Not all Friction is Bad
Transcript
hey how's it going - Keith Townsend from the CTO visor comm with another CTO dos we're going to talk about removal of up friction or at least went to think twice before you remove friction that may be kind of anti DevOps we'll call it I've heard that term concept when it comes to enterprise IT and what we've heard from analysts such as myself that in order to enable digital transformation we have to remove friction and that's friction between the user or the consumer and the business
when it comes to business logic and when it comes to the business process but when it comes to non-transactional things such as application development we need to be careful about when and how we remove friction as a good Enterprise Architect we will understand the complete system and when I say complete system I don't mean just how an application works it interacts with different parts whether it's messaging buses cloud computing or primitive storage the application itself I'm talking about the system of governance and processes around application
development we were in a brown field environment we forget that a lot of times that the culture of development is a result of years and years of trial and error error a lot of times we have an undocumented process that just simply works it may be slow but it works I had to turn down a customer or at least refer the customer to a different consultant because I didn't have the correct skill to help them with their unique challenge at the i-tree arch their problem they
had introduced new technology into the development process basically they had a additional cycle of development where the whole team got together put together their coal their code improvements tested those coal improvements and then deployed it on deployment day that that Tuesday they didn't have a CI CD process they were a slow organization in order to fix that perceived problem they introduced distributed development resources giving each different team a virtual machine self-service capability in which they could go and test their code independent of the other teams
and move fast well they move fast and broke some stuff and instead of improving the overall speed to delivery of the application they end up introducing defects into the process because they didn't take integration tests as a part of the holistic portion of development so while they reduce friction in one area they cost a complete different breakdown of the overall system in another so it's not always good to reduce friction at least you shouldn't reduce to reduce friction without giving consideration to governance and process when
you're looking to introduce a new technology you need to really think through what exactly are you improving on the front end and how does that impact the back end document out your entire process your the entire development lifecycle understand that like life cycle so that when you do run into these challenges you will still run into challenges you have you can look at the overall process and understand how you've broken the process by removing friction that's it for this episode of the CTO advisor you can
follow us on the way up the CTO visor comm you can follow me on twitter at CTO advisor if you have some pushback or questions around this or you can just shoot me an email Keith at the CTO advisor comm talk to you next CTO DOS
