Agile Corporation for MIT

1
Digital Transformation
AGILE
CORPORATION
S
São Paulo, September 2022
by Caio Candido

MIT – Cloud & DevOps
2
Summary and conclusion of the Forbes articles
Articles chosen as a basis for writing my (free thought) Article:
Can Big Organizations Be Agile?
Surprise: Microsoft Is Agile

3
Executive summary
As a former Datacenter organization, focused on Infrastructure, "Agile Organizations", the
"Digital Enterprise" believe that the path to digital leadership must be strategically, and
culturally designed around people, processes and technology.
Agile development processes allow us to stay focused on product, with speed, and delivery,
and we are working even smarter - using AI and ML to generate better results and simplifying
and automating IT processes to achieve greater scale. We have many powerful examples of
IT teams and business partnerships developing and delivering new ways to create better
customer experiences. Reducing costs and improving employee satisfaction. The focus is on
exploring new ways to create better digital experiences for your own staff, customers, and
business partners.
Organizations are pressuring IT/Datacenter to be more agile and responsive to changing
business needs, insisting that they can keep costs under control. One way for IT to respond
is to accelerate the software development life cycle (SDLC) process. Program development is
complex, risky, and expensive. Every day, legacy applications are maintained, patched, and
upgraded, while new applications are developed and released into production. Each activity
is typically managed by teams of people from different organizations (Business Units), using
manual processes and a wide variety of technology. As a result, mistakes are often made,
further slowing the process to affect overall IT performance. Simplifying the SDLC by making
the most of cloud computing, automating manual processes, and improving the way
development and operational teams work together can help you reduce costs, reduce time to
market, and increase business agility and responsiveness.

4
Main ideas of the article
I particularly realize the full power and benefits of DevOps by realigning development,
test, and operational organizations from existing silos to create an integrated team.
With leadership, internal sponsorship, and alignment, this can be achieved
incrementally over time. As these groups come together in a team, operations staff
learn how applications are built, and developers and the QA team learn how
applications run in Production. This requires process - and sometimes organizational -
change to generate significant increases in productivity and efficiency.
Assess the agility of your SDLC process by focusing on two important factors: how
long it takes to develop your software "agile" (test management) and new releases. We
can reduce your release cycles from weeks to days or even hours, dramatically
improving time-to-market for software delivery. Maybe, CI/CD definitions.
Organizations can work to identify capability gaps and cultural impediments that affect
the performance of their DevOps environment. Ideally, we measure, track, and
compare against the outcomes that matter for success. We drive improvement through
Resources, and identify priorities for capability improvement, tracking progress to
demonstrate value and identify next steps.
Most organizations "battle" with executing quality assurance in a measured, structured,
and consistent way. DevOps can address much of this inefficiency using more frequent
testing cycles ("fail faster") and platform-driven automation that reduces human error.
As your tested software approaches deployment, we follow a roll-forward/roll-back
approach in which code is deployed and then extended, and the old software is retired
as we prove that the new Code works correctly. All this happens quickly as the code is
validated through automated functional testing, part of the deployment process itself.
To complete software lifecycle automation, teams need to work to redefine process
version management (RMPs) by:
- Developing an application modeling process.
- Creating standard virtual runtime models.
- Establishing a package repository management and deployment capability.
- Enabling automated testing for integration and function.
- Defining an end-to-end release process management model.

5
Using the two articles published in Forbes as a basis, especially the part that talks about
Microsoft being Agile and how large companies can follow this path, I think it was critical to
evolve processes and people. As published in the August 11, 2019, in Brazil article "Large
organizations can be agile", it was quoted that:
"Microsoft is an organization that has been around since the last millennium, since 1975.
According to the various articles published, it has some sections that implement Agile and
Lean. Earlier in the Drucker Forum, Gary Hamel mentioned the complaints of Microsoft's own
employees when Windows Vista was offered to the public. While in 2007 Microsoft was
releasing Windows in three-year cycles, with low possibility of feedback by users, today, the
situation is very different. Since 2014, Microsoft's Windows 10 has undergone a remarkable
transformation. It is now receiving feedback from a group of more than 7 million active users
and issuing updates on a weekly basis.
Furthermore, when employees see their ideas implemented in days rather than years, it
exerts a huge benefit on their morale. Other parts of Microsoft such as the Development
Division and Skype are also implementing Agile.
These examples, which were identified in 2016 by SDLC visits, are not isolated experiments
in these companies. In each case they are part of a large-scale implementation of an
entrepreneurial approach to running the organization with continuous innovation."

