Digital Ramblings- Part 1: The What & The Why

The word digital gets bounced about meeting rooms like a tennis ball at Wimbledon. It's rapidly rising through the ranks of boardroom buzzwords and overtaking the old favourites like 'cloud' and 'big data' as if they were nothing more than mangey old roadkill on the side of a really REALLY fast motorway. In fact, if I don't see or hear the word digital at least fifteen times a day, I ask my two-year-old to gouge my eye sockets to check I am still amongst the living.... my two-year-old is really good at gouging eye sockets... 

But what does it really mean? 

The problem with buzz words and hype -particularly around far-reaching descriptors like Digital- is that everybody has their own idea about what being digital really means. Is it writing poetry on Mac collaborating with your co-worker over facetime whilst sat in a coffee shop drinking a mocha-choco-soya-skinny-fairtrade orangey froth served on a wooden plate, prepared by organic gerbils? Maybe. Being Digital can be many things to many people but what does it mean for business and indeed their technology teams?

Simply put. Speed & Agility. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. 

You can try to overcomplicate what digital means -and our consultancy friends in the industry love to do this- but ultimately it comes down to the pursuit of Speed & Agility. How quickly can my business disrupt a market or respond to disruption caused by competitors?
Why is Speed & Agility so Important?

Traditional IT systems (let's call them Legacy) were built in times that moved a lot slower -this could be the understatement of the century by the way. Applications would be designed and deployed over periods of 36-60 months and often carried an ROI to suit. They were enormous projects, enormous applications and supported by highly tuned and customised infrastructures and IT professionals. Innovation in the technology space was largely predictable and there were a limited amount of companies able to invest in these massive undertakings -usually large Fortune and FTSE listed type enterprises. 



The modus operandi for these IT systems was -and is still- uptime and stability. Change is not something that is welcomed in these environments (because of the complexity and cost involved) and if indeed the need to change outweighed the risk of doing so, the change would be slow and incorporate large teams of skilled professionals and very grumpy project workers.

The mindset here is driven by the pace of the market and innovation. The market was slow and innovation was relatively predictable. Therefore applications and projects could afford to take their time. 

However, due to Moore's law (and other people who felt left out and made up similar laws for networking and stuff), technology has got twice good -for the same price- every year. Yes, this is a massively simplified version of events but then, I am simple. 

Anyway, where was I, ah yes... Because technology has improved exponentially every year, the amount of compute resources available to power code is more abundant and attainable at a much lower cost of entry - enter cloud delivery models and suddenly the barriers are pretty non-existent. 
The fact that I am able to write and maintain a blog, free of charge (and get paid for the pleasure) is a testament to this fact. Thank you, Google, you shiny beautiful future silicon overlord. 

I digress again... My point is, compute resources are now a commodity so pretty much everyone in the developed world has reasonable access to them. This commodisation of compute combined with a utility delivery model has paved the way for Software to dominate the business landscape. 
In more specific and direct terms, anyone who can write code can now afford to power their ideas with very affordable and instantly accessible compute. 

Whilst you read that last paragraph, I spun up an instance of compute on AWS just for fun. This is of course, Amazon's Web Services platform. It literally took a couple of minutes. 

Context: I have zero computing qualifications - I am a salesman. 

:::Let all that sink in for a moment:::

Yes... there are still barriers to entry in certain industry sectors (like regulation, compliance, marketing and advertising funding, etc) but essentially no market or established business is safe from being disrupted by the fast and free-flowing innovation that has been enabled by commodity and cloud compute. 

If you are a CEO of an established business - you have to take note of this. 

So, back to speed and agility, you can probably work out why this is important now right?

Software is now THE weapon of choice for organisations looking for a competitive edge in a Digital Landscape. The faster your organisation can develop code, get it on the internet, monetize it and either continue to drive innovation in that code base or quickly respond to external innovations, the more profitable your digital business will be. Speed & Agility. 

That's enough for one day. In part 2, I will chalk up a few thoughts on how CEO's and indeed CIO's could make changes to their businesses to fully leverage these shiny new digital technologies. Not that any will read this, of course, I will just have to tell them when I see them!

I will first focus on the technology changes that are causing this disruption, waffle on about the new application and infrastructure architectures for a bit and then when I run out of knowledge (it will be quick) I will describe the people, process and tooling strategy that I think will be effective at leveraging these shiny new architectures.

At some point, I will probably try and sell you a digital monitoring platform as well, but lets warm you up first ;-)
(yes, I used the word leverage in the penultimate paragraph -maybe I have a bet on how many times I can squeeze it into my blogs....? you're tempted to check now aren't you?)

Thanks for reading,
Chancey