Have you been part of defining strategy and asking for investments from the stakeholders ?. One of the primary questions that you will get from the stakeholder is “what is the ROI (Return of investment) ?”. All returns and investments are not directly related to the money. 

I like the quote :

“We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.”

We can’t ignore the qualifiable benefits. Define the right OKRs (objective, Key results) that will help the organization to track these benefits. 

Invest in 

1. People – Develop culture, identify skill gaps, and train.
2. Process– Standardize and simplify, measure
3. Technology – Fit to deliver the desired outcomes. 
4. Organization – Define Roles and responsibilities. 
5. Governance – Establish maturity levels and define OKR’s. 

Return: 

1. Monetization -Promote the assets and get a new revenue stream. 
2. Reduce cost– Gain efficiency in operational cost 
3. Time to Market – Increase velocity in delivering new product values to the customers 
4. Quality – Automate, improve delivery effectiveness. 
5. Seamless Experience – Enhance customer experience. 

Cloud is a buzzword in every organization right now. Everyone is defining a strategy for moving towards the cloud that is happening as we speak. Everyone expresses interest in being part of the ‘cloud’ journey. 

Is this journey really about pushing a magic button?

• Doing lift and shift from on-premise to cloud – If so, what is the gain?.
• Rearchitecting to the cloud platforms – if so, it’s cost-prohibitive. 

It’s about considering changes to the business model and the organization to get the full benefits of cloud adoption. It’s about defining your strategy! 

 An interesting quote, “Strategy is defined by what you are not doing.” 

The strategy should help/provide directions in defining principles; decisions are derived based on the defined principles. 

Before you begin the cloud journey, I recommend three tasks to accelerate the journey: successful adoption.

Leadership Buy-in (Business and technology)

• Articulate how the cloud will affect the enterprise.
• Educate them on the economics of the cloud operating model.
• Explain the driving factors and strategic aspects.

Define cloud adoption framework (hybrid, multi-cloud) 

• Provide the holistic view across business, people, and IT 
• Create a decision-making process for adopting hybrid, multi-cloud, and platform/technologies. 
• Agility needs for faster to market and to provide a seamless customer experience. 

Establish governance and Enable adoption. 

• Define criteria and guidelines for technologies, security, and process. 
• Help to resolve the blockers and the bottlenecks with established principles and mechanisms. 

Question: Who is going to help in accomplishing the above tasks ?. 

Hint: It’s the artist who defines the enterprise architecture  

Do you define the architecture before you begin the product development and iterate them over while developing the product ?. If the answer is yes, you are on the right track to building the product right. The art of building architecture does not just refer to how the system connects. It’s also about ‘Why’ we are defining the architecture with logical/pragmatic reasons. Good architecture comes when the organization has a clear vision and aligns with the current industry/market trends. 

Architecture should answer the business questions or the needs so that it can deliver value. It’s important to understand the organization’s business vision and strategy before defining the architecture. Architecture should have the artifacts to answer all audiences (not just the development/operations team) 

• Reference architecture (business, capability, and solution)
• Pragmatic architecture for the near term and long term business needs 
• Strategy addressing the business needs, architecture characteristics, and preferences. 
• Solutions for critical capabilities. 
• System and use case views 
• System component views 
• Platform architecture 
• Process and data flows 
• Most importantly – Architecture decision records 

Architecture is not about boxes and lines. It’s an ‘Art,’ and you need to be an ‘Artist’ to build enterprise assets to stay ahead in the current market competition. 

Big data solutions are a field to process data from disparate sources, store the data, and perform analysis to get a meaningful and measurable action from the data. The benefits from big data processing provide a variety of insights, bring values to the organization. 

• Understand your data. 
• Determine intelligent actions. 
• Valuable decision-making. 
• Identification of New markets 
• Optimization and monetization.

Every big data initiative should have a purpose and answer a business need or a question. It’s not just used to collect/aggregate the data from different sources without understanding the real business needs, making it hard to sell the big data platform’s values and benefits. More importantly, focus on building the end-to-end solution for the initial MVP. 

Big data analytics life cycle is a proven concept that provides a step-by-step methodology to build the big data platform that addresses the business requirements; this helps validate and get feedback early to make sure the solutions provide tangible values. 

Do you have your own technology radar? Did you build any recently? If not, I recommend you to build one. Technology radar helps to give a view of your tools and technologies which are in play and assigning them to the different quadrants of the radar. It gives a visual representation of the adoption level of the frameworks, tools, platforms, and technologies that are in use and in the market. 

Here are some tips to build your interactive technology radar 

1. Limit your list of tools, technologies to a maximum of 100 across all of the four quadrants
2. Don’t get into analysis paralysis of the tools. 
3. Radar is not the governance tool for your organization. 
4. Provide a clear and concise description of each of the items in the quadrant. 
5. Create documents to support your technology radar 
6. Capture only the high-level framework, tools in the quadrants.
7. It’s not the tools, frameworks, platforms catalog for your organization. 

Here is the one I built for myself

Are you in the agile transformation phase from executing projects to building products ?. Yes. Its a cultural shift which involves people, process and technology. It’s a journey, start with small and do a roadshow on how it works or how to make it work ?. 

 In my view, Product Enablement within the organization requires 

1. People’s mindset changes 
2. Clear definition and understanding of the process. 
3. Accepting the change and commitment to follow. 
4. Identify change champions and establish change management. 
5. Define product taxonomy and roadmap 
6. Define OKR’s – Objectives, Key results. 
7. More importantly, train people on the process and technology. 
8. Supporting tools and technologies to enable product development.