6
Application for companies and customers
Challenge: Most companies have been constrained by the traditional, monolithic approach to
making capacity required changes in their environment. A single feature change can take years
to implement between planning, developing, and coordinating the release into Production,
which can be a massive application due to the scale and size of the enterprise.
Solution: Transforming every user and/or customer experience to the most agile and cloud-
based format, using Kubernetes, Cloud tools and hybrid cloud infrastructure are part of the
strategy.
Results: Once the "Agile" culture is created and with the right tools, now, the company(s) can
continually repeat the enhancement of their platforms, enabling many more frequent releases
of features and capabilities on a weekly basis. Page loads, applications, now that can be faster,
helping to improve the entire business.
Increase agility with multi-cloud flexibility: As we saw in MIT's "Cloud & DevOps" training: new
competitors, new markets, and new challenges are always around the corner. That's why most
enterprise leaders say that recent disruption has proven the need for a more agile and scalable
IT/Datacenter environment.
As a result, organizations are accelerating their move to on-demand and on-demand solutions
for the required IT/Datacenter resources provided by public clouds, private clouds, "Edge &
Fog", as local infrastructure delivered as a service (As a Service).
Unlike what many may think, or "evangelize", in the "cloud storage" scenario, just like on-
premises (Private Data Center), data is always stored on physical infrastructure (there is a
Storage, Server, Switch somewhere). However, when you choose "cloud" storage, this data is
managed by "Service Providers", marketing this physical infrastructure in/as a "Cloud" offering.
These Datacenters (CSPs) have structures that are designed to support large data read/write
and processing. Within the Datacenters the best strategies are defined to deliver with security,
availability, and speed to access all the data of the customers that contract the services (Public
Cloud). Regardless of which option you choose to store your data, every "virtual" demand,
whether IaaS or PaaS, necessarily, the data will be processed and stored by a physical
structure.

7
Digital Transformation
The rapid pace of digital transformation means that your organization's success depends on
the responsiveness, scalability and resiliency of your on-premises, cloud and edge computing
infrastructure. Adopting a "hybrid environment" in your multi-cloud strategy that utilizes flexible
consumption and service delivery models ensures you can quickly leverage the devices,
software and infrastructure your staff needs to drive better results. By having freedom of choice
in how you purchase, and consume technology, you can choose the right resources and the
right acquisition strategies to meet your technology and business objectives.
This also allows you to scale up or down the lifecycle of each workload, application, and
initiative based on the demands of your business, plus the ability to scale, a consistent
experience across your cloud allows you to quickly and efficiently deploy, operate, and scale
workloads with on-demand selection of the most optimal environment for each application or
"use case" while eliminating siloed management.
As applications mature and migrate, this consistency provides the flexibility users need to avoid
surprises throughout an application lifecycle, providing the cost transparency into resources
you need to be more strategic about how you deploy your overall IT/Datacenter budget. This
IT agility will accelerate digital transformation and help you meet future business demands.

8
Conclusion
Agile or "Agile" is a journey. My view is that all great organizations are on journeys. None of
them have arrived yet. None of them present themselves as having "the perfect solution", but
rather the best paths to follow, based on facts and project experiences over the years. All of
them are facing challenges, even the "richest" ones, because the "movement" is cyclical. Many
talks about "Digital Transformation", I particularly like the term: "Digital Innovation".
It is important to "say" that in this journey: companies are not alone; it is not only "they" who
will encounter implementation problems. So, this is a set of Agile journeys, journeys inspired
by "inspect and adapt" as we continue to learn.
Finally, I believe in four core points when we talk about "Agile Corporations":
Delighting customers: An obsession with continuously adding value to customers and users.
Companies now need to generate instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale, anywhere,
anytime, on any device. This is more than a growing attention to customers: it is a shift in the
goal of the organization.
Decalcification of Work: A presumption that in a volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous
world, big problems need to be broken down into small parts. And only then executed by small,
autonomous cross-functional teams, working iteratively in short cycles in a state of flux, with
rapid feedback from customers and end users.
Enterprise-wide Agile: A recognition that to be fully entrepreneurial, the entire organization
needs to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset to function as an interactive network. Agile is not
just for IT/Datacenter: it's a change in the way the entire organization thinks, is driven, and
managed.
Cultivating the culture: a never-ending commitment to actively nurture and systematically
strengthen entrepreneurial mindsets throughout the organization.

Agile Corporation for MIT

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Agile Corporation for MIT (20)

More from Caio Candido (10)

Recently uploaded (20)

Agile Corporation for MIT