Innovation IT Workshop part1

Hello, this post is the script I used for a webinar kindly hosted by RedHat UK, about Innovation IT. Please enjoy it!

Hello everyone. Thanks for coming and welcome to this webinar about DigitalIndustrial Revolution, and Digital transformation. I’m Luca Pedrazzini CEO of Sorint lab a System Integration company vendor independent based in EMEA.

Digital Industrial Economy and Digital transformation are over-used expression that needs to be deeply understood to anticipate the impact on our business and be prepared to take all the opportunities. Let’s focus on the word “Revolution” for a moment because “Businesses don't transform by choice because it is expensive and risky. Businesses go through transformation when they have failed to evolve.” as said by Howard King. And I add that too many technical development forced us to transform rather than evolve. There’s no time to evolve. Few words about the company I work for, just to give you the idea of the context of my point of view. We are technology partners of large enterprise cross market because we are a technical company vendor independent focused on services and consultancy… Our customers describe us as a big R&D company.

here there are ome figures to give you a better understanding of our areas of activities. Please visit our website for more information... I strongly believe that we have a nice company of 700 tech guys passionate about technologies and methodologies big enough to execute our mission on helping our customer to deal with the increased compleity of technologies, startups, new architectures, methodologies, infrastructure in other words of a changing ecossystem. WE would like to welcome you in a new era of IT services

Again our point of view is mainly based on our active center of operations distributed in Italy, UK, Spain, Germany, France and US.

SORINT is Focus on offering services and help our customer on succeed in four main areas. In this session we’ll go through these services to give you a better understand of our approach to digital transformation projects Digital transformation, Continuous Control over your core business application 24x7 with our competence center , reskill your IT department to deal with new challenges, methodologies, technologies an so on … And in the Opensource adoption solutions, to help you leverage opensource concept and products to foster your business value. If we focus for a moment to think about solutions (business model and technical product together) that are revolutioning our world we’ll realize that there are more innovations in Netflix, Facebook, twitter, google and so on than in standard software vendor. RedHAt is playing a unique role putting together opensource software, support, services and enterprise needs.

Digital transformation means to bring technology to the core of our business, develop software to create new products at a different speed, at different scale, with a valued approach able to sustain the change of structures and models.

Digital transformation is the digitalization of processes, business operations and customer relationship to scale and grow a near zero marginal cost. Experiment, prototyping and fast failure are parts of this approach We define digital transformation as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Continuous Investigation on new solutions. Business savvy mixed with deep technology knowledge are foundamental to help adopting and adapting new approaches.

it's a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure.. trying to avid to much failures.

Visit our web site or send me an email to have all the references I used to build this presentation The software brought to the core of the business, and the IT has to sustain this transformation. “Companies grow… They change organization, rules, roles, procedures but not the way to make software and providing Infrastructures. ... the fact is that many companies that really depend on software development are not very well prepared in software development. As you can see I’ve listed some of the titles and inspirations that shape the context. From the business perspective of CloudEconomy, the platform economy, the API economy to the business savvy needed to lead a IT department in the era of Agile and Devops. Companies as Netflix, Spotify, paypall and google, talking about technology first, then HR approaches and people motivation. We’ve entered a very exciting era of Business changes. WE can no longer think of business as something known and understood. The revolution imply that The Enterprise Architecture of your company is the asset, the infrastructure, the software, the total IT capabilities that allow the business to operate and win.

