Microservices and the next phase of Digital Transformation.
If we’ve learned anything about digital business from the pandemic, it is that innovation and adaption are critical for survival. In the current wave of new enterprise software vendors and technological change, the overarching lesson should be that organisations must learn how to innovate. The thinking so far as regards Digital Transformation meaning perhaps to transact online, and use cloud applications etc., has reached its natural conclusion. Beyond this, organisations must recognise it is not simply about using cloud applications or cloud native technology. It is about fundamentally re-organising and re-architecting to deal with disruption on an on-going basis. This next phase will be all about Innovation Transformation. To achieve this, organisations are going to need drastic technological and organisational change.
Enter Microservices. While not an answer to Conways Law, or even a solution to all the regular enterprise software concerns (they probably add more), they begin to drive the type of organisational change that innovation requires. Its the freedom — responsibility dynamic that kicks in, when by reducing the dependencies that teams have to deliver value, or the difficulty they have to change something i.e. continuously deliver working software, that will become the engine of innovation in the next phase of Digital Transformation. But how can we get there ?
There are lots of stories already of failed enterprise-wide microservice-led projects and programs. We can attribute many of these failed projects and the failed projects to come, from Inflated Expectations— but we should have expected this. If you have worked in enterprise software for a while, you probably have come across the Gartner Hype Cycle. It describes the cycle of new technology introduction as shown in the graph below. As has been pointed out many times, there is eventually a net gain or advancement in capability and productivity but you need to go through some pain and disappointment to get there. We need a pragmatic approach to get onto the Plateau of Productivity. Let’s look at one application of the strategy ‘Divide and Conquer’.
Divide and Conquer
Although many organisations become obsessed with decomposing-all-the-things in the future-state vision for the landscape, its probably not the best approach. It is easier and more pragmatic to divide and conquer, focusing all the innovation effort on where you need it the most, i.e. where you need to innovate, usually at the layer of customer engagement. Does this mean all the customer engagement applications, usually commerce, marketing & CRM etc. need to be microservice based? At least they must have a high degree of interoperability with the ‘innovation layer’ which is your added value on top of these basically commoditised applications. Of course we need flexibility, scalability, and composability at the API level of customer engagement, so you can easily replace sections of this with targeted, differentiating innovations, i.e. microservices. This is a simple conceptual model for innovating where it matters, and helps to keep focused on the bigger goal of delivering continuous innovation.
