How to be More Agile, More Composable, and More Resilient

How to be More Agile, More Composable, and More Resilient

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please welcome to the gartner virtual stage distinguished vice president analyst and gartner fellow gartner research and advisory darryl plummer hello welcome to the application innovation and business solutions summit i'm darrell plummer and i'll be taking you through our keynote this morning which is delivering resilience through a composability fitness routine have you ever wondered what most successful people have in common well the answer is simple they all have a philosophy they have a philosophy whether you're talking about elon musk or steve jobs or someone like stacey abrams they have a philosophy of how to build success and you can build a philosophy as well why would we need a philosophy today well because we need to build success the ancient philosopher socrates once said we are what we repeatedly do now what he meant by that was that we tend to do things over and over again and the sum total of what we do our behavior defines what we are it defines what we mean in the context of the world and in this world we really need to define it well because things change quickly they change so fast that all of a sudden our entire lives can be overturned for example in 2019 some 365 million workers in u.s based offices the number is much larger across the entire globe use computers at their desks every day and then in 2020 we sent almost everybody home now that was a disruption that we all felt that we all had to live with and it was something that forced us to change our behaviors changed and our approaches to everything had to be rethought now this is an important thing for us because when you start thinking about the fact that we're all now working from home we had to figure out new ways to compose a solution to that problem and the reality is that change is going to continue to happen like that that kind of change won't slow down but just managing the change isn't what we need to do in fact we need to do something completely different and that is to build resilience resilience is something that allows us to weather the storm that allows us to get through disruptions no matter when they happen whether we expected them or we didn't and in fact the resilience if you look at the definition of it it's about two different things first resilience is about being able to recover quickly to get back to a place where you can start again but not starting from where you were before because in fact the world has changed in that time it is the ability to bounce back yes but it is also the ability to bounce forward to recover enough so that you can chart a new path and get to a new place resilience is something that we all are familiar with in many different ways in our lives we just need to figure out how to apply it in our business and with our technology first let's take a look at something that's extremely resilient that we all understand the human form the human form is one of the most resilient things that we have available to us it is flexible it is adaptable and it's agile you know it's flexible because it can bend into any shape that we think we might need it's adaptable because it can be trained it can learn new ways of doing things and that brings agility the ability to stop and start go in different directions all the time the human body is a miracle and that miracle is what allows us to be resilient but it's also not just the physical part the human body is also about a mental aspect it is about being aware of what we need to change you know pay attention to your body it'll tell you what you should change about your lifestyle it is about being willing to make those changes when you need to make them and it's about being persistent in making those changes so if we can do this with the human body we have to realize that we can do it with other things as well your role now is to establish and maintain enterprise resilience just like you want to remain maintain resilience in your body you want to maintain it within your entire enterprise and that's a great role to have because it means that now you get to retrain everything just as the human body is a complex organism an organization is also a complex organism and that organism can be trained the human body can be trained through fitness to build greater health and an organization can be trained through composition to build greater resilience in the end it builds a philosophy that we can rely on one that says to us that composition is to resilience as fitness is to health that's our philosophy that's where we're talking about building this thing you know i i built kind of a philosophy of fit and fitness myself like many people i had a lot of time under my hands during the pandemic locked at home and i started the fitness routines now now trust me i've got a long long way to go but the reality is that i can already see differences that have been brought about i can see different parts of my life that are changing because of this new routine and the same thing has to happen within an organization so when you use a composition routine you realize that everything is composable you start thinking everything can be composed from applications which can be composed from modular pieces of software that can be tied together and orchestrated through apis and with processes and workflows that can be made into solutions that are changeable for the time and that's a very good thing because it's not just applications it's architecture it's our culture our culture of thinking will shift to composable thinking our ability to create partnerships our entire business in fact will be composable if we let it and if this is really the place where we'll begin to develop new innovation innovation will come from our ability to change to fit the new value scenarios that emerge when we see something new that needs to be done something that maybe we've never been able to do before we'll be able to bend or train something new to fit it this is the key behind the notion of a composability fitness routine so if you look at some examples some simple examples of what have happened recently we have to remember something these changes are not just about the pandemic i'm sure just like me you're sick of hearing about the pandemic but the reality is that change has been getting much more frequent since the late 80s and they have it was going to get more frequent as technology changed we're in for a decade of radical technology innovation and those changes that are brought about those new value scenarios that digital giants tend to own are something that we will all learn from if you look at a simple area