Digital Industrial Revolution is a whole scale change to the foundational components of a business: from its operating model to its infrastructure. What it sells, to whom and how it goes to market. It isn’t to reaching new customers through new channel as it was with (for example) the online banks or building apps for mobile users. It is to create a new line of business to reach a new demand through new technologies. Technologies that connect people and machines or informations. We are dealing with an enourmous number of new technologies forcing the business to change exponentially. When we add digital technology to the market we introduce growth with a near-zero marginal costs both in acquiring new customer than in providing services. We are facing disrupting new companies entering new market with low cost solutions, and exponentially become mainstream in few months. To transform a large organization takes a significant amount of time, a huge amount of resources and a cross-functional set of business skills that’s why the creation of a virtuous ecosystem is important and choose the right partner is strategical. In The followiong few slides i’ll try to put together the not enough told history of IT in the Age o f Agility. Not fa from us there are the digital business opportunity we wanto to reach. WE are starting our journey moving from a reliable Architecture made after consolidation projects through traditional waterfal approaches buyng monolithic hardware and keeping the lights on, thanks to our IT operations guys. But this is in the Age of uncertainity, as said before, new business model are changing the markets, the consumers the demand… so we need to have a clear strategy to get to the Digital Opportunities. As said by Niccolo Macchiavelli (1530) and I have to mention Macchiavelli as one of the most important italian business strategist … please appreciate how far in time I have to go to find a good Italian buusiness strategist! As said by Niccolo Macchiavelli you should never, never, never waste a perfectly good “crisis” of the market … I used the word crisis because digital transformation and Digital Industrial revolution for some mean opportunities for other mean the end of a business… Machiavelli put it well in his essays: “ There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain to its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things” … a new order that is DIGITAL. Every interaction between a customer and a business, between a business and another business, between employees in a business and between a government and a business will become more an more digital. ...we need an iterative and incremental path to achieve our established business outcomes, we need to maintain a good pace, and adapt our strategy faster enough to avoid impediments...

… Evolving our IT assets, our entire Enterprise architecture could be the right way to move our steps forward. Keeping attention to the technical debt, maintain sustainable investments in new initiatives, keeping the OPEX low enough to free needed capitals everything can go quite well … but something can go wrong. … Evolving our IT assets, our entire Enterprise architecture could be the right way to move our steps forward. Keeping attention to the technical debt, maintain sustainable investments in new initiatives, keeping the OPEX low enough to free needed capitals everything can go quite well … but something can go wrong.

If our IT asset, now a core business asset, fails to evolve stopping to foster the new business models resulting in stucking our race to the digital competition we need to change our strategy.

An holystic view is needed we have to change organizations, become customer obsessed, product oriented using design thinking, lean startup approaches , scenario planning, beyond budgeting way of control, impact mapping and embrace Devops processes. The complex of practices we call DevOps combine a highly automated, repeatable and testable Continuous Delivery framework with collaboratives teams that support the full livecycle of delivering capabilities to production. The infrstructure should be “immutable” and the machines should be “cattle” rather than “Pets”. The focus is really on value harvesting engaging all the stakeholders. Switching from waterfall to agile puts the value driven project management as a priority instead of adhere to a plan in uncertainty. Microservices or Miniservices adoption in some cases can foster the agile adoption. Cloud native infrastructures provide the scalability and flexibility we need to avoid waste of time… ...and we need new approaches to IT operations, it’s not enough to keep the lights on we strive to run our business better,… And I mentioned in the slide the Site reliability engineering model from Google as a way to redesign IT organizations. All the approaches have to stick to an agile strategy with discipline and deep understanding of why, where and how to implement new methodologies, architectures, infrastructures. We need to implement a strong Action Plan Discipline, opennes, leadership and clear vision is the key factor to build a good action plan. You need to master The modern application development using again methodologies, architectures and infrastructures able to implement new features bringing value at a unprecedent speed and agility. Then you have to create an application modernization plan. Using Domain Driven Design to leveraging on your legacy application as a platform on which you develop new features in modern way. Could be a good idea to move the strategic and highly evolving applications in cloud native infrastructure and than innovate. You need cross functional highly skilled teams building training paths for your exeprienced engineer to give them new skills form development to operations and business savvy. You need to write the cloud stategy, assessing all the IT assets, choosing for every application the right infrastructure model (Private Iaas, Publica Paas…) and the needed process to evolve the application from rehosting to refactor, rearchitecture and rewriting… The next generation Enterprise Architecture needs a Next generation IT operations. Moving from silos based organizations to community of practicies, with automation, continuous monitoring, agile practicies, SRE concepts… And as mention earlier you need to use opensource software as a source of innovation. In the opensource communities and best practicies there are some of the keys to succeed in a complex world. Thats all for this webinar. In the next one we will explore in more details how to execute yor Action plan. Thanks for the opportunity to you all and to RedHat who is our excellent host.