BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL ‘DIGITAL FIRST’ CULTURE

Enterprises must avoid technical debt and legacy dependencies, build hybrid cloud architecture, and adopt open thinking to thrive in the new digital world.

In recent years, the Digital First world has been driven by the need to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. This has led to a significant shift from physical to digital interactions with customers and employees. While some organisations saw this as a necessary move to stay afloat, others used it as an opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

There are common elements that most organisations have been using to create new digital services at the speed of business. These include open technologies, effective use of cloud infrastructure and SaaS services, agility, flexibility, efficiency, and choice of application deployment strategies. Organisations have also been leveraging technology ecosystems to accelerate development, building cross-

l Open technologies, agility, flexibility, efficiency, and choice of application deployment strategies are crucial for success in a Digital First world.

l Organisations must avoid technical debt and legacy dependencies.

l A hybrid cloud architecture is critical, and Red Hat’s OpenShift can help prevent vendor lock-in.

l Red Hat has developed a set of services called ‘Open Innovation Labs’ which help the ‘Digital First’ innovators pioneer this culture.

functional, creative, and competent application development teams. This can be termed Open Innovation.

The acceleration of the cloud era has been largely driven by openness, with Open-Source Software playing a major role. Collaboration, creativity, community work, open platforms, and interoperability rely on openness to create innovative software that can be used to build cloud strategies. The Linux platform serves as the foundation for most clouds, and numerous opensource tools and technologies are available on public clouds. Additionally, many new applications providing business and customer interaction capabilities are hosted in the cloud and have open application interfaces. This abundance of software tools, services, and cloud infrastructure creates endless opportunities for ‘Digital First’ creativity.

With such an unprecedented level of choice, there needs to be experience and discipline applied to avoid building technical debt and legacy dependencies into the ‘Cloud Journey’ to ‘Digital First’. This leads to the second element of agility, flexibility, efficiency and choice of application deployment strategies. This is where strategy and choice need to be applied to build the correct foundations for the longer term. In all development and innovation journeys there is the need to explore, experiment, implement and execute as fast as possible, and speed vs astute choices for the longer term are always trade-offs.

The technology industry is littered with lock-ins from vendors who create complete vertical stacks all linked together that were once used and embedded into critical solutions over time leaving a customer locked in. The choice initially allowed speed and became a boat anchor in the fullness of time. Foresight and thinking ahead can allow organisations to avoid this. A fundamental need for many customers is choice and agility. Not every cloud is available in every country. Similarly, all clouds do not have the same tooling. Not every application should be deployed in the cloud and customers need to choose their optimum deployment from physical on-premise to a virtual, private and public cloud. Organisations must be able to seamlessly deploy new applications in the best place. Those who went ‘all in’ on the cloud are finding significant levels of expense that were unforeseen for non-critical applications. This is where the strategy of ‘Open Hybrid Cloud’ becomes critical.

Choosing a single operating platform such as Red Hat ‘OpenShift’, which is a fully supported, integrated and complete Kubernetes-based development and deployment platform for applications across both on-premise, virtual, private and multiple clouds. This means there is a highly functional layer that prevents lock-in to any individual cloud vendor, allows flexibility of choice of deployment and the management and automation tools to set up and deploy applications across multiple infrastructures lead to greater flexibility to deliver at speed.

Look at this as a standard ‘Cloud’ operating system and the underlying compute resource, whether physical, virtual, private or public cloud is the computer. Building a Hybrid Cloud Architecture for the long term is one of the critical steps to ‘Digital First’ success and a key part of this architecture will be to build with the capability to automate and create push-button deployment capabilities for all repetitive tasks that require expensive skilled labour, again critical to agile deployment and a topic that needs in-depth consideration.

The third element is utilising the strengths of the technology ecosystems to accelerate development. The advent of the cloud and the availability of a massive range of applications delivered as a service with Application Programming Interfaces or APIs, an open way to connect the chosen application to your system and use the functionality, can be geographicand location-based services, search services, payment gateways, artificial intelligence support, data services like stock prices, bus timetables, etc., customer relationship services, and robotic process automation applications. There is an almost unlimited choice of services. Many institutions are also opening their internal systems to provide services automatically through APIs leading to massive improvements in customer engagement. Let us also not forget legacy systems. Many institutions have been facing difficulties in re-writing or replacing legacy systems that are critical to the business, and once these systems are ‘opened’ for integration through APIs, they can also become part of the solution in delivering known internal services to newly developed ‘Digital First’ applications.

The secret to the third element is the integration technology and strategy chosen to connect to all these services, both internal and external, as part of the delivery of new and innovative cloud services applications. Again, there is a need to choose wisely. The decision to go with one integration service using one cloud vendor could lead to vendor or technology lock-in. Hence, it is important to think beyond the present and plan for the future.

Once the integration strategy, the technology, the toolsets, and the skill sets needed to support have been decided, it will unlock the capability to innovate and develop all the new ‘Digital First Applications’ that will power a company’s business, internally and externally.

The final element, ‘Open innovation’ is central to this successful delivery of a ‘Digital First Culture’. Open Innovation is characterised by an open, transparent culture and open practices both internally and amongst the chosen ecosystem partners. n