Book Review: Designed To Disrupt
Designed To Disrupt [PDF] is written for CIOs, CTOs, strategy officers, IT decision makers & business leaders but it can be read anyone who wants to understand the big picture of cloud computing & how digital transformation can aid businesses. It is co-authored by the same folks (Eduardo Kassner, Barry Briggs) who wrote the excellent guide, Enterprise Cloud Strategy published by MS Press
The writing in the 133-paged free ebook is informal and well-illustrated with interesting infographics
Key points & extracts -
Examples that show how transformative technology is now affordable -
Hosting servers and applications in a different location may save money, but it does not change your business. But a truly remarkable phenomenon is occurring whose impact and scope are well beyond the simple cost savings of a migration. Businesses are discovering that because of the reach and connectivity of cloud services, they can transform how they conduct their businesses; indeed, they can turn their decades-old business models on their heads to increase revenues, efficiencies, and customer satisfaction and to access entirely new markets.
We can think about change in two ways: optimization and disruption, which are both valid ways to react to the need for change.
Examples of disruption of business models -
Blockbuster, the videotape rental service, was made obsolete by Netflix’s DVD mailing service. Less well known is that as Netflix transformed to a streaming service, its revenue dipped by nearly 80% before it became a leader in the streaming-media segment.
BMW and Daimler, the giant automakers, are well known for applying state-ofthe-art technology to their design and manufacturing processes. Both, however, have also recognized the power of new technology—and a changing demographic. With “cars-as-a-service,” customers can use credit cards to “borrow” cars for short trips, generating an entirely new revenue stream.
How do you know when to optimize and when to disrupt? ..the answer involves understanding your business in depth, as well as the competitive climate and emerging technological opportunities.
With the cloud, agility is the key word.
..digital transformation means, at its core, a bridging of the historical gap between the business and IT
Now, many have said that the agile methodology will replace waterfall. We don’t entirely believe that. For certain applications that have high regulatory or compliance requirements, it remains vital to have a detailed specification and controls in place to ensure that laws and rules are complied with.
“technical debt” ...old applications, outmoded networking techniques, or quick fixes that remain because the cost to replace them has generally been perceived to be too high: again, candidates for replacement in the cloud.
“shadow IT” - systems and applications managed outside of IT. Often business units are the first to deploy cloud solutions, especially SaaS services, because of their low cost and lack of need for IT management.
You don’t want to waste any time ideating in directions that compliance constraints won’t permit. You also will want to plan how to most effectively meet compliance and regulatory requirements with any solutions you ideate and build, so become familiar with critical compliance information upfront.
The statement of a problem may sometimes result in a discussion of an opportunity for a cloud solution. For the envisioning session, the problem statement may be copied or restated as an opportunity, but for our work, keep it in its problem-oriented syntax to avoid ambiguity of what the problem is down the road.
“A/B testing” - one selected group gets one set of content, another gets different content, and the results are compared
Like a hackathon, a proof-of-concept (POC) is an activity usually targeted at demonstrating the viability and feasibility of a set of ideas or hypotheses. A POC, however, has a much larger scope than a hackathon, and often promising results from a hackathon will drive a more indepth POC. Further, the objective of a POC differs from those of a hackathon: Where the hackathon is intended to explore new possibilities, the POC is more aimed at validating a particular approach, to reduce or eliminate specific areas of doubt, and to gain a better understanding of what the implications—to the organization, to the business, to the technology—of a change might be.
...many organizations have created innovation laboratories as a permanent home for experimentation. Innovation labs answer the question, “how will emerging technologies impact, positively or negatively, our business?”. In such a lab, new ideas and new technologies can be tested and perfected without impacting the business—until they are ready. Conversely, if an idea does not pan out, no damage has been done.
As you plan your change, you’ll need to have a comprehensive understanding of your current “as-is” state and a solid view of the state you’re trying to achieve—the “to-be” state. The difference between the two is sometimes known as a gap analysis
Cloud solution architecture - After evaluating the new cloud solution from business, application, information, and technology perspectives, put together a single conceptual view of the solution. This concept solution diagram is used as a discussion point with the stakeholders and influencers by assisting with the validation of expected outcome and ensuring the problem was rectified.
..the cloud allows your teams to try new things quickly and cheaply: This capability is critical now as the need to constantly update, change, and transform your business model and processes continues to grow
Most cloud services sport at least a 99.5% availability SLA; redundancy is a core architectural design principle of cloud platforms.
The writing in the 133-paged free ebook is informal and well-illustrated with interesting infographics
Key points & extracts -
Examples that show how transformative technology is now affordable -
- In 2000, sequencing human DNA cost $2.7 billion. By 2014, the cost had been reduced to under $1,000, and several companies will provide DNA analytic services today for under $100.
- Drones in 2007 cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and were rare; commonplace today, they can be purchased for a few hundred dollars.
- The time for many digital-centric companies—Google (8 years); Facebook (6); Uber (4); Snapchat (2)—to reach a $1 billion valuation is far less than the typical Fortune 500 company (20 years).
Hosting servers and applications in a different location may save money, but it does not change your business. But a truly remarkable phenomenon is occurring whose impact and scope are well beyond the simple cost savings of a migration. Businesses are discovering that because of the reach and connectivity of cloud services, they can transform how they conduct their businesses; indeed, they can turn their decades-old business models on their heads to increase revenues, efficiencies, and customer satisfaction and to access entirely new markets.
We can think about change in two ways: optimization and disruption, which are both valid ways to react to the need for change.
Examples of disruption of business models -
Blockbuster, the videotape rental service, was made obsolete by Netflix’s DVD mailing service. Less well known is that as Netflix transformed to a streaming service, its revenue dipped by nearly 80% before it became a leader in the streaming-media segment.
BMW and Daimler, the giant automakers, are well known for applying state-ofthe-art technology to their design and manufacturing processes. Both, however, have also recognized the power of new technology—and a changing demographic. With “cars-as-a-service,” customers can use credit cards to “borrow” cars for short trips, generating an entirely new revenue stream.
How do you know when to optimize and when to disrupt? ..the answer involves understanding your business in depth, as well as the competitive climate and emerging technological opportunities.
With the cloud, agility is the key word.
..digital transformation means, at its core, a bridging of the historical gap between the business and IT
Now, many have said that the agile methodology will replace waterfall. We don’t entirely believe that. For certain applications that have high regulatory or compliance requirements, it remains vital to have a detailed specification and controls in place to ensure that laws and rules are complied with.
“technical debt” ...old applications, outmoded networking techniques, or quick fixes that remain because the cost to replace them has generally been perceived to be too high: again, candidates for replacement in the cloud.
“shadow IT” - systems and applications managed outside of IT. Often business units are the first to deploy cloud solutions, especially SaaS services, because of their low cost and lack of need for IT management.
You don’t want to waste any time ideating in directions that compliance constraints won’t permit. You also will want to plan how to most effectively meet compliance and regulatory requirements with any solutions you ideate and build, so become familiar with critical compliance information upfront.
The statement of a problem may sometimes result in a discussion of an opportunity for a cloud solution. For the envisioning session, the problem statement may be copied or restated as an opportunity, but for our work, keep it in its problem-oriented syntax to avoid ambiguity of what the problem is down the road.
“A/B testing” - one selected group gets one set of content, another gets different content, and the results are compared
Like a hackathon, a proof-of-concept (POC) is an activity usually targeted at demonstrating the viability and feasibility of a set of ideas or hypotheses. A POC, however, has a much larger scope than a hackathon, and often promising results from a hackathon will drive a more indepth POC. Further, the objective of a POC differs from those of a hackathon: Where the hackathon is intended to explore new possibilities, the POC is more aimed at validating a particular approach, to reduce or eliminate specific areas of doubt, and to gain a better understanding of what the implications—to the organization, to the business, to the technology—of a change might be.
...many organizations have created innovation laboratories as a permanent home for experimentation. Innovation labs answer the question, “how will emerging technologies impact, positively or negatively, our business?”. In such a lab, new ideas and new technologies can be tested and perfected without impacting the business—until they are ready. Conversely, if an idea does not pan out, no damage has been done.
As you plan your change, you’ll need to have a comprehensive understanding of your current “as-is” state and a solid view of the state you’re trying to achieve—the “to-be” state. The difference between the two is sometimes known as a gap analysis
Cloud solution architecture - After evaluating the new cloud solution from business, application, information, and technology perspectives, put together a single conceptual view of the solution. This concept solution diagram is used as a discussion point with the stakeholders and influencers by assisting with the validation of expected outcome and ensuring the problem was rectified.
..the cloud allows your teams to try new things quickly and cheaply: This capability is critical now as the need to constantly update, change, and transform your business model and processes continues to grow
Most cloud services sport at least a 99.5% availability SLA; redundancy is a core architectural design principle of cloud platforms.
Take advantage of always-current cloud platform ....a study by Microsoft IT a few years ago showed that the more modern the software (e.g., the more recent the OS or database), the fewer support tickets and less time to resolution for an issue. The cloud keeps all business processes and applications on current services and modern platforms, establishing a solid technology foundation.
Scaling on-premises services requires larger platforms and significant amounts of resources to perform re-platforming. Monolithic servers that only offer a point solution and scale vertically are passé and expensive, whereas cloud services scale horizontally and offer unlimited capacity
Environmental sustainability is a key goal of all cloud providers, and a key benchmark for data center sustainability is Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE. Because of careful hardware engineering, innovations in data center engineering, and economies of scale, cloud data centers can reduce their PUE’s to 1.1 or even less, meaning that nearly 90% of the power used by a cloud data center is directed to servers
to look at the cloud purely as a means to reduce costs is very limiting: It affords the opportunity for you to transform your business. Here’s a quick summary of some of these opportunities as we’ve
discussed throughout these pages:
• Greater opportunity evaluation through enhanced business correlations.
• Lowers costs and capacity limitations outages based on high reliability to maintain business continuity
• Lowers costs through quicker setup to
experiment with strategic direction shifts.
• Lowers costs by reducing tactical work
using higher intelligent automation, which
will allow for more productive strategic or
valued work.
• Lowers total cost of ownership based on
demand utilization by only using required
resources, which allows for a reduction in
core business product or service costs.
• Lower costs of a legal audit or infractions
by isolating or handling regulatory
information uniformly and consistently.
• Lowers infrastructure cost by maintaining a
pristine foundation.
• Lowers costs of development by
controlling technical diversity and
duplicate architecture stacks.
• Lowers costs for on-going operation by
using more efficient platforms that will
consume less energy and resources.
• Lowers costs related to integration
by using services layers that directly
connect standard interfaces that use
standardization.
• Lowers costs by using effortless and
unlimited horizontal scaling to increase
business capacity.
• Lowers costs by minimizing platform outages
and increasing durations between failures.
Every company should think about their current business model—and how they can take advantage of technology to both optimize their current processes as well as how to drive the coming disruption.
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