Accelerate transformation at supersonic speed with a well designed cloud program enabled by committed change agents
Werner Vogels launched the 2017 AWS Summits in Sydney with his typical non-conformist approach that transcends both keynotes and strategy. The Amazon CTO took center stage wearing a custom T-shirt emblazoned with “Werner Against the Machine” — the chest insignia of a modern superhero.
As the ultimate committed change agent disguised as a CTO, Werner is using his AWS superpowers to save businesses worldwide — using speed, analytics, flexibility, the skill to adapt, and the power to take flight from ‘hostile’ database vendors.
The Supersonic Speed of an Enterprise
TL;DR — speed matters
For most other enterprises, supersonic speed is the most elusive superpower for a heroic cloud journey — and the most necessary to harness.
During my 20-year career at Capital One, speed at scale was the modus operandi of the lean enterprise. Accelerated by an agile mindset and DevOps culture, the rapid rate of adoption enabled a cloud journey that transformed Capital One into what is now essentially a large FinTech startup.
achieving supersonic speed is the real superpower for companies like @CapitalOneDevEx #AWSSummit @Werner
Capital One’s accelerated technology transition is powered by the API-driven cloud computing services from AWS, enabled by real-time access to big data, and fueled by a commitment to the open source community. While technology plays a leading role, the hardest part of that transition and ultimate superpower is really a talent transformation.
The Gravitational Pull of Legacy
Gaining the supersonic speed to achieve escape velocity from on-premise data centers requires bold leadership with a long-term dedication to innovation. There is no magic pill for enterprises — although going all-in with AWS is a leap in the right direction.
The Cloud Center of Excellence is the tip of the spear for enterprises adopting the cloud
Cloud computing has posed a disruptive threat for years, but short-term incentive structures provide little reason for large corporations to invest in the disruptive technology. Many enterprises continue to be anchored by the weight of their own internal processes and platforms — and paralyzed by the FUD of vendors in survival mode contributing noise to their echo chambers.
“It’s not the big that eat the small … it’s the fast that eat the slow.“ — Laurence Haughton
The gravitational pull is preventing many enterprises from gaining momentum and advantage in the cloud — at least not at the speed required to avoid death by the fast and hungry. The only way out of the dilemma is to adopt a new approach — where continuous innovation is the new bottom line and speed is the name of the game.
Achieve Escape Velocity with a CCoE
For enterprises that are serious about cloud adoption and aspire to achieve supersonic speed, the executive leadership team must invest their time, resources and budget into the sponsorship of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).
starting your enterprise cloud adoption journey? please don't pass go and collect $200 without a cloud center of excellence #AWSSummit
The CCoE is an essential mechanism for large organizations planning to achieve the velocity required to escape the gravitational pull of their own death star — a private cloud or an on-premise data center.
Design the CCoE for Constant Evolution
TL;DR — transition matters
The Cloud Center of Excellence will continually evolve in order too keep pace with the rate of innovation associated with cloud adoption. Modern enterprises should be very purposeful with the organization design principles of their cloud program structure.
The leaders of cloud programs should observe the flow of their value within the organization, and design an adaptive structure that evolves alongside the internal needs of the enterprise. Simon Wardley infuses these concepts of flow and transition within his value chain mapping strategies — and his design principles apply as much to organizational design as they do towards product evolution.
All of this stuff - bimodal / two speed IT / dual operating - de-emphasises that important transition, the middle - https://t.co/hgpEvMurt5
Applying Simon’s design principles of Pioneers → Settlers → Town Planners (PST) toward an organization’s cloud adoption program offers an innovative approach for effectively navigating the evolving journey. Guided by astute situational awareness, organizations learn to continuously pivot through the cycle — from the exploration stage, through expansion, toward the enhancement of industrialized components and patterns.
Accelerate through the ‘trough of despair’ with an education program that achieves critical mass of cloud fluency
Stage 1: The Cloud Center of Exploration
The Pioneers Explore
Embarking on a cloud journey requires a tremendous amount of iterative experimentation with the underlying AWS utility compute services. During this stage of early adoption, the core team is focused on pioneering engineers with plenty of aptitude and attitude.
The two-pizza team leverages agile techniques to break things daily — and collect the data which will determine the patterns of future success.
The core team is stacked with battle-tested engineers with deep experience in understanding how critical functions currently operate, and know how to translate existing data center platforms into cloud services. These engineers have plenty of scars and war stories from previous tours of duty with security, network, and access control.
ProTip 1: An executive sponsor is absolutely essential during the early phases of the cloud adoption. The sponsor must be a strong advocate, provide plenty of air-cover, and actively engage with the core team for the purpose of removing impediments from the board.
Stage 2: Cloud Center of Expansion
The Settlers Expand
Once the pioneers solidify early successes into identified patterns, the focus turns toward scaling the prototypes into products and services that are consumable by the enterprise. By listening to a broad range of internal customers, the settlers refine the patterns and help the understanding grow.
When the cloud services start to scale across an enterprise, it’s natural to place a heavier emphasis on governance and controls. A key advantage of AWS is the ability to engineer your governance by leveraging the API-driven services to access real-time controls and compliance.
