Post on 08-Aug-2015
London Microservices User Group
Introducing New Technologies To Traditional Organisations
@peetdenny
Introducing New Tech to Traditional Organisations
❖ Is often challenging
❖ Disconnect between business goals and tech goals
❖ Business sponsor mistrust of our ability to delivery
❖ Past failures
❖ (The mention of CRM is banned in one company!)
The Problem of Introducing New Tech to Traditional Companies
IT: New tech! The business: erm…
–Disgruntled business owners everywhere
“How can we get these guys to stop working on their own thing for long enough to build
something for us?”
Start With The (Business) Goal
❖ What do we want to do as a company this year?
❖ Get all of our hotel rooms booked out
❖ Cut costs by £1.5M
❖ Drive more purchases through new channels
❖ Sell more insurance policies
❖ How will introducing this new tech help us reach these goals?
❖ Then pitch to the business sponsor (e.g. Product Owner)
Gather and Understand the Challenges❖ You are usually not the sole influencer
❖ Depending on the size of the organisation, there may be a large number of stakeholder groups impacted by the choice
Development App support
Middleware support Infrastructure/Unix/Windows
Enterprise Security Build and release management
Monitoring Team Enterprise Architecture
❖ Their views may not always be positive
❖ Meet with each group and strive to understand what led them to have this view
❖ They may be right! Keep an open mind
Group Example Beef
Development Why am I being forced to use this? I could work much more quickly with X
App Support How will we support this? It’s new tech that we have no experience of! We’ll need 6 months to learn it
Middleware supportWe have all of these tools that we’ve built/configured to
support TIBCO and Websphere, now we have to start again from scratch!
Infra/Unix/Windows How can we capacity plan if we have no experience with this tech?
Enterprise Security We’re going to have to spend £10k on a pen test since we’ve never done this before
Build and release It took us 9 months to automate build and deploy for Weblogic, it’ll probably take the same for this
Monitoring Nobody knows how to monitor DropWizard, you’ll have to design a whole new monitoring strategy
Architecture JBOSS is our strategic choice. You’ll never get funding to move everything off of JBOSS onto this new thing
Prove and Persuade❖ Prove that the challenges can be overcome
❖ (You have to be right first)
❖ Identify main pockets of resistance
❖ Take ‘em out for a coffee
❖ Get on the same page
❖ Don’t leave it until the ARB/TDA!
❖ Build a network of support
Persuasion
It’s not enough to be right, you also have to be believed
“But you didn’t persuade me” - Idi Amin
Network of Good News
Wut?
!
????
:D
Day 1:New Idea
Day 30:Everyone’s got an opinion
Day 90:Everyone’s rooting for it
Dubious Sponsor Dubious & Confused Sponsor Delighted Sponsor
Prove and Persuade Not just for the bad guys
Implement Something Small
❖ Time to put your money where your mouth has been❖ Build something small which delivers real value to the business
❖ Prove that our assumptions work in practice❖ Build goodwill❖ Generate desire to use this technology more
❖ Choose either a small project, or a small part of a larger project❖ But make sure that what is delivered gives value to the sponsor❖ Make sure it’s awesome!
Win & Celebrate Success❖ Now that you’ve delivered the
awesome, cash in on your win❖ Go out to the pub, get some
pizzas in, rent a floor in a nightclub, fly to Vegas, depending on scale -microservices are small :(
❖ Make sure to invite the sponsor❖ Publicise: Write blog posts, do
an internal roadshow, get your success out there
Iterate!
❖ Once you’ve tidied up after the party….time to do it again!
❖ Hopefully process has raised the profile of both the technology you’ve introduced and you yourself.
❖ Conduct a retrospective of what worked, and what didn’t and go around again
❖ Time for more Microservices!
The 7 steps
Start with the business benefit
Understand all the challenges
Prove and persuade
Implement something small
Win &
Celebrate!Iterate err…profit!