About The Playbook
Korio is a group of professionals who came together to help companies re-platform and become agile and fast. We prefer to work with established companies in the mid-market who might be struggling with the transformation to digital. Collectively, we have gone through dozens of transformations. We have witnessed successes and failures.
Based on what we have learned, we have become quite opinionated on what works and what doesn't. This short post is part of a larger Playbook that we have assembled based on what we have learned.
Here are our proposed plays for re-thinking your Business Architecture.
As we learn more from our clients and if we think that the learning is: A) actionable, B) validated and C) doesn't state the obvious, then we will add it to our Playbook.
Remember, everything we propose can be done incrementally and with very little lead-time. If you want to adopt the plays in a more gradual manner, go ahead but consider setting each up as an experiment: have a hypothesis, measure the impact and act on what you learn.
The Play: Embed IT in your Small Autonomous Teams
- Relax the definition of who can write code: the very good news about the emergence of new tools and approaches is that we don't need classically trained and super-expensive developers in most cases. Low-code platforms are not all created equal, but the good ones do not compromise on good quality code, security, scalability and the resiliance of solutions. In fact, in our experience the opposite is usually true: we don't want to have to depend on the brilliance of a single hard-to-retain developer to give us our edge. Add to this the fact that re-usable and highly patterned solutions to business problems have emerged in most industries that mean that we don't need genious developers to code us out of fresh and perplexing business challenges.
Why Bother
- Throwing digital projects (large or small) "over the wall" to IT rarely works.
- An isolated IT team - where the individual developers are not deeply invested in customer problems - will take longer to contribute and, when they do, expect numerous revision cycles.
What To Avoid
- Excluding IT: The Business/IT Divide is a concerning trend that dramatically limits our ability to become a modern, digitally-enabled enterprise.
- Confusing your IT model with that of a startup: we need to come to terms with the fact that moderately mature mid-market enterprises will struggle to attract and retain software engineers whose primary passion is writing code. Startups can hire and keep them. Others will struggle. We have worked extensively in both environments and we have learned, the hard way, to respect the difference in appeal between our business and how a startup or pure-play digital enterprise works. Instead of hiring and developing developers that are passionate about writing the next greatest algorithm, find developers who are more passionate about the business and data. Sure, they need to know how to code, but usually the code we need in the emerging low-code world doesn't require a degree in software engineering. Ultimately, those developers are going to migrate to startups and digital pure-plays. Trying to hold onto them is very hard (though we have seen it done, with the right role structures.)
The Fallback
If you can't assign your developers and Business Analysts to specific teams on a permanent basis, we should still find ways to ensure they understand "the business of the business" and, most importantly, customer problems. Try to assign them to specific business teams for as long as possible and over-invest in onboarding them into the team. Some developers will simply not show a high level of interest, while others will engage. Invest heavily in the individuals that engage as they are truly worth their weight in gold, given the nature of the IT labour market.