“May you live in interesting times,” expostulated British Member of Parliament Austen Chamberlain in 1936, falsely believing the phrase to be an ancient Chinese curse – and today, that ersatz Asian malediction is never truer than in the turbulent, confusing world of enterprise IT infrastructure.
Cloud computing is merely the price of admission. Add healthy measures of containers, microservices, real-time streaming, virtualization, serverless computing, and all manner of over-promising and product-washing, and one can certainly find oneself cursed to endure a permanent state of confusion, Chinese or no.
And while we at Intellyx spend our days leading vendors out of the morass of technobabble into the clear light of business value, I can hardly pull back the fog on the entirety of modern enterprise IT in the mere 1,500 words or so we allot for our Cortex newsletters.
What I am able to do in such a constrained missive, however, is delineate how we must all think differently in order to take our first step on the road from confusion to clarity by calling out seven transmogrifications we must undergo in the way we think about modern IT.
Transmogrification #1: Digital Transformation – from Superficial to Workload-Centric
For years, Intellyx has exhorted its audience (aka you) to understand that digital transformation represents how customer preferences and behavior drive enterprise technology decisions.
And yet, to this day, such digital decisions tend to be merely superficial. How many supposed digital transformations boil down to little more than improved mobile apps, perchance, or other thin veneers of transformation that appear shiny and new, yet hide stagnant evils beneath?
In the modern world of enterprise IT, in contrast, customer-driven business transformation meets technology-empowered change at the workload.
Workloads – management-centric abstractions of the underlying technology that run applications – become the center of digital transformation’s technology story, as they bring modern enterprise technology to all the customer-centric business goodness we wish to bring to light.
Transmogrification #2: Modernization – from ‘Rip and Replace’ to Updating Architectures for Workload-Centricity
The bane of every CIO’s existence has always been modernization. Yes, legacy sucks. But changing out legacy typically sucks more. In other words, life as a CIO sucks no matter what.
The good news: in the modern world, modernization only rarely means rip and replace. We now have a plethora of other options to add to the mix. Leave and layer. Modernize in place. Virtualize. Bring all manner of newly powerful abstractions to older apps, extending their useful lives in a multitude of ways.
What do all of these options have in common? Modern enterprise IT now has a new architectural context for legacy modernization that focuses on the role of the workload rather than the age of the technology.
If we think of workloads as both portable and abstracted from their execution environments, then we can run old apps whenever doing so meets the customer need – as part of a modern architectural context that takes advantage of all the other crazy goodness going on.
Transmogrification #3: From Unintentionally Heterogeneous to Intentionally Hybrid
Once we make our peace with our legacy and free our workloads from the fetters that have bound them lo all these years, we can finally climb to the rooftops and shout, yes! We love heterogeneity!
Only we don’t even call the mix of applications, operating systems, and deployment environments heterogeneous anymore. That word is oh so 2005. Today we’re talking hybrid. And not just hybrid cloud – hybrid IT. As though we were doing it on purpose.
In the modern world, we actually want hybrid IT.
Transmogrification #4: Integration – from Making Connections to Abstracting Endpoints
If modernization be at the top of every CIO’s hate list, integration has got to take second place. After all, who doesn’t love trying to connect one application to another, resolving Gordian-knotty issues of protocols, data formats, ambiguous metadata, and grumpy old middleware all at once?
We’ve been pounding on this problem for years now, and I’m pleased to say that all that hair-pulling over REST and its motley entourage of standards, formats, protocols, and other folderol has finally paid off.
But we’re not simply talking about APIs here. The modern IT way of looking at integration abstracts the APIs themselves, supporting policy-based integrations dynamically at run time.
That is, if such abstracted endpoints are what the situation calls for. Otherwise, why bother?
The situation may not call for such flexibility, such pure dynamic loveliness. But it’s there if you want it. Oh, and if you’re trying to integrate to oh-so-ephemeral microservices? You’re gonna want it.
Transmogrification #5: Virtualization – from Main Course to the Seasoning
One cannot argue with the Hamilton-esque success of virtualization. Not only did it take over enterprise data centers faster than global warming can sink Florida, but without virtualization, we’d never have gotten to square one with the cloud.
Today, however, we’ve cracked open the virtualization nut. Virtual Machines are oh so 2006, which is an improvement over oh so 2005, but not by much. Now we have containers. Container orchestrators. Serverless computing aka Functions-as-a-Service aka just more virtualization, only now at the function level.
Want a lot of virtualization? Go ahead and pour it on. A bit here or there? Shake it on like chili flakes on a pepperoni pizza. A mere pinch, perhaps? It’s up to you.
Transmogrification #6: Visibility – from Ops to Everyone, Even the Boss
Remember the good old days of ITOA? Or ITOM? Or APM? ITSM, perhaps? Or how about AIOps? Or maybe any of a number of similar abbreviations, so numerous that even Harry Potter couldn’t accio any magic to all those quadrants? Sure you do.
Yes, enterprise production environments are complicated, and sneeze at them funny and they go belly up. So be sure to hire a bunch of hardcore techies who love nothing better than to get in a room and point fingers at each other whenever Mrs. Poindexter in Pacoima can’t get her Pat Boone YouTube to load.
So you buy monitoring tools with fancy colorful dashboards in hopes those techies can figure out what’s wrong before you lose Mrs. Poindexter. Soon you have dashboards out the wazoo.
Cut to today – those pretty dashboards? Not just for techies anymore. Now everyone has access to them – including the boss, who routinely checks business performance on her phone. In real-time. And yes, by business performance we mean real data in real-time about real money.
Transmogrification #7: From Data at Rest to Data in Motion
Do you know where your data are? Really? Well, you’re wrong. You might have been right when I asked the question, but since then, everything has changed.
The old way of thinking about data was that their normal state of affairs was at rest. Put them in a database until you need them. Only when you execute a query do your data run around from place to place until they get tired and have to stop again.
In the modern world, we’ve reversed this picture. Today we assume data are always in motion – that streaming is the normal state of affairs for our data, and therefore, everything we do with data happens in real-time.
Of course, we still let those pesky buggers rest now and then – but data at rest become the exception rather than the norm. Remember, fire hoses are for fighting fires, not filling lakes. Or swamps. Or god forbid, warehouses.
There’s a reason I saved #7 for the end of my list – it requires the greatest shift in thinking of the lot, because data are so core to our technology, and of course, to our businesses as well.
Where, however, does such value lie? Data at rest at best has potential value – they might just be worth something if we did something with them. Data in motion, in contrast, can have value right now. Get this one wrong, and your business will be oh, so yesterday.
The Intellyx Take
Are these seven thought transmogrifications the whole story of modern enterprise IT infrastructure? Of course not, but they’re a good start. Hopefully you’ll admit that I did manage to cover quite a bit of ground with a simple set of seven principles.
And if you haven’t noticed – referring to the two of you who read this article with bags on your head – these seven transmogrifications all interrelate. On purpose. Perhaps they’re all simply different ways of looking at the same transmogrification.
Interesting times indeed.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: The Alchemist by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (public domain).
