It’s Time to Dry Up the (IT) Waterfalls for Good 

Waterfalls are among the most beautiful spectacles in nature – the cascading water, the shimmering spray, the refracted light. “As long as I live,” John Muir wrote, “I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.”

The waterfall model of IT delivery, however? Not so nice.

The waterfall methodology has been widely discredited in recent years, and rightfully so. At a time when digital business demands that organizations deliver services to customers as fast as Class 5 rapids, the waterfall model flows like sludge.

The cumbersome, rigid stages in which a project courses downhill from one group to another, from development to production, are painful to even think about: A developer codes something. It’s then passed to the infrastructure manager. He or she asks the server people whether there’s enough capacity. They spend time provisioning the servers. Next, the storage manager is brought in to consult on whether enough storage exists in the right places. Then, there’s the effort of provisioning for the network. And if it’s an external app, there’s the additional work of readying it to pass through the firewall.

And yet despite all the buzz around DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery and other industry-wide initiatives to accelerate and refocus IT processes, a shocking number of organizations still cling to this obsolete system.

I’d estimate that one third of enterprises believe they’ve abandoned the waterfall approach but, in reality, they’ve merely implemented more agile techniques in the development phase rather than across the entire infrastructure.

How many companies have truly abandoned the waterfall in favor of more nimble processes end to end? Probably about one in 10.

This will not work as the mega-trends of Big Data, mobile, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence/cognitive computing/machine learning – each by itself a game changer on par with the invention of the internet itself – quickly and dramatically reshape the demands on IT services.

Mark Thiele of Apcera

Take the IoT, for example. All technologies tend to improve while at the same time getting cheaper. This phenomenon will mean that IoT devices will become so inexpensive from an enabling perspective (sensors, small form factor compute and readers, etc.) that there will be a nearly limitless desire to deploy them. It will become possible to solve problems or create opportunities that would have been assumed impossible just a few months earlier.

Businesses will expect to act on these new opportunities quickly and cost effectively. But that can’t happen if IT delivers in weeks, months or years because of out-of-date methods.

Which points to another problem in today’s enterprises: They remain over-focused on delivering IT to internal constituencies rather than to external stakeholders – i.e. customers and partners.

The vast majority of companies today have no more than 15 percent of their IT effort targeted at the end customer. The overwhelming majority of resources go to keeping the lights on -- ERP and HR systems, sales and marketing technology, internal data analytics initiatives, etc.

In a typical enterprise, you might have only 10 of your 1,000 applications facing outward but any one of those 10 could have exponentially more customer users than even the busiest internal application. The lesson: The impact of just a handful of new apps for external customer engagement can dwarf the volume and scale of all internal apps combined.

Disruptive companies like Amazon, eBay and Netflix have figured out ways to flip the internal-external equation on its head and deliver applications to customers at breakneck velocity. Amazon, for example, has said it makes changes to production software every 11.6 seconds. Many Google services reportedly see new releases multiple times a week.

It has become urgently necessary for every company to emulate these vanguard 21st century companies and figure out how to deliver services to their customers much faster than the old ways allow. Most companies that can’t make the transition risk going out of business within five years.

Turning IT inside out to achieve these goals requires massive effort but is achievable if an organization sets and commits to three strategic imperatives:

Culture/Leadership: You must think differently. You have to be ready to leverage any resource needed in real time and reward employees more for delivering services than for building infrastructure or understanding how to work with one individual cloud provider.

The C-suite should take an active role in promoting and enforcing DevOps, the methodology that calls for software developers and operations teams to vacate their silos and work closely to allow more frequent releases of code into production. It is no longer good enough for DevOps to exist as point or trial projects on a per-team basis within organizations. DevOps must be a strategic, enterprise-wide initiative.

Technology Services/Use Strategy: Companies must change their thinking about technology from the technology itself to a service delivery orientation. The discussion should shift from in-the-weeds topics, such as how to deploy a virtual machine faster or put more VMs on a processor (matters that still excite many infrastructure managers), to how to quickly deliver services to customers that benefit them in specific ways, from higher productivity, to enabling new business opportunities, to lowering the bottom line.

Flexibility: Servers and clouds provide no other benefit than to create a platform for delivering applications. So if cloud is the new platform, using clouds to your benefit makes sense. This means you should be able to deploy your applications on any cloud (public or private) or on all clouds. You should be able to leverage the “platform of clouds” to guarantee any specific customer requirement for data sovereignty, latency and performance.

With this three-pronged framework, companies can get started today re-designing their organizations in line with the forward-looking, service-delivery paradigm needed to survive.

Instead of waterfalls, companies need to think of IT as a fast-flowing river surging toward a single destination: an ocean of new services for customers.

Mark Thiele is chief strategy officer at Apcera.