A short piece on organic, unmanaged growth and technical debt.
42, that’s how many versions of a single application were discovered to be in use during an assessment exercise on a digital transformation and virtualisation project I was working on.
The aim was to virtualise servers, introduce a virtual desktop infrastructure and rationalise the application stack. A complex undertaking but one that has a fairly well established pattern to achieve the desired result.
The application landscape needed to be understood for more than a few reasons
- What dependencies were there between the desktop and server architectures?
- What licensing requirements had the customer fallen foul of?
- Who had the ability to install applications that shouldn’t have?
- Who was using these applications?
- What standard should be adopted going forward – and how do you start to get there?
- What management tools were needed to control this (and other applications)?
Just a few questions that start to expose the challenges around technical debt – and we’re only talking about a single user application at this point.
Now scale that up to
- Every application in use across your business
- Every server deployed with back-end application systems running…where do they connect to (north, south, east and west)..how’s the data managed…what’s supporting the infrastructure etc etc
- Every device to be managed for consistent deployment of operating systems and application
- Every network endpoint that is connected that has a security requirement
This list goes on!
Now think of this in two ways
Ongoing operations…you’re changing nothing in your business, you’re just growing and managing what you have. Streamlining this will be key to keeping your machine running smoothly. Understanding it, knowing how it currently works and transforming it to be lean, efficient and manageable with the least impact during daily use may well be a focus for you.
Or
Your contracting/growing/merging…imagine dealing with that and adding to it blindly, introducing risk to operations as you scale back service without fully understanding it, or better still combining it with another organisation. Getting a grip on how your technology-enabled business actually works will be critical to the success of your next move.
Sometimes I sense that the significance of an assessment or discovery exercise is often downplayed, or shunned in favour of just making changes (JFDI anyone?) within IT projects. But how can you say you’ve really improved something if you don’t know what it is you’re changing from?
Next time you’re needing to embark on IT-related change – think carefully about the roles, skills and people you build the team with – don’t get me wrong there are some exceptional technical SMEs who’ll bridge the gap…but don’t gloss over specialists in analysis, risk, management and operations.
Grey Triangle’s approach to IT project delivery, in taking your business to the cloud and beyond, relies on its Evaluate stage to truly understand what’s going on. The output from this gives your business new insights and the project delivery team the best possible chance of overcoming the challenge we’re responding to.
Okay, so it wasn’t 42 but it was something ridiculously close, and 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, right?
Thanks to the team at Affiniti Integrations (https://affiniti-integrations.com/) for the inspiration to write a piece on technical debt.