At this stage, it’s imperative to focus on scaling the early understanding of AWS to the enterprise — achieving critical mass of cloud fluency is the only way an organization can sustain a transition to the new operating model.
Invest the time and money into a multi-dimensional cloud education program. An engaged workforce armed with compelling context and content will dramatically accelerate your organization through the ‘trough of despair’ and ensure more attraction versus attrition.
During the enablement phase, the core team should no longer be considered the most cloud savvy department in the organization. By unleashing cloud superpowers upon thousands of developers throughout the enterprise, the core team should pivot and begin harvesting new and improved patterns from other divisions.
Elevating other departments beyond your core team’s existing capabilities is a key early indicator of achieving escape velocity.
ProTip: Instead of outsourcing your cloud training to Human Resources, tightly integrate cloud education as a core function on your program team. Leverage the AWS certifications as a benchmark for cloud fluency and set a minimum goal of 10% enterprise-wide.
Stage 3: Cloud Center of Enhancement
The Town Planners Enhance
As the cloud journey matures, it should lead toward the commoditization of services that result in more cost efficient, faster, and industrialized platforms. In highly regulated industries like financial services, the organization depends on these town planners to ensure customers and regulators can trust what’s built.
Innovation it’s not just limited to the early stages and pioneers — it’s also found in the operational stages of cloud adoption. For example, Capital One’s Terren Peterson is evolving the mindsets of their engineering teams by embracing the concepts of Site Reliability Engineering using innovative approaches to manage operations.
Their SRE teams leverages industrialized utility functions to manage compliance and controls with Cloud Custodian. The SRE’s also contribute new functions to the ever expanding platform — completing the cycle as higher order services continuously evolve.
Cloud Custodian is a function-based policy rules engine. The origin of the service demonstrates the PST design principles at work. Originally developed internally by their pioneers, it was scaled across the entire enterprise by settlers, and finally driven toward open source commoditization by the town planners.
ProTip: Involve your operational teams starting on day one of the cloud journey. Since operations is 24x7, consider a shift-and-lift for a subset of workloads. Leverage a cloud capable MSP for interim support to lighten the load during their talent transition.
Summary
Using these organizational design principles, a cloud program team can begin to continually cycle through the explore-expand-enhance stages. Over time, this approach will begin to harness Werner’s superpowers and accelerate cloud adoption at supersonic speeds.
Drew is an AWS Community Hero, Alexa Champion, and maker of dad jokes. Follow on Twitter @drewfirment. #WePowerTech
Amazon is collecting a massive treasure trove of data from consumers invoking custom skills that’ll drive further disruption
The consumer data derived from the Alexa voice skills is a gold mine for startups like VoiceLabs
“There’s gold in them thar hills and there’s millions in it.” — M. F. Stephenson
The recently published 2017 Voice Report from Adam Marchick is a solid “state of the union on voice platforms” — and you’ll really appreciate the effort and intellectual rigor that VoiceLabs put into their analysis.
Here are my two takeaways from this report:
Alexa-like voice platforms are about to cross-the-chasm
Amazon is sitting on a gold mine of data
In the new space of voice analytics, VoiceLabs is a standout startup offering services that “provide accurate, real-time data to developers about how consumers use their Amazon Alexa skills and Google Assistant Actions.”
The emerging strategy to collect real-time data was referenced in a recent article which describes how analytics startups like VoiceLabs are Scrambling for Alexa Data from Amazon — and rightfully so.
The private questions that consumers “ask” voice platforms generates an extremely valuable data set. At the very least, the consumer data derived from the voice skills provides can be used to create highly accurate profiles of consumers for marketing purposes.
The Value of Voice Data Analytics
For now, Amazon is keeping the majority of the voice data to themselves. And since Amazon has quickly attracted a massive ecosystem to feed the accumulation of that data set, they have a strategic advantage over competing voice platforms — one they know exactly how to exploit.
The most obvious way for Amazon to leverage the voice analytics is feeding the data into their existing consumer models for targeted pricing and and promotions. For example, if someone asks “Alexa, what are the signs of pregnancy” — the customer should also expect to see diapers as an item on their suggested wish-list the next time they go shopping on Amazon.
But the consumer line of smart-speaker devices and the developers building custom skills are just a pawn in Amazon’s longer-term strategy. Amazon is playing chess and positioning Alexa as the Queen — while everyone else is getting played, or at best, playing checkers.
Amazon can lead a horse to water better than anyone in the industry
Woo the Developers, Then Woo the Enterprise
With over 5M units of Amazon’s smart-speaker devices sold in the past two years, there is an army of users interacting daily with custom-developed Alexa skills. As Amazon builds toward critical mass, it’s hard to bet against their domination of the voice platform — just as Amazon’s AWS has dominated the cloud industry since 2007.
Similar to how Amazon’s cloud strategy evolved from the developer community to the enterprise, AWS will follow a similar pattern from consumer to enterprise dominance with their Alexa voice platform.
