It wasn’t long ago that a CIO might have shuddered at the thought of developing and releasing in a few weeks an important app to be used by millions of people.
But some of Australia’s largest organisations have learned how to move digital projects this quickly – and a better picture has formed of why they succeed while others struggle.
Leaders' enthusiasm for digital projects helps, says Marie Holmes, Senior Director, ANZ, VMware Tanzu, which helped a major Australian state government department tackle and overcome the typical challenges that derail big digital initiatives. Holmes has seen leaders take ownership of digital customer and citizen engagement in recent years.
But other organisations are still underestimating the work needed to achieve these goals. Leaders are “not necessarily appreciating just how big and complex digital transformation is,” Holmes says. “It is not just about technology. It's about people, it's about processes and technology. And the technology is changing all the time,” she comments.
“It might seem obvious, but when you're sitting there looking at where to start, an appreciation of how all of these pieces come together is not necessarily obvious at the time.”
Those pieces of the puzzle include business cycles and cultures, which are not syncing with digital plans, says Volker Grimm, Managing Director, Technology, Accenture. Development teams may use agile ways of working, but the wider enterprise may not be geared that way.
“We’re still seeing a lot of annual budget cycles, annual project prioritisations, and this is just contrary to getting real business value out of agile delivery,” Grimm comments.
“Driving that agile mindset out into the business, into the finance processes, into the budgeting process and prioritisation processes, and frankly adopting a culture that allows agile change, is going to be very important going forward.”
Also needed is a reassessment of budgets, Grimm argues. The push to move large development projects quickly isn't always reflected in the finances allocated to them, in his view.
“What we see a lot in our clients is that the task of application modernisation is often seen as an IT job that has no value or interest of the business. Which results in the IT organisation trying to achieve modernisation and cloud adoption and platform adoption basically based on the budgets that are allocated for operations, for patching, for risk mitigation.”
“And that is hard to achieve. I mean, it's a very difficult business case to really drive application modernisation on these, while still large budgets, they're not really transformation budgets.”
The way forward laid out by the Accenture VMware Business Group is to improve the way business and application teams work together, but also address underlying inefficiencies in their software development environments.
Change needed in development environments
Digital projects can be most daunting for organisations trying to modernise legacy code, including mainframe systems.
“A lot of our clients are probably more still on the client server architecture landscape, where you've got large monolithic systems that combine a lot of business functionality and processes together in one big system,” Grimm points out.
The goal now, Grimm says, is to find “seams” in those monolithic systems and decouple them to enable faster changes. “Every part that you change, you have to retest the entire business functionality. And it's just hard. It takes a lot of time and resources and money to do,” he says.
Compounding this challenge is widespread concern about developers’ productivity, according to Grimm.
"Most of the IT leadership that we're talking to estimate that the productivity of their developers is as low as 20 percent because of all the required risk management and administrative processes that go around the software development lifecycle at the moment."
Organisations that don’t create a development environment geared to faster change risk losing developers, Grimm argues.
“Developers see the examples of modern software landscapes like those at cloud hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, or entertainment platforms such as Spotify or Netflix, and what software engineering practices are in use in those organisations, and they expect that if they go out and work in a bank or in a retailer or wherever they choose to pick their first job, they expect the same experience and are often disappointed that there's a lot of manual processes and a lot of approval processes to go through.”
“And frankly, if they find this type of environment, they will vote with their feet and go somewhere else."
"Democratising” software development
A broader trend is the industrialisation of the software landscape and software management lifecycle, Grimm says.
“There is a real drive and need to increase the industrialisation of software developers through platforms, through cloud adoption and through more modern engineering practices as well. We're going to see a maturing of the software industry over the next few years at a tremendous rate,” he predicts.
This shift is taking place, Grimm says. “We've seen governments be really successful where they've adopted modern engineering practises wholeheartedly, uses of cloud, uses of application platforms… but also the adoption of fairly new concepts, like serverless code.”
“Also we’ve started to see quite a bit of use of low code frameworks, which drive democratisation of the software development process and allow business or process users to directly be involved in the building and rollout of those applications. This has allowed a number of government agencies to be really fast and efficient in those rollouts.”
An example of the platform approach Grimm refers to is VMware Tanzu, a platform and services for building running and managing applications in any cloud. Holmes sees Tanzu enabling developers to focus on getting software out quickly with less need to worry about security and operations.
The goal is to help organisations “go fast, spend less and be free, not be tied in, not be constrained and limited by technology”, she says.
Momentum growing
VMware and Accenture have success stories to prove this formula works. They include the state government department the Tanzu team began working with several years ago, which managed to revive its stalled digital project.
“The approach there was to sit down and really basically start off with where you can have the most impact. Start small, think big,” Holmes says. Within weeks, the department was building code.
“It took a few weeks to work with them to do that and just another few weeks to build code and start to get a minimal viable product out there and continuously iterate.”
Other organisations are following suit. “We have clients who talk about how, using new methodologies and technology, that they're taking months to progress digital projects and turning them into weeks, and weeks into days and days into hours,” Holmes says.
Find out more about how the Accenture VMware Business Group can help you operationalise your transformation journey efficiently by contacting us or visiting us online.