no fitness gyms you know if you belong to a gym you probably knew that in the last year a lot of them closed their doors because people couldn't go to the gym they were locked out 60 of them never came back and in fact we had many businesses affected that way 13 major retailers had to close their doors for a time and we're looking at a situation where if you're going to be flexible adaptable and agile you've got to be willing to change and the resilience that was built by gems was they shifted over to zoom classes zoom training classes now you could do virtual classes and you could still get your exercise they also shifted to mental health classes helping people to stay mentally fit while they couldn't come to the gym they started cleaning the gyms more regularly and rigorously and they instituted social distancing across everything they did so for those customers that came back they could feel a confidence a trust that this gym was going to be good for them we could also go to china wuhan china in fact a place where the pandemic matter quite a bit and you'll find that there was a retailer there that had to decide do we close our doors or do we keep working through this pandemic what they did is they decided to retrain their entire sales force to become online streaming hosts to host sales events to host activities with customers that allowed them to engage and actually acquire product this allowed them to reduce the number of layoffs that they had and they had no downtime no closing so we can be resilient they had to be aware of what would work aware of what training was necessary and uh and willing to actually make the investment in retraining all their staff to get there they persisted and that gave them success so when we talk about these things we're really talking about the idea that composition brings something important to us it is brings a path to resilience that we can build on composition brings more awareness to the organization discovering what you need when you need it that is discovery composition brings greater flexibility through modularity now we've we've thought about modularity for a long time and we talked about it but modularity now those black box pieces that fit together in any way we want the lego pieces if you will can be used to build many things but then they have to be orchestrated we have to have the flow of their function what happens first what happens next under what conditions to orchestrate these things in sometimes real time and lastly they have to be autonomous because composition brings willingness through autonomy it brings the ability for us to say look each of these modular pieces are not just pieces they can actually work independently of one another in an autonomous fashion and not interfere with one another then you connect them together through the orchestrations the exchange of information and data and you get a composed result now there's a company that represents one of the best examples of composable business that i've seen and that is higher you know it is an asian white goods manufacturer appliances they offer a great deal of services around how you get these appliances what the customers want and the like now hire has gone out and built modular enterprise elements they created what they call micro enterprises they were modular and they were autonomous because they could work independently and they could be plugged into different scenarios as needed they didn't interfere with one another in a negative way and they had to communicate they had to be orchestrated through a mechanism they called the jellyfish model the jellyfish you know the jellyfish an animal doesn't doesn't have a central nervous system it actually communicates out to all the through other tentacles the information needed for the the entity to work and they use a similar uh mechanism they call it the jellyfish model they communicate out to each of these micro enterprises as needed to get the job done that's an orchestration through an interesting way of communication so hire was creating something that allowed them to compete better it allowed them to change faster and to be resilient in times when they had to make a shift such as if their supply chain changed because of tariffs or if their replenishment strategies had to move faster to actually make up for um a missing equipment that they couldn't get so these are things that they did well and you can do them as well when we're thinking about a philosophy around composition we have to remember that mindset matters and this was the name of a book written by a fitness guru named brian grasso brian said a mindset is just stories you tell about yourself to yourself and this is an important thing now i have a personal trainer many of you may have a personal trainer and you know that they are very good at torturing us and keeping us doing what we need to do and he's always telling me you got to be in the right mindset you got to be positive you got to believe you can do it and if you believe it that's more than half the battle and the same thing is true here when we're talking about composition you know it's interesting because we have been talking about modularity and and we've been talking about apis we've been talking about integration for decades and now here comes composition and people go what's so different why you know i don't understand it really we've been doing that already but we haven't we haven't what we've been doing is modularity composition requires us to believe that we're able to structure an entire solution from composable pieces orchestrated together and that are autonomously able to do their jobs so when we think about this we have to actually shift our mindset that's the first thing to do the struggle we have in our minds is that we have an inability to believe that this is something different an inability to believe that when a business goes through like higher goes through changes that are actually doing composition well they are even if you don't think it is because all you're thinking about is an application and code it is still composition to be used to an advantage the second thing is we have an inability to establish a discipline around composition if you don't have discipline you really won't build consistent success so you need to build a discipline and the third thing every discipline needs to be built on a strong foundation we don't have a strong foundation for composition because we have many tools we have many platforms we have many services and capabilities that are not designed to be composable today we have many that are heritage systems that are around and we even have people who still love writing code so these are things that we need to get past and our mindset has to be shifted in