How can Continuous Delivery power innovation in an organisation?

When an organisation is in a state of Continuous Delivery, its technology strategy can be described as IT as a Business Differentiator. IT staff will work in one or more product departments, which are accounted for as profit centres in which profits are generated from incoming revenues and outgoing costs. A profit centre provides services to customers, and is responsible for its own investment decisions and profitability.

IT as a Business Differentiator promotes IT to be a front office function. There will be a rolling budget, and a rolling plan consisting of dynamic product areas with scope, resources, and deadlines constantly refined by feedback. Long-lived, outcome-oriented delivery teams will implement experiments to find product/market fit for a particular business capability.

This is in direct contrast to Nicholas Carr’s 2003 proclamation that IT Doesn’t Matter, to which history has not been kind. Carr failed to predict the rise of Agile Development, Lean Product Development, and in particular Cloud Computing, which has commoditised many lower-order technology functions. These advancements have contributed to the ongoing software revolution termed “Software Is Eating The World” by Marc Andreessen in 2011, which has caused a profound economic and technological shift in society.

Continuous Delivery as the norm

IT as a Business Differentiator is an Internet-inspired, 21st century technology strategy in which IT contributes to uncovering new revenue streams that increase overall profitability for an organisation. This means executives and managers are incentivised to maximise revenue generating activities, as well as controlling cost generating activities.

Continuous Delivery is table stakes for IT as a Business Differentiator, as IT executives and managers are accountable for delays between ideation and customer launch. There will be an ongoing investment in technology and organisational change, to ensure deployment throughput meets market demand. There will be a focus on optimising flow by eliminating handoffs, reducing work in progress, and removing wasteful activities. The reliability strategy will be to Optimise For Resilience, in order to minimise failure response time and blast radius.

IT as a Business Differentiator and Continuous Delivery were validated by Dr. Nicole Forsgren et al, in the 2018 book Accelerate. Surveys of 23,000 people working at 2,000 organisations worldwide revealed:

  • Continuous Delivery results in high performance IT
  • High performance IT leads to simultaneous improvements in the stability and throughput of IT delivery, without trade-offs
  • High performance IT means an organisation is twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals
  • Continuous Delivery also results in less rework, an improved organisational culture, reduced team burnout, and increased job satisfaction

Leaving IT As A Cost Centre

If an organisation has institutionalised IT as a Cost Centre as its technology strategy, moving to IT as a Business Differentiator would be difficult. It would require an executive-level decision, in one of the following scenarios:

  • Competition – rival organisations are increasing their market share
  • Cognition – IT is recognised as the engine of future business growth
  • Catastrophe – a serious IT failure has an enormously negative financial impact

If the executive leadership of the organisation agree there is an existential crisis, they should publicly commit to IT as a Business Differentiator. That should include an ambitious vision of success that explains the current crisis, describes a state of future economic prosperity, and injects a sense of urgency into the day-to-day work of personnel.

There is no recipe for moving from IT as a Cost Centre to IT as a Business Differentiator. As a complex, adaptive system, an organisation will have a dispositional state of time-dependent possibilities, rather than linear cause and effect. A continuous improvement method such as the Improvement Kata should be used to experiment with different changes. Experiments could include:

  • co-locating IT delivery teams with their product stakeholders
  • removing cost accounting metrics from IT executive incentives
  • creating a Digital department of product and IT staff, as a profit centre

This leaves the open question of whether an IT department should adopt Continuous Delivery before, during, or after a move from IT as a Cost Centre to IT as a Business Differentiator.

Further Reading

  1. The Principles Of Product Development Flow by Don Reinertsen
  2. Measuring Continuous Delivery by the author
  3. Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly
  4. Utility vs. Strategic Dichotomy by Martin Fowler
  5. Products Not Projects by Sriram Narayan

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Thierry de Pauw for his feedback.