Successful Application and Data Modernization Initiatives in Heterogeneous Enterprise Environments will Hinge on Embracing Cloud Operating Models
By Lane F. Cooper, Editorial Director, BizTechReports and Contributing Editor, CIO.com
If organizations are to achieve sustained success in their technology modernization initiatives, senior leaders should stop thinking of "cloud" as a "place" to send their workloads. According to Thoughtworks North America executives Ajay Chankramath (Head of Platform Engineering) and Wesley Reisz (Technical Principal), business and technology leaders ought to instead embrace the notion that "cloud" is a platform-based "operating model" that will lay the foundation for enterprise-wide systems integration, agility and resilience.
Listen to the entire audio interview with Thoughtworks' Ajay Chankramath and Wesley Reisz by clicking here.
Chankramath and Reisz sat down for a podcast interview after a series of executive roundtable discussions in New York City exploring the state of application modernization in the context of accelerating business transformation initiatives.
"When we first started talking about cloud computing around a decade ago, it was usually discussed as a location to put compute capacity that was not on-premises," explains Reisz.
This conceptualization – which primarily positioned the cloud as a method of OPEX outsourcing – has not served the enterprise community particularly well. It prompted many organizations to pursue lift-and-shift strategies that simply moved workloads from on-prem to public infrastructure-as-a-service platforms without making many – if any – changes to applications. In many cases, repositioned workloads have ended up returning to on-prem resources because of poor economic and technical performance.
"There are definitely organizations that are on a journey that is only about lift and shift. To realize the full benefits of digital transformation requires much more. Cloud is increasingly understood as an 'operating model' that fundamentally changes how enterprises build and deliver software. It's a whole thought process, not just a location," says Reisz.
According to Chankramath, embracing cloud operating models provides the foundation for moving applications around enterprise infrastructures in a much more agile and performant manner.
"For a growing number of organizations, a high level of agility is critical. As a result, technology leaders are looking for the ability to put the right resources in the right places quickly – whether on-prem, at the edge or in one or more cloud environments. Cloud operating systems, along with a platform-based approach to developing enterprise architectures, makes this possible," he says.
The challenge is that few organizations appear ready to make this shift across their enterprise environment.
"A majority of the organizations are unprepared to take a step back and completely change their organizations to address the operational requirements for effective application modernization across the enterprise. There are many reasons for this. Often it is because they still have many legacy systems that support mission-critical operations," says Chankramath.
As a result, what is needed is a roadmap that provides a clear path to application modernization based on business priorities and objectives that can be objectively measured and tracked.
Any conversation about modernization, explains Reisz, must begin with an understanding – across all key stakeholders – of desired strategic outcomes over specific timelines. Once ingrained across the people and organizations responsible for driving change, metrics must be applied to establish a standard against which progress can be measured. The good news is that proven engineering metrics are available to track modernization developments.
"Organizations would be well advised to start their modernization initiatives using the DORA metrics. It stands for DevOps Research and Assessment and was developed by an expert team of authors – Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble (a former Thoughtworks executive) and Gene Kim – who wrote a book titled 'Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations,’" says Reisz.
The book, which is considered required reading for those engaged in enterprise-wide application modernization initiatives, identifies four key metrics for tracking – and guiding – strategic and tactical projects:
Deployment Frequency—How often an organization successfully releases to production
Lead Time for Changes—The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
Change Failure Rate—The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
Time to Restore Service—How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production
"These metrics provide business and technology executives with a clear window into the current and evolving state of modernization activity. Armed with these metrics, leaders can determine whether their architectures – the way things are put together – are flexible enough to address the dynamics of today's business environment or too brittle, preventing organizations from being able to deploy new capabilities quickly," he says.
More importantly, the DORA metrics allow executives to forecast progress and anticipate challenges associated with application modernization that leverage cloud operating models.
"Properly applied and administered, these metrics enable organizations to move beyond simply monitoring progress – a lagging indicator – to applying predictive analytics through 'observability.' Monitoring describes what data organizations are collecting. Observability suggests the ability to interpret the data in real-time," concludes Chankramath.
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EDITORIAL NOTE: Listen to the entire audio interview with Thoughtworks' Ajay Chankramath and Wesley Reisz by clicking here.