order to help us do it so the first thing to do is support your philosophy through composition and there are three ways in which you can look at this first building belief you got to build in belief and secondly you have to go into discipline and third build that strong foundation so the three things that i mentioned that we have an inability to deal with are the three very things that we have to do right so let's start with belief well belief in my world actually is about trust thinking and habits you know if you if you if you trust something you're willing to try things with it that you might not otherwise try if you have the right thinking around it then you can actually keep yourself focused on the right things at the right time and if you build the right habits doing the right thing will lead to the right results so the idea of these three is coming the three things coming together to build out belief is something that we all can benefit from right now we've got to trust that these systems will work we got to trust that they're not going to fall apart as soon as we build them we have to be thinking all the time about what can i compose how would that compo composition happen what do i need to discover in order to make it valid and real and we need to break the habits now i was told once that human beings are creatures of habit we do the same things over and over again and the example that he used was that when you get in the shower you probably start washing yourself in the same spot every last time now think about that the next time you're in the shower it'll drive you insane you know if you really are a creature of habit you will do that and trying to break the habit is hard so let's build the right habits let's build composability now i'm talking about things like reuse patterns i'm talking about things like getting developers not to rebuild something when they could go out and actually use something that's already there when you find a moment you need to compose something are you going to reach for that code editor are you going to go into a marketplace to search for something if you're honest with yourself you're probably reaching for code more than you are the marketplace so these habits will build belief for us it can get us into a place where if we believe it we can do it flex factory an example in manufacturing flex factory has actually brought together a number of organizations in partnership uh companies like porsche work together and they use all of their own composable capabilities to share their the ability to get manufacturing done they're able to bring together a lot of different aspects from each company they have a flexible production uh concepts that are working together they build out a digital value chain where each link in the chain is adding some value that the other companies in the chain do not have and they're composing the solution by working together to through pre-arranged agreements and contracts that allow them to share capabilities to share products to share technology and to share customers this allows them to break barriers down now the barriers that begin to fall first the culture and mindset begin to change because the barrier of a bad mindset or bad culture will stop almost any initiative from happening so they break it down by forcing themselves to think in sharing terms what do we need to share what do we need to get from someone else as opposed to doing it ourselves second barrier is they unblock the creation um and usage of capabilities they don't stop people from using something just because it came from a different place than they might have thought it would come from they reach out and use it no matter who's in the ecosystem they're willing to actually exchange the third thing is they support continuous change they don't believe that this is going to be done once and stop it's going to continue to happen we've been building applications for a long time where we think once the app is done and we deliver it we're done that's not the way the world should work we have to actually continue to really challenge ourselves and make changes all the time and lastly they redefine their company structure the structure is now about the collaborative it is about all these companies working together not just about the hierarchy of one entity so if they can do it we all can do it as long as we're willing to believe and to actually work on that belief the second thing that you have to do in these disciplines that i talk about is you want to build a high composability metabolism now this is interesting because again personal trainers are always telling you you got to do a bunch of squats i'm like why do i have to do squats my leg are the strongest things around it goes because you know you have to build those big muscles activate those muscles once you activate the big muscles they actually burn energy when you're sitting still that's a part of raising your metabolism so you have to ask yourself what are the muscles that you're going to activate in your company that are going to burn energy even when you're resting and this idea leads us to some things that we can do first fusion teams focus a lot of energy on fusion teams now i've talked a lot about business and i've talked a lot about the technology behind it not in detail but certainly the notion of the two things are enough that we have to bring them together to fuse them into a new element where we bring business and i t function together because business can't do it alone and i t can't do it alone so we need to fuse them and build out teams that are that are sensitive to both sides of the equation and these teams are usually led by a business individual more often than a technology person but that's a good thing because now we're closer to the outcomes but what are the technology issues we should focus on first composable experience you know composable experience is when we actually allow the user the customer to compose an experience or we can compose the experience for them through technologies that let us change easily now let me give you a way of thinking about this now if you have a smartphone a modern smartphone today now and if you're one of those people who still have an old flip phone or an old blackberry you know then you know you're not who i'm talking to but for everybody else we're talking about smartphones where if you you want a new function you can download it from the app store you can compose your experience you can increase your ability for that phone to do things training in essence to add a new skill and you can build out an experience that's more satisfactory to you when customers can do that with any environment where they can personalize hyper personalization where they can actually begin to use different uh channels for access so they are able to compose an experience that's best for them that's a muscle that you have to exercise a second one is the democratization of i.t democratization of i.t this is when you allow non-technical people to do what was formerly considered a technical role how are you going to do that because now the tools are getting easy enough for them to use without technical training yes i'm talking about low code no code talking about tools that you give to the business side so that they can build their own solutions now i'm going to explain why that doesn't lead to chaos and the reason the reason why is because the tools are tied now through cloud services back to the i.t department working together they're using api's services data that is cult curated by the i.t department but fed through

