As we consider industry, business and digital transformation, the time for market theory, guess-work and ‘marketecture’ is over. It is way past time for us to get real.
The wave has begun, and many major companies are truly leaning into business transformation to fundamentally improve how they interact and serve their consumers. Has anyone else noticed GE’s commercials to attract developers? If you haven’t seen them, they’re pretty great (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ)! This is a big shift in what we expect from this stellar brand, and its indicative of an industry change that is beginning to overwhelm analysts and business leadership alike. We need look no further than recent press to see this move is not isolated in nature. You need only consider Ford (https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2015/12/15/ford-teams-with-pivotal-to-speed-development-of-connected-car.html), Philips (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MqD6YDeRw), Mercedes (http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/10/19/mercedes-benz-and-pivotal-forge-smart-car-apps-on-cloud-foundry/), and Home Depot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl0oH0UdJPM) to find that, while we have been talking for quite some time about leveraging IT, and software development in particular, as a business enabler, we are now beginning to see the push to make that concept a reality in practice across industry verticals. How then do we successfully create the needed changes within our companies to be truly successful in such a broad way?
It’s always interesting to see how vendors respond to these questions. When a company asks, “How do we get started in transforming our company?” vendors will often reply with strategies that are tools-based. ‘It seems that we can get you to a digital future with this analytics dashboard …’ or, ‘let’s put in this messaging solution to help you maximize the usage of your software services better…’ or, ‘Docker is the answer!’ These suggestions and approaches often can provide value to an individual or a team, but are essentially point solutions which, without a larger context, often lead nowhere close to holistic transformation. They also tend to lead to theoretical ‘marketecture’ exercises to some dream of a destination that we think has a chance to lead us somewhere better. This approach routinely does improve our execution, but almost never gets us to the ideal ‘dream’ we built PowerPoints around.
If our hope is to transform the business/culture/software, it is critical that we define the outcomes that we want to achieve up front, and the best way I’ve seen it work is to ‘Get Real’ and build something in the end-state vision. Stated another way, the desired outcome is simply to build truly great software in the right way. Hopefully that’s an interesting thought, but it is fraught with challenges. What does building great software look like when we have not been doing things that way traditionally? How do we deal with legacy debt? How do we address our processes (funding, governance, etc.) which are designed with great intentions, but significantly limit our ability to innovate? This is where engaging with a firm that builds software the way you want to build becomes essential.
Often, you need to partner with someone who does the whole thing the way you want to do it and build something real. I learned a bit about cognitive learning a while back, and people simply learn best when paired with an expert who is already where you want to go. Your mind picks up patterns and modes of thinking that are new and more complex than we can define in a slide by working side by side with someone who lives life in the ‘target state.’ If you want to be an outstanding lawyer, you need to know something about the law, and then you should find a mentor to work with who is the kind of lawyer you want to be. Learn from the best, stay nimble, and stay coachable.
Now this next part will be a bit of a commercial, but I love the approach we take at Pivotal Labs, and it provides an excellent example of successful implementation of the process I mentioned above. At Pivotal, we seek to help firms by bringing them into our process (http://pivotal.io/labs/process) and building something new together to illustrate an end-state effort that allows for rapid innovation and outstanding software development. The goal is to help others build software the way Silicon Valley startups build software (with as little friction to innovation as possible, building in a cloud native fashion, etc). This includes experiencing culture, process, tools, platform, etc. to accomplish a goal or outcome (such as a new mobile application). Our hope is that this knowledge does not stay at Pivotal, but rather becomes a part of who our customer is.
Once you have built something real and experienced an end-state approach and product, you can then rationally step back and evaluate what you do with everything else you have. You can even figure out where tools can most effectively play!
Embracing the Change 
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