’t We Transformed Yet? Why Digital Transformation Needs More Work

Digital transformation remains a clear focus for many organizations, with proactive leaders seeing opportunities worth navigating the complexities of technology and process disruption. 

According to Kristy Ellmer, a managing director for Boston Consulting Group, “thirty percent of any given sector is in transformation at any given time. Companies that go into a transformation mindset when they’re in a place of strength will be more successful than if they do it reactively. And then how you execute it and move the organization behind it is what actually creates competitive advantage.”

While the business case for digital transformation is clear, many enterprises still struggle to successfully transform all aspects of their organization. Part of the technical challenge is building and deploying the apps and services that deliver the experiences users (both internal and external) expect as standard. 

Enterprises are leaning on various platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce to enable their digital transformation, helping them to take on some of the heavy lifting and manual tasks associated with building vast enterprise-specific applications. These platforms have proven significant value in multiple business functions, so it’s no surprise that businesses are demanding more functionality from their platform teams. 

The results are impressive. Take ServiceNow, for example. The company saw a 31.5% jump in Q2 RPO to $18.6 billion, and CEO Bill McDermot is betting big: “Well, we’re going to reinvent the whole industry, and we’ve got to put it on the ServiceNow platform. And we’ve got to take the data, and we’re going to connect all the disparate parts that are suffocating companies, and we’re going to move it into the Now platform, and we’re going to reimagine the way workflows.”

However, while the platform’s go-big-or-go-home aim is admirable, the reality is the demands large enterprises put on platforms are still exceeding the capability to supply new apps and services. From banks to insurance companies to energy and utilities, platforms are creating project backlogs across all sectors and impacting software developer employee satisfaction due to bottlenecks. Digital transformation needs more work. 

What’s Going to Fix These Platform Shortcomings? 

The solution lies in taking a dual approach. Firstly, companies using these platforms must automate where appropriate to cut errors, improve quality consistency, and alleviate the burden on overstretched teams. At the same time, they also need to synchronize across all the environments used in development lifecycles to catch inconsistencies before they become sequelae for complex errors and troubleshooting impacts delivery timelines. 

Automation's Role in Efficiency, Consistency, and Compliance

Automation should enhance operational efficiency and consistency across platform environments, ensuring that all environments remain production-like without manual intervention - which will significantly reduce the risk of inconsistencies and errors.

The goal should be to put in place environment synchronization, automated deployment flows and release payload bundling capabilities to streamline the process of introducing updates, applications, and configurations into production-like environments. By minimizing manual intervention, and synchronizing environments automation not only speeds up delivery but also reduces the likelihood of human error and code errors during deployments. This automation extends to release packaging and management, allowing teams to efficiently bundle and deploy changes as cohesive and auditable units.

Ultimately, automation should also enhance governance and compliance by facilitating the enforcement of policies and standards throughout the platform ecosystems, ensuring innovations and changes are not only rapidly deployed, but also authorized, secure, and compliant with regulatory requirements. 

Imagine flying a commercial airline without automation. You may not be aware, but autopilot systems make continuous course corrections per minute. Without this automation flying from New York to Los Angeles would be impossible unless the plane were flown closer to the ground and the pilots followed landmarks - something that was done in the early days of flight. If you travel to the desert west, you can still find the cement foundations for airplane towers, whose sole purpose was to help pilots navigate from point A to point B. 

Automation changed everything, and it can allow for the paradigm shift between digital transformation to business transformation.

Catching Issues Early Through Seamless Propagation and Multi-Environment Visibility

When it comes to enterprise development, platforms alone can’t address the critical challenge of maintaining consistency between development, test, staging, and production environments. What teams really need to strive for is a seamless propagation of changes between environments made production-like through synchronization and have full control over the process. This control enables the integration of crucial safety steps such as approvals, scans, and automated testing, ensuring that issues are caught and addressed early in the development cycle.

Many enterprises are implementing real-time visualization capabilities to provide administrators and developers with immediate insight into differences between instances, including scoped apps, store apps, plugins, update sets, and even versions across the entire landscape. This extended visibility is invaluable for quickly identifying and resolving discrepancies before they can cause problems in production environments.

A lack of focus on achieving real-time multi-environment visibility is akin to performing a medical procedure without an X-ray, CT, or MRI of the patient. Without knowing where the problem is, and the nature of the problem, doctors would be left to make diagnoses and treatments in the dark. This challenge is something psychiatrists know too well, as the human brain is the only organ that is treated without imagery.

Automation, Visibility and are Key to Better Digital Transformation

The benefits of automation and synchronization don’t stop there: with better visibility, developers can open the lines of communication and work together more collaboratively. Teams that communicate better are seeing increased opportunities to innovate beyond their typical day-to-day tasks and to fully realize the benefits of their digital transformation efforts. 

Remember, when everyone sees clearly, teamwork flows freely. When team members work against a shared vision of their platform landscape, productive collaboration ensues. 

Real-time multi-environment visibility empowers the embodiment of Linus’s Law, which states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” 

However, the actual statement the law is based on comes from Eric S. Raymond’s book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and states, “given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.” 

The key part of the statement is “the fix [will be] obvious to someone.” Having a shared view of the facts will put your smart IT people in the best position to be the most successful.