these low-code tools they can now build the solutions because in the end supply and demand is always a problem for it organizations especially app groups because the supply almost never meets the demand now if they can do the work themselves they can build their own supply when they need it throw it away if they're done when they're done with it and it's easy enough to build another one just in time to get more value so it changes the economics of the whole equation and fusion teams help you manage that to keep the chaos at a minimum to keep everyone safe and working steadily speaking of chaos however the third muscle you have to actually exercise and activate is is a muscle around managing chaos chaos engineering a discipline we should all be thinking about because agile systems can be very fragile they can be very complex many moving parts if you've ever built like a lego star wars death star or a millennium falcon or something you know all the hundreds of pieces you've got to put together you lose one and you're in trouble you got to figure out how to get a workaround going same thing is true with composable anything a lot of moving parts and we don't know what's likely to go wrong because it's not going to be always deterministic in the way we're used to it in algorithmic programming so chaos engineering lets us test for the unexpected failures for the failure through complexity that will be brought about that discipline will build reliability and build trust to support the belief that we can do this well so three muscles for you to exercise those three muscles are gonna really really raise your metabolism and get you to a new place now let me add some more things that you can think about doing a couple of principles you should have on your mind one is the principle of specificity again i'm talking about trainers and fitness routines specificity is a principle that can be used quite effectively another principle is rest and recovery let's talk about each one the principle of specificity says tailor your exercises to fit your goal now if you're out there and you want to lose weight and you go pumping iron pumping heavy weights you're not going to lose a lot of weight you're going to gain mass you're going to gain muscle if you want to lose weight you have to do you have to lift repeatedly lighter amounts of weight so if you're doing one thing but you're trying to get the goal of the other you're unlikely to be successful tailored to the goal that you're trying to actually meet in business and in technology that means focus on one thing at a time essentially it means center on the thing you're trying to get done not some grandiose vision of everything being composable all the time everything can be but it can't get there overnight you have to pick something to actually work on and then once that thing is picked you'll be able to actually solve problems that extend your ability to use your skills in a new environment or a new scenario so this is the kind of thing that fedex did now fedex found what we call a moment of composability when they realized that they wanted to actually go with these fedex on-site stores inside embedded inside other stores they had embedded delivery and they used apps you know to actually allow people to work with those stores and they had to build out a microservices-based architecture to support both ios and android apps so they got a lot of flexibility that way and they had to extend the partnership they use these dojos to actually train their people to train them in thinking about composition train them and thinking about partnering training and thinking about how to actually build out flexible solutions and those dojos were able to be extended as a part of their strategy they thought it through to get these on-site stores running and the partnership now been yields great results because they were flexible they were adaptable they were willing and they were aware of what they needed to change this was a moment of composability we can all find them we all have those moments in our lives you know when you realize you know i got i got a kid going to college and i haven't saved up any money what do you do now right you got to compose a solution compose yourself same thing is true with our applications our business and our architectures the second principle is the principle of rest and recovery rest and recovery uh again trainers will tell you your body's got to rest it's got to recover that's why i always say you got to get a good night's sleep you got to work hard and then stop you know they always tell you you know we're going to go for 30 seconds and then we're going to stop for 10 seconds then we're going to go for 45 seconds then we'll stop for 5 seconds they give you time to rest because the body has to recover and if it does recover it can do greater things the body's going to tend to respond to whatever demand we place on it but if you place too much it shuts down because if you don't let it rest fatigue sets in same thing is true in your composition efforts when you think about this you're really needing to do some things in there that your body needs to work on while you're not working so rest doesn't mean do nothing the body is doing something it's recovering it's preparing you for the next round and you can do the same thing take stock want to rest look at what you're doing who's using what how much reuse are you getting what modules are the most effective and why start planning as well take stock and then plan for the next round plan for with the changes that need to be made if the people don't have the modules they need they're not going to you they're not going to look for them they're going to try to build new ones so you won't get reuse you won't get any kind of of consistent use of modularity and certainly your composability will suffer so let your organization rest and plan for how to make it