Every organization is different, and the answer to transformation is “It depends.” Identify your targets and start marching towards them. 

Today organizations are transforming to adapt to the new market needs and expand the business. Every organization is looking to maximize its value by utilizing the most incredible asset called data. Some organizations don’t have the scale to build everything independently, which drives the need for partnership with other organizations to maximize the market presence and offerings.

Exposing data for consumption by the consumers and partners plays a vital role in the fast delivery of product features and enables the customers’ self-service capabilities. (make data available for consumption = provide APIs for the consumers).

API Management role is an essential aspect as it addresses the below sections for designing, building, scalable and reliable solutions with robust security

APIs are proliferating. API lifecycle management approach provides a view of managing different stages in the life of an API (3C’s of an API lifecycle)

1) Create API’s – Design, Develop

2) Control API’s – Secure, Scale, Monitor

3) Consume API’s – Publish, Analyze

Reach out if you need to explore further!

Integration center for enablement helps an organization to maximize its investments. Integration is the heart of any organization to deliver the best returns and make the enterprise produce products/ features rapidly.

Building an integration center for enablement is a journey.

• Think from enterprise vision vs. siloed vision 
• Get executives to support, an important aspect.
• Establish common platforms, technologies, and tools.
• Establish process and frameworks from day one. 
• Define standards and best practices.
• Set-up Governance model. 
• Define current, transition, and future state architecture.

More importantly, act fast to deliver value with the initial use cases while building the integration center’s foundations for enablement, enabling trust and confidence from the executives and teams.  

Here are some common traits for building an integration center for enablement in your organization. It doesn’t matter what level of maturity you are at in the integration space today; this is a journey and iterates through continuous feedback.

DevOps is a set of practices dedicated to building, delivering, and operating rapidly-evolving systems in close alignment with business objectives. Some key practices are prolific communication and collaboration among all participants in the software development life cycle (SDLC). DevOps focuses on creating an ongoing feedback loop of analyzing, building, and testing while leveraging automation to speed the entire software delivery process. To achieve this, you need to define a framework for your organization which are tools/technology agnostic and build governance around the framework 

Here is my view on the DevOps 

The collaborative software development style focuses on public availability and communication with beginnings in the open-source community.

Benefits

• Enabler for Agile and DevOps
• Collaboration between stakeholders, developers, testers, and operations
• Visibility – features, releases, code, bugs
• Scalable/distributed workforce
• Promotes speed and Innovation

A modern version control system supports a distributed repository where each developer has a working copy of the system.

Benefits

• Code centralized and secure
• Distributed working copies of the repository
• Faster operations – peer-to-peer
• Track content not files for more flexible reuse and collaboration
• Integrated with development and build tools – e.g. DevOps toolchain
• Transparent development activities
• Peer review
• Documentation
• Frequent release cycle with early feedback 

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Continuous testing (CT) is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline.

Benefits

• Automation of the lifecycle
• Shortens delivery cycle
• Integration problems are found early in the lifecycle
• Visibility to the lifecycle steps
• Promotes Collaboration, Agile, and DevOps

DevOps vs. Agile is NOT a debate. Each one addresses a specific problem; when using together to build a product, it realizes the productivity gains. Agile and DevOps helps to take an idea and deliver it to produce business value. Architecture plays a vital role in bringing the concept and providing the right solutions to maximize productivity gains and business value. 

Here is the view of how an idea evolves to produce value, what collaboration processes are needed to maximizes the value 

Agile focuses on building better software and rapidly

• Develop a product and delivers in increments
• Quality results aligning to the business needs
• Flexible and responsive to changes

DevOps focuses on software development processes 

• Time to market
• Aligns the goal between development, operations along with business drivers.
• Consolidates Build and Integration Pipeline to achieve productivity gain  (cloud and platform agonistic).

 Data is the greatest asset for any organization. Data architecture modernization provides the ability to understand the information effectively, use the data efficiently for market growth, create new revenues, and gain customer satisfaction. 

In today’s world, Data leaders are playing a vital role, and here are the top 10 things they are looking at in every data modernization journey. 

1. People -Leverage existing people, cross-train, and gain benefits using modernization frameworks.
2. Self Service – Enable business owners to visualize data without any IT assistance.
3. Fit for purpose- One size doesn’t fit all; leverage technologies or tools best suited. 
4. Cloud-first approach– Focus on delivering business value rather than maintaining the platform or infrastructure. 
5. Streaming – To enable business owners to use the latest information to deliver rapid business values. 
6. No Vendor lock-in: This is getting tricky in today’s world. Often depends on the long term vision and criticality of the business needs. Ex: multi-cloud strategy. 
7. Predictive Analysis: Tap into predictive actions rather than reactive reactions.
8. Time to value: Leverage out of the box features to gain business value in no time (minimal time ).
9. Data Lake: Preserve raw data to perform a variety of actions and enable different use cases.
10.  The-iliites: yes. Fitness functions are essential.

Every organization is maximizing its values by enabling data consumption through API. API’s are everywhere, and it’s an integral part of all the applications that we use today. 

It’s essential to manage those API as a product. Here are a few tips/suggestions/questions that you need to consider how we approach API product management. 

Key takeaways you to consider from the beginning of API product journey : 

1. Identify the APIs that provide business value for the enterprise or any business line.
2. Understand the consumer usage patterns of the API’s 
3. Automation is the key to accelerate API product development. 
4. API Analytics – Analyze consumer traffic in real-time 
5. Monitor- API response time and errors.
6. Enable threat and Security protection to secure the data. 
7. More importantly, start with a SMALL use case to demonstrate business value.