Building Agility Into Your Development Processes
The concept of bi-modal IT in relation to software engineering is fairly straightforward. It gives people permission to adopt different rules for different circumstances. In one sense, this idea has existed in many enterprises for some time, in the form of "IT-based projects" having one set of rules and "Shadow IT projects" having a different set of rules. There are however, two aspects that make bi-modal IT a very different proposition:
- It's no longer the business doing shadow IT by themselves; it's now one team - IT and the business working together on the Line of Business led initiatives.
- There are now agile IT processes and new software architectures that make bi-modal IT possible and extremely potent. These new architectures are crucial and often underestimated, as the right architecture provides a technology pathway that is empathetic to both the people and technical hurdles that will inevitably challenge everyone on a bi-modal journey.
Once you have your bi-modal IT strategy working, you will get fast and tangible business results.
As you address your bi-modal journey, it's important to use the right agile IT processes and take one step at a time, which is why "prototyping" is often a good place to start. This might seem a strange first step, but it's one of the few areas where business and IT can engage on a level playing field, in a friendly and facilitated environment, More importantly, a core element of prototyping is the definition of "user tasks". This is a very different lense that is applied during requirements analysis; not paying attention to the user tasks and using techniques like prototyping, will have a significant impact on the quality and usefulness of the application.
Microservices, or a Microservices Architecture can not only increase the functionality of your development but, help you bake in flexibility and agility. This is achieved by dividing a single application up into a set of smaller component Microservices, that run independently but communicate through APIs. This allows you to create faster and more agile development cycles. Microservices enable loosely-coupled elements that can be independently developed, replaced and scaled individually. They improve resilience as each individual service is compartmentalised, ensuring that faults can quickly be identified, without the need to unpick the code for the entire application. In addition, Microservices simplify deployment and improving rollout speed.
If you are looking to speed up your development cycles, enhance organisational flexibility and improve your outcomes, Certus can help you create a bi-modal strategy that integrates a wide range of Certus IP, third party and custom built Microservices into your software and application development processes.