better the next time don't just rest on your lawyer laurels don't just say hey we did it we built this app we're great no you got to be planning for what's the next round these principles can get you a long way if you follow them a lot so that was discipline but what about that strong foundation well you've got to have a strong base of technologies you got to have a strong you know like i said the squats are so your legs are strong you also got to build a strong core your ab work your back work all building a strong core because when they're strong everything else is easier to do so building a strong foundation for an enterprise is really about having the right composable technologies available to it the composable technologies that we would focus on are many and a variety of things i'm going to give you three first automation everything from simple automation to hyper automation you've got to be able to automate your way into consistency greater quality and repeatability that brings speed it brings safe speed so automation is a key thing that you're going to do along with the composable architecture the composable architecture is one that's designed around using platforms using services that are inherently modular that inherently are able to share capabilities from different places at different times the notion of being able to build out what we used to call a service oriented architecture is embedded in the idea of a composable architecture because you're going to use services as your your your major component of assembly like the lego blocks okay you have to figure out the granularity of them and you have to then figure out who's using what and give them a path to being able to understand how to evolve these things and then there's third pre-packaged business capabilities this notion of being able to go and find something that someone else already started instead of starting at the beginning yourself is a very powerful one it extends from just the services the microservices you might use all the way out to an entire ecosystem for a supply chain or for a manufacturing group because you when you say you're going to depend on others you build a camaraderie that doesn't normally exist now i've been a developer since i was 13 years old and i believe that i'm the best developer that ever walked the face of the earth any decent developer will say that it's almost never true but the fact is if you believe it you're gonna tend to rely on your skills and we have to train developers to say no i'm going to rely on the person sitting next to me she's got as good a skill set as i do and i'm going to use her code i'm going to use her modules and we'll pass that up the chain all the way to the business executives to pre-arrange the agreements and the necessary um you know the necessary sharing that we can build an economy around so an economy of composition really relies on these things and these are things that will build that foundation for you and make it so that you can repeat it all the time we need to build repeatability and composition supports that because composition is a practice that must be practiced you have to do it as often as you can and the reason why is because if you don't use it you will lose it again in fitness muscles build strength with use and composition can build strength with use as well without it it will atrophy think about it for a moment you go out and you want to do a composition usually it's an unexpected time when you need to change something quickly if you haven't been practicing this then you will not be ready to make the change you know i've been a martial arts a long time and i always say you fight the way you practice you know if you're not fighting regularly training and practicing that way then you're probably not going to react that way when it's time to do it so use it or lose it don't let your composition skills atrophy because you have to do it as a part of your behavior pattern remember we're talking about behavior here socrates said excellence then is not an act but a habit a habit is the heart of behavior and behavior is what we're really trying to get you to change not just building a composable application not just building a composable technology solution but using the right behaviors to actually build out composability in everything that you do everything is composable and you can train yourself to use it effectively so in the end you have to think about what you can do practically i've given you a number of things to think about they translate into practical things that you can do anytime first let's look at this one evangelize composition evangelize composability overall why because evangelism draws crowds crowds can be inspired inspiration leads to belief belief connotes faith and with faith we can work miracles now that sounds like a lot of talk but the reality is that belief is the first step to success any successful person will tell you that and you need to evangelize the belief and lead to that success the second thing that you can do is promote those good habits start thinking about watching what your people do who reaches for the code editor first that's the person that needs to be helped to reach for the marketplace portal who is likely to reuse things that others have done more frequently that's the person to hold up as an example to the rest of the organization who is the person who is going to say let's build a community and collaborate together through fusion teams let's work with the business don't just push them aside and those are the people that you will promote and those are the habits that you will build and then the third practical thing that you can do is target the right technologies i gave you something to think about things like automation you know things like the composable architecture things like pre-packaged business capabilities target the right things to get the right things done right so start narrowing down your list of what technologies you will be using not expanding it continually i'm not saying settle on something forever i am saying come up with a list of the composability technologies that you think are the most critical to your organization and once you've come up with that list make sure that you have the right training on it and the right focus and you're following the habits built around its use if you can do that you will make a lot of progress on composability and you won't be talking about it five years from now saying oh it never worked because it can work and if it does work you'll be more agile you'll be more composable and you'll definitely be more resilient thank you very much for listening and enjoy the rest of your day you

2021-08-28 14:13

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