The speed of smarter architecture

Today, in our conversations with large-enterprise clients, the theme of speed comes up often and in different ways. The most common way is in conversations about software delivery speed, sometimes called developer velocity. Concerns about software delivery speed are oftentimes the motivation behind agile or devops initiatives, for instance.

The second way speed comes up is with concept-to-cash lead time—how long does it take to turn a good idea into a digital product that is up and running and generating cash? This kind of speed includes everything that happens before software development begins and everything that happens after a first working version of software is deployed. Measuring concept-to-cash lead time often reveals that good ideas are taking twelve months or more to make their way through portfolio management and funding bureaucracy before developers start developing anything.

Speed is a critical factor in today’s digitally driven businesses, where the faster devour the slower.

The third type of speed has gotten a boost of attention from the COVID pandemic: how fast can we respond effectively to changes in the business environment? Let’s call this kind of speed business agility. Business agility applies to the entire enterprise (not just the IT organization) but is highly dependent on an enterprise’s digitally supported “sense and respond” capabilities. Data analytics play a big role in business agility, as does organizational structure, decision governance, and a data-driven culture.

Each of these types of speed are critical in a digital age where the faster tend to eat the slower. Consider the so-called FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). They each employed all three types of speed while rising to dominant industry positions. Today they are large enterprises, but fairly recently, they were all small ventures with one thing in common: the ability to move much more quickly than the industry incumbents they displaced.

For large incumbents, the principles of smarter architecture need to extend throughout the enterprise.

And it’s not just the FAANGs: outside of the “born digital” world, improving speed may be even more critical to large incumbent enterprises. When we see the average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 drop from 60 years (in the 1960s) to under 20 years (today), with an accelerating trend towards even higher turnover, we’re seeing the effects of having—or lacking—all three types of speed.

Smarter architecture is a fourth type of speed that becomes possible with hybrid cloud

The purpose of this paper is to propose a complementary fourth type of speed we call the speed of smarter architecture. Smarter architecture is a way for large enterprises to use hybrid cloud computing technologies and some related business technology (digital) practices to do two things:

1. Improve the speed of software delivery, decrease concept-to-cash lead time, and improve business agility
2. Make new types of digital strategies—such as building customer platforms and improving customer lifetime value—feasible sooner and with less execution risk.

The speed of smarter architecture is new because the technologies that make it possible are new. In general, new levels of speed are possible via the way cloud makes it easier for developers to experiment and innovate without the constraints of conventional on-premise infrastructure. But specifically, new speed at enterprise scale is possible due to new cloud container technologies that free applications from the hardware they run on.

It is also true that the hybrid, horizontal nature of smarter architecture creates new needs for speed throughout the enterprise technology stack. The hybrid underpinnings of smarter architecture create new speed-of-change opportunities that can only be realized by a decoupled platform architecture and associated operating model. These opportunities show up in current challenges with data and regulatory compliance: if it takes a building full of people to change a configuration because of tightly coupled architecture, it’s hard to get faster. But if every development team can make those changes without triggering a host of dependencies, everything goes faster.

Over the last three years, the combination of container technology, open source cloud software, and hybrid cloud architecture have made a new, better way of deploying and managing applications at scale possible.  Possible, but not easy… large businesses that may have already made investments in cloud adoption may be getting only a fraction of the value available.

Read the full report to see how smarter architecture can help your organization move faster—and deliver more business value.