The combined threats of COVID and an uncertain economic outlook have made these very trying times.
We get a lot of messages in these trying times (ITTT) about following the ‘better angels’ of our human nature — picture a decision being made, with an angel and devil on either shoulder, whispering advice in our ears.
The moral: we should follow our ‘good’ virtues — honestly supporting and helping our fellow humans versus succumbing to the ‘bad’ failings of fear and self-interest.
One hopes that good virtues will help us drive our businesses in a way that has a beneficial impact on our end customers, our employees and the world in general.
But the enterprise itself doesn’t have the luxury of righteousness as it seeks to apply technology to survive and grow, ITTT. The ‘neutral angels’ pulling the compass of digital transformation are neither good nor bad.
Neutral angels, opposite virtues
There are two opposite virtues, or ‘neutral angels’ whispering in the ear of an enterprise about digital transformation strategies.
- One virtue of distribution (vD) — spreading activity farther afield
- The other virtue for proximity (vP) — bringing activity closer
The coronavirus crisis has forced the modern enterprise to lean more heavily on its digital backbone, perhaps more now than at any time in history. Massive digital transformation decisions had to be made within days as social distancing requirements inevitably pushed customer transactions farther online and work outside of the office.
It seems that the virtue of distribution (vD) has been making the most convincing arguments for transformation these days — starting with the immediate relocation of most knowledge workers and technologists out of the office — and most retail transactions out of the store to prevent the in-person spread of the virus.
For some companies, the decision to go remote was already well underway, with work-from-home policies baked into the business model. Office space was simply vacated ahead of schedule.
But the vD coefficient doesn’t stretch on forever. Sure enough, the virtue of Proximity (vP) starts whispering in our ears again. In some companies, sales or quality of service may suffer. Knowledge workers may eventually become more distracted, or frustrated, or unproductive working at home, leading to a reconsideration of how to safely return some work to the office.
These balanced, neutral angels of vD and vP are tugging at virtually every digital transformation decision we make, whether setting broad strategies and objectives, or negotiating tactical options and tasks.
Goodbye to the software development office
Digital-first businesses are uniquely positioned to take advantage of a distributed IT workforce that can build and maintain an increasingly distributed application estate. Nowhere is the value of vD more prominent than in today’s small-to-midsize independent software vendor.
Software engineers in a product organization appreciate self-determination, so long as they are contributing valued work. Shared platforms for remotely governing agile software delivery from requirements, to repositories, to release trains and issue resolution are improving in quality and interoperability every day.
However, the outlook for a permanent departure from a shared office isn’t 100% rosy, even for a software company. The in-person agile scrum or daily standup meeting packs a lot of collaborative value, the most creative solutions can often arise from live interaction, and intangibles like camaraderie and mentorship also improve vP.
A disciplined approach to remote development work is essential, but for certain teams, innovation just happens more predictably, and fewer mistakes are made when the team is co-located.
Digital opposites don’t attract
‘To office, or not to office’ is not the only question we should be asking. Where else can we apply these virtues to assist our digital transformation decisions?
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Build/maintain software in house, versus buy from a vendor |
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| vP: Ability to retain responsibility for critical software stack, self-governance and compliance advantages, avoid vendor price worries, lock-in or abandonment | vD: Lower development and support labor cost, time-to-value, better specialized support, warranties |
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Internal product teams vs. contract and outsourced resources |
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| vP: Talent recruitment benefits, knowledge development, maintain proprietary advantages, confidentiality | vD: Flex to meet resource demands, lower long-term labor costs, get specialists when needed |
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On-premises or ‘private’ compute resources vs. cloud IaaS |
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| vP: Value of existing investments, dedicated infrastructure, reserved capacity, Capex accounting, internal control, meet compliance requirements | vD: Elastic scalability, pay-for-use Opex accounting, easier provisioning, 24/7 infra support, multitenancy (+100 ROI benefits any cloud provider will share with you) |
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Data gravity versus data distribution |
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| vP: Very large datasets, Save moving time / costs, better co-located software processing performance, data protection, self-ownership, privacy | vD: Transactionaility, ephemerality, smaller datasets, redundancy, find scale and cost efficiencies, edge use cases |
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Internal security function vs. Security service or platform |
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| vP: Self-determined protection level, SoC team support, meet certain compliance needs | vD: Global threat awareness / knowledge, vendor guarantees, lower TCO |
The list of criteria for balancing distribution versus proximity is as endless and ancient as breaking down traditional silos versus centralizing IT control under a single pane of glass.
The Intellyx Take
In writing this column, I was also struck by the notion that we don’t need to choose just one path. There is a third way open that offers the best of both worlds.
For instance, take cloud computing. Today’s hybrid IT cloud orchestration platforms can deliver a unified cloud management experience that behaves and scales similarly in multiple public cloud IaaS vendors as well as private infrastructure in the data center. Everyone wins.
Or take edge computing. The 5G movement, with IoT devices and network appliances at the edge allows Kubernetes deployments and localized workloads on compact server architectures that run closer to the actual work being done. Both virtues of distribution and proximity are satisfied here.
These neutral virtues are anything but sacrosanct — at best they add mental models to consider when making decisions. And there’s nothing wrong with thinking deeply.
© 2020 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster, the weekly Cortex and Brain Candy newsletters, and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. No parties mentioned in this story are Intellyx customers. Image sources: Image source: wackystuff, “Here Comes Trouble” flickr CC2.0 license.
