WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs), digital humans and physics-informed AI join the 25 technology profiles on the Gartner emerging technologies hype cycle for 2021.

Enterprise architects still have an important role to play at large incumbents, but they need to evolve in three ways.

The most important reason to consider a strangler fig application over a cut-over rewrite is reduced risk. A strangler fig can give value steadily and the frequent releases allow you to monitor its progress more carefully. Many people still don't consider a strangler fig since they think it will cost more - I'm not convinced about that. Since you can use shorter release cycles with a strangler fig you can avoid a lot of the unnecessary features that cut over rewrites often generate.

There is no doubt that the cloud is one of the most significant platform shifts in the history of computing. Now, there is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud. As the cost of cloud starts to contribute significantly to the total cost of revenue (COR) or cost of goods sold (COGS), some companies have taken the dramatic step of “repatriating” the majority of workloads (as in the example of Dropbox) or in other cases adopting a hybrid approach (as with CrowdStrike and Zscaler). Those who have done this have reported significant cost savings: In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul, the majority of which entailed repatriating workloads from public cloud.

Shortsighted solutions to recurring problems--antipatterns--often sabotage technology transformations.

In the early 1960s, it was common to think, ‘We are building a new computer, so we need a new programming language,’

Responses to a McKinsey global survey of 800 executives suggest a disruptive period of workplace changes lies ahead due to acceleration of automation, digitization, and other trends.

In our experience, technical due diligence is the single biggest differentiator of deals done well—or poorly. What’s more, technical due-diligence failures can usually be avoided. Almost always, the disappointed acquirer insufficiently vets the technology and discovers too late that it fails to work as advertised. Or the technology does work, but only in constrained environments, and won’t scale. In other cases, crucial parts of the IP turn out not to be owned by the seller.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

With 93 percent of companies reporting that digital is critical to achieving their goals, we expect technology leaders will come under increased pressure to plan, measure, and track team performance levers more scientifically. As a result, McKinsey decided to study this topic deeply. We found several forces converging to help bring more “science” to the management side of technology

The WSE (pronounced “wise”) is the largest commercial chip ever manufactured, built to solve the problem of deep learning compute. The WSE is 1.2 trillion transistors, packed onto a single 215mm x 215mm chip with 400,000 AI-optimized cores, connected by a 100Pbit/s interconnect. The cores are fed by 18 GB of super-fast, on-chip memory, with an unprecedented 9 PB/s of memory bandwidth.

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy.

Succeeding is no longer just about who’s able to build the technology, or who’s first to market. It’s about who’s got the best experience.

This report presents LibraBFT, a robust and efficient state machine replication system designed for the Libra Blockchain. LibraBFT is based on HotStuff, a recent protocol that leverages several decades of scientific advances in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and achieves the strong scalability and security properties required by internