Crushed by the pace of technology change? Do these two things

But I don’t want to focus our time together on criticizing those who built the legacy millstone — I suppose a few years from now someone will complain about what I am building. I want to talk about a path forward and some things I have learned that have helped me keep up with the pace of technology change. I want to help your IT organization from getting crushed by the pace of technology change.

Over the years, I have found one thought process that has helped me more than anything else to break apart this millstone. It is the notion that there are only a few business processes, business rules and associated technologies that deserve innovation and uniqueness. For everything else, we simplify, standardize and consolidate.

How do we know which processes, rules and systems deserve innovation and uniqueness? We learn that by dividing our world into two general categories with one thing in common: They contain mission critical technology.

The first category comprises those things that are mission critical and create competitive advantage — these are the things we must do better than anyone else. These are processes, rules and systems that help us win in the marketplace. These are the things that deserve innovation and uniqueness.

The second category is all those things that are mission critical but will never create competitive advantage. These are vitally important and we can never perform these activities poorly, or we will lose the market share we won with the things that create competitive advantage. But these are also the things we can do well enough (rather than better than anyone else). The vast majority of our activities fall into this second category. Perhaps we can look back to my list from earlier.

CRM replaced: Do customers select us over all of the alternatives in the marketplace because we have a highly-customized CRM system for case management? Even if someone can make the argument that we need to do customer service better than anyone else that does not mean that we need some wacky, customized approach to case management. In our case, we replaced our legacy, complex CRM with a new system that we implemented with zero (yes, zero) customizations.

Storage standardized: Do we win in the marketplace because we have three different types of storage? No. My customers don’t even know what storage system I use. So, at every upgrade point, we migrated to a single, standard system.

Client-facing apps revitalized: We have taken the same approach to our client-facing applications: Which functions and features create competitive advantage? Only those deserve innovation. For every other piece of code, we reuse, we standardize and we consolidate. In addition to our filtering features and functions based on competitive advantage, we have also broken up our monoliths by breaking them into microservices that talk to each other via messaging tools. In effect, every microservice has an API that allows it to connect to all other services. This change has significantly improved our agility as we can replace or change a service without blowing up those around it. Our reliability and performance are much better and some of my teams have been able to get to daily production releases.