Platform Thinking & Running IT as a Business

Over the last decade, the primary role of the IT organization has evolved from being a dedicated ‘solution provider’ for all business problems into that of a platform provider that enables the rest of the organization to build and deploy solutions meeting their needs. The user community is provided with a secure foundational technology and building blocks that they can use to build their solutions without having to worry about the security implications.

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At the center of this paradigm shift is what is commonly referred to as Platform Thinking. At a high level, there are 3 key characteristics that enables this in an organization

1. A focus on building a safe and secure foundational technology that is made available to the end users in a self service model
2. An ecosystem of reusable, certified building blocks that can be stacked on the foundation to build and deploy new solutions
3. A standard and a platform for secure information exchange based on a modern services architecture & interfaces (API)

Knowledge networks and social collaboration has become the keystone of platform thinking at work. This will also free up a lot of engineering talent from doing mundane, non-value-added backend activities that are ideal candidates to be automated. In the end, it is not sustainable for an IT organization today to build everything. The focus has to shift to building out the tools that the rest of the organization could use to build apps that consumers could then use to extend the functionality.

With technology becoming a core enabler to run the businesses, it is now more important than ever to run IT efficiently with the capability to deliver tangible business value to the organization. It is no more about SLAs and KPIs like a typical back office cost center. Additionally, in many organizations IT is one of the revenue generating business towers and that forces the IT organization to become a product line or a service line to the business.

While organizations make this transition, one of the roadblock that plagues many organizations is the lack of a common vocabulary. There are various process models and design patterns that address overlapping scope that eventually help you reach the same outcome, but they are filled with jargon to a point where the teams may not understand each other even though they are talking about the same thing.

This is where it becomes important to build a Reference Architecture as a definition of the ‘true-north’ for the organization. By definition, a reference architecture is a standardized & abstracted architecture framework that provides a frame of reference for a domain, sector or field of interest. It should be technology agnostic, vendor agnostic and tool agnostic by design and will represent functional components (a.k.a building blocks), data objects that are inputs and outputs to the functional components and their relationships with the flow.

Several organizations have collaborated, piloted and contributed to the development of the Open Group standard called the IT4IT™ Framework for running the IT as a business. The framework provides a recommendation to manage IT through 4 different value streams, 5 supporting activity streams with the reference architecture at the center of it. This is a recommended model that will help organizations drive efficiency and agility to the end-to-end IT value chain.

Many organizations where IT is one of the revenue generating towers or directly impacting top-line revenue have started to make the transition to this model. Some organizations have started on streamlining the process with the value stream mindset, whereas some others have started with the toolset configurations to drive the process change.

In my personal experience, the key is to get the reference architecture in place. There is too much inefficiency in place today due to the lack of a common vocabulary, vendor dependent technology stack and tool driven decision making. By establishing a common vocabulary, unbiased and independent reference architecture and an open operating model will automatically pave the way to break down the silos, eliminate the jargons and focus on efficiency measured by business value.

Please share your thoughts about how you have enabled Platform Thinking and building out a Reference Architecture.

Foot Note:

IT4IT™ Value Streams: -

1. Strategy to Portfolio — Define your strategy to balance and broker your portfolio
2. Requirement to Deploy — Prioritize every requirement to build the best services and deploy them
3. Request to Fulfill — Handle each request by streamlining the process to fulfill it
4. Detect to Correct — Seek to detect issues and to correct them before they impact the user