When AWS introduced their first set of cloud services, they were geared almost exclusively toward the 180,000 members of their development community. Since 2007, AWS has grown exponentially as it’s strategically cycled iteratively through a series of innovate → leverage → commoditize (ILC) cycles. Each cycle create new services — enabling AWS to move up their value chain and step closer to the needs of enterprise customers.
And with the introduction of Lambda, it’s now possible for AWS to move services even faster through the ILC cycle since underlying functions supporting new services are essentially commoditized as they’re innovated.
After years of moving up the value chain with higher level abstraction of services, AWS is now clearly focused on features that woo the enterprises instead of the developers — such as Snowmobile and Managed Services Program. Nobody should be surprised when the exact same strategy plays out with Alexa.
Amazon ‘s experience with AWS will be a key differentiator in their dominance of voice platforms
This Isn’t Amazon’s First Rodeo
While Amazon harvests usage patterns and strategic insight from their voice platform, the flow through the Innovate-Leverage-Commoditize (ILC) cycle should seem very familiar to the early days of AWS.
Amazon’s Alexa innovative voice platform is first to market (i.e. AWS).
The initial Alexa platform has enough minimal viable features on the development portal to attract an ecosystem of developer (i.e. EC2, S3).
The development community and Alexa Dev Champions are enticed by compelling features, and free T-shirts, to leverage the platform and build custom skills (i.e. web sites).
AWS monitors their usage patterns and leverages the learnings to drive further innovation and commoditization (i.e. Jeff Barr daily blogs).
Rinse and repeat.
Every time an Alexa skill is invoked, Amazon learns — each utterance sharpening the machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.
The FUD is Real
With feature-rich IaaS and PasS offerings now available from AWS, migrating a corporations on-premise data centers into their cloud is not a matter of ‘if “ — but “when”. Everyone knows that customer’s don’t give a shit about your data centers.
In similar fashion, AWS will leverage the voice data analytics from consumer Alexa skills to fuel their longer-term strategy — enterprise call centers.
With voice services, their target just moves down the street from the data center — to corporate call centers. The recent AWS releases of the Polly, Lex, and Rekognition services services offer compelling features that are early indicators of a viable strategy.
In the coming years, expect to hear lots of familiar Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) derived from cloud adoption and reapplied to the call center industry as thought leaders declare all the reason why this won’t work — probably starting with security issues. This phase will be followed by nervous sales teams casting doubt on the viability of machine learning and artificial intelligence for call centers.
swardley offers a simple yet effective illustration of how FUD impacts enterprise adoption
Ultimately, we’ll know when the AWS strategy has succeed when incumbent vendors start proposing hybrid call-center solutions. The final sign of success is when all the engineers are arguing about the term callcenterless — and every article starts with “first and foremost, there are still call centers in a callcenterless architecture”.
Let’s just hope the companies we are patronizing have already migrated their call centers to AWS voice platforms at that point. Then we can all finally stop yelling “representative” to get actual service through voice channels — instead we can just ask Alexa.
“There’s no way through this problem other than education and we have a long way to go” — Marc Andreessen
If software is eating the world, then the forward progress of companies is directly related to their ability to develop software effectively. — Joe Emison
Software is eating the world— and many businesses are being served for dinner by the fast and furious who leverage Amazon Web Services’ ever-expanding infrastructure and platform services.
The adoption of cloud is now mainstream, and AWS makes it possible for progressive companies to focus on their marketplace differentiators — while AWS does the heavy-lifting of utility compute.
Enterprise like @CapitalOneDevEx are using #AWS in meaningful ways to focus on differentiators and not the heavy lifting @ajassy #AWSSummit
With every release of new features and services, AWS is creating even more opportunities for companies to enjoy the benefits of frictionless innovation. And for what it’s worth, the opportunities to feast at the table of AWS applies as much to enterprises as it does to start-ups.
Emerging serverless architectural patterns are accelerating the insane pace of innovation, along with the ability for a business to efficiently disrupt at scale.
The endless opportunities are now only limited by your imagination — especially as serverless seamlessly integrates with maturing AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence services such as Polly, Lex, and Rekognition.
As Joe Emison highlights in his series on modern programming practices, a company’s forward progress is directly related to their ability to effectively develop software — and take advantage of infrastructure and platform services from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.
In the blog, Joe references the famous Wall Street Journal essay published in 2011 by Marc Andreessen — Why Software Is Eating the World — that outlines the shift toward an economy dominated by software-based companies.
Most notable in Marc’s essay is the now cliché statement that “every company needs to become a software company” — regardless of your industry. He correctly predicted that companies who fail to embrace the transition should prepare to be disrupted by the next Uber.
While most organizations are focusing on the bright and shiny aspects of the technology disruption outlined in the essay, very few heard Andreessen’s most important call to action for overcoming the challenges of the technology transition—education.
Overcoming the lack of skills is the most critical — and often overlooked — prerequisite for a company to participate in the software revolution.
Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. […] This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.
There’s a simple path to determining the success of a company trying to compete in today’s software-driven marketplace: assess how much they are investing in a meaningful talent transformation program that focuses on modern software development skills and cloud fluency.
With over 25% of corporations identifying the lack of cloud expertise as the #1 challenge with cloud adoption, there’s no other way through this problem other than education.
