Enterprise IT migrations and/or transformation challenges

 Introduction

In my first blog entries I discussed the brave new ways of building mobile applications and in specific the use of cloud hosted technologies. 

As IT departments scramble shifting to Mobile/Cloud/Analytics technologies  and Dev-ops/Agile methodologies, it is very important to keep an eye on how to approach existing ecosystem with these changes, it is a great opportunity to revitalize IT teams, and they must become partners in the movement instead of being dragged along for the rough ride.

From Migration to Transformation.

For the past few decades and since the introduction of the PC, Change has been the only constant in IT, and it did come in Waves, Each wave provides quick cycles of change at first, then it matures, the cycles of change slow down until another wave hits and we repeat.

The PC was the first wave, the 'Killer App's coming fast and furious (remember Word Star ?), Once DOS matured and slowed down the GUI wave came, Followed by the 'Internet' wave and its sibling, the "Internet Application" wave and once those matured and the cycle of development slowed down, the Mobile App wave came.

The mobile App wave is still raging with cycles of change, expect this to cool down sometime in the near future only to be followed by the Internet of things , wearable gear waves, apps every where waves.

 Every wave 'cycle' brings with it a 'Migration',  Enterprises know very well how painful those have been and can still be in the future, but they also know the benefits of them, and the danger of not doing it at the right time.

I have seen 4 types of Migrations and/or Transformations in enterprises in the past decades.

Release Migration

This type of migration happens fast and often specially in the early days of a wave . Think J2EE release frequency in the early days of the 'online application' wave. (before it was JAVA2EE)  or think the insane amount of frameworks and languages for building mobile applications and dev-ops in the current mobile application wave.

Competitive Migration

Ahh , those were fun and they are usually heated at the early days of a wave where technology providers jostled for space in the emerging market, I do have fond memories of being the 'Websphere guy' in BEA weblogic (then) environments.

Technology Migration

This type of migration happens just before the previous two usually but it happens much less often (And we should thank the IT Gods for that).

They are usually chaotic, disruptive and painful. with many jobs lost, new jobs created and it carries a shift in IT department culture along (more on that below).

There was a threshold where mainframe 'screen scraping' just did not cut it and that good old trusted main frame application was going to be rewritten in JAVA (horror of all horrors).  people like myself try to blog easing the pain of people moving from one technology to another, but no matter what, there will be causalities on both the department and personal levels.

Methodology Change

Methodology change is what happens when we moved from waterfall to Agile or when gigantic corporate like wall-mart moves to dev-ops.

These changes are equally painful to technology migrations and usually are a result of such moves.

The hallmark of Methodology change is "Resistance", it is almost impossible to do these changes by just issuing the 'top-down' commands, leadership from behind is a must, and building grassroots movement to support such change is key.

One of the best books I enjoyed reading that discuss only this type of change was Succeeding with Agile . it is a great read not on 'Agile' itself but rather on the group psychology of change and how it does impact organizations.

Key challenges for successful change.

From my work in many migrations through the years, if I am to choose the key challenges that IT managers need to keep an eye on it will be

Resistance to change 

This is just human nature, we are creatures of habit, and it professionals (the really good ones that you want to keep happy) identify on a personal level with their work, and change brings with it all types of insecurities and vulnerabilities.

Need for grass root 

this will go hand in hand with the resistance to change, the bigger the change , the more we will need to build grass roots, introduce change gradually and generally lead from behind.

Operation impact 

This is not "Operation Migration" but rather  the impact of this migration on the development/operation ecosystem. factors like bringing outside consultants to help the migration or promoting (related to grassroots factors above).

Skill gaps 

it is a fact of life, every change has a skill gap , not all skill gaps are created equal and to complicate matters , not all IT professionals respond to skill gaps equally.

Conclusion

There had never been a greater need for grassroots support and 'push from behind' type of migrations than these days, with modern technologies , the shift to cloud based and outsourcing of IT services, the focus is slowly shifting back to development and developers. and any IT migration and transformation process in the mobile/cloud/analytics era must take that into account.