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The Business Bottleneck Breaking Through the Last Barrier of Digital Transformation Build software a smarter way Jumpstart app development in an iterative, results-driven way. We help you deliver great apps with proven practices and simple tools. You'll have working software in days, thanks to an approach that starts small and scales fast. Build new apps your customers love and update the ones they already rely on. Modernize your existing apps Build innovative new products Collaborate in a culture of continuous learning https://tanzu.vmware.com/labs The Business Bottleneck Breaking Through the Last Barrier of Digital Transformation Michael Coté Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo The Business Bottleneck by Michael Coté Copyright © 2020 Michael Coté. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com). For more infor‐ mation, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected]. Acquisitions Editor: Melissa Duffield Interior Designer: David Futato Developmental Editor: Angela Rufino Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Production Editor: Nan Barber Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest Copyeditor: Octal Publishing, LLC February 2020: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition 2020-02-06: First Release The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The Business Bot‐ tleneck, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The views expressed in this work are those of the author, and do not represent the publisher’s views. While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, includ‐ ing without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reli‐ ance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of oth‐ ers, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licen‐ ses and/or rights. This work is part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and VMware Tanzu. See our statement of editorial independence. 978-1-492-07767-1 [LSI] Table of Contents Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company. v 1. The Business Bottleneck. 1 Business and Software Development Is Chaos 4 The Small-Batch Cycle 6 2. The Finance Bottleneck. 11 The Business Case Is Wrong from the Start 13 Starting Ignorant Can Be an Asset 14 Small-Batch Finance 15 Business Cases Focused on Growth, Not Costs 17 Finance’s Small-Batch Imperative 18 3. The Strategy Bottleneck. 21 A Moment of Pedantry 21 Getting Over Digital Transformation Fatigue 23 Sensing Your Market 24 Know Your Customer 27 Consider Cassandras 30 Try New Things 33 Validation with Small-Batch Strategy 35 4. The Leadership Bottleneck. 41 Vision 42 Enshrine Urgency: Always Run in the Yellow 44 All the Feels: A Note on Positive Motivation 46 Leading Failure 47 iii Organization Structure, or, Plato Never Worked at an Enterprise 49 Strategy from the Nerds 56 Do You Still Need an IT Department? 58 Understanding Tech 62 Metrics: Managing Like a Tech Company 66 5. Conclusion. 73 iv | Table of Contents Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company I’ve been in IT for 23 years, plucked from high school as cheap labor to make an online banking system. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been trying to “align” IT with the business. Make IT as useful, responsive, and business focused as possible. It works here and there, and ended up being a lot of cost management and outsourc‐ ing at the start of my career. In the 2000s, through ecommerce and later “tech companies” like Uber, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix, we saw a new type of business operating model emerge. This model assimilated lessons from software companies (like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and Oracle) and applied them to traditional industries: transportation, advertis‐ ing, retail, and entertainment. These companies experienced huge growth because they had fast time to market and could continually innovate to refine their product to chase and create opportunities. Now, mainstream companies are transforming to this “tech com‐ pany” model. The Home Depot and Dick’s Sporting Goods have shifted to an omnichannel model: 50% of items purchased online are picked up in-store at The Home Depot. Car companies like Ford and Daimler are adding new services to their existing products with continually innovating apps that evolve their businesses. Every insurance company is responding to the need to improve customer experience by speeding up the claims process. These companies are taking the tech company approach to business: they develop their businesses by focusing on product development and management. Software is at the center of how they operate their v business, how customers interact with businesses, and, most impor‐ tant, how these companies innovate. Gone are the days of multiyear strategy market analysis and planning. Organizations that shift to a product approach instead use 90-day, even weekly, innovation cycles to experiment with how they grow their businesses. With this closeness to customers—“the market”—these companies have a better chance of catching “inflection points,” those shifts in business-as-usual that present opportunities to those that notice, and threats to those that don’t. For example, John Mitchell at Duke Energy described an oncoming inflection point in the energy business: when cars switch over from gas to electric, the entire system of refueling cars will create massive changes to the power-grid. Imagine when every “gas station” is actually an electric car station—or whether stations will even exist! Either way, power companies like Duke Energy need to begin exploring and innovating now. If you want to be like a tech company, you should...well, be like a tech company. This report is the second part of my effort to help explain what that means. My previous book, Monolithic Transformation was written for IT executives, managers, and staff as a quick manifesto and man‐ ual for changing how they build and run software. I began writing notes for this report as I encountered a new problem: The Business. This report is addressed to people outside of the IT department who want to understand and help move along digital transformation at their organization. As ever, what I mean by “digital transformation” is improving the way you do software to improve your business. Of course, this report should also be useful for IT people who want to understand and work with their business counterpoints. Ideally, there would be no, or very little, distinction between the two as you’ll read in the following text. This report has four sections: 1. I explain a way of thinking about software and how it’s built that’s more accurate to the true nature of software. This model of software informs how the rest of the enterprise should adapt to benefit from software’s inherent agility. 2. I look at how the finance department should change to align better with the true nature of software. vi | Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company 3. I do the same with the strategy department. 4. The last section lays out tasks that the corporate leaders in busi‐ ness and IT should prioritize and tackle. Each section is supported by small and larger case studies to illus‐ trate the thinking and tactics. Unless you’ve chosen to live off the grid (in which case, how did you even get a copy of this report?), you use software every day. Much of it is software created and run by large organizations like banks, retailers, and governments. This software is not always...good. My hope is that over time this software improves and thus all of our lives improve. Everyone has a stake in improving how software is done at large organizations, and I hope this report will help those of you working in those organizations improve how you do software and make my life a little better. Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company | vii CHAPTER 1 The Business Bottleneck All businesses have one core strategy: to stay alive. They do this by offering new reasons for people to buy from them and, crucially, stay with them.1 Over the past decade, traditional businesses have been freaked out by new competitors that are systematically and sneakily stealing customers. The super-clever among these competi‐ tors innovate entirely new business models: hourly car rentals, next- day delivery, short-term insurance for jackets, paying for that jacket with your phone, banking with only your iPhone as a branch, and incorporating real-time weather information into your reinsurance risk analysis, to name a few examples. In the majority (maybe all) of these cases, surviving and innovating is done with small software development cycles and a product- centric focus on managing the evolution of those applications. As the software evolves and you learn what works and doesn’t work, the business improves as well. You can use software to not only run your business, but also to develop it. 1 Being more cynical...er, pragmatic, they can also do this by using artificial means: maintaining exclusivity with patents and copyrights, establishing and holding monopo‐ lies, or deluging their industry with so many regulations that it’s costly for any new competition. High barriers to entry for their markets work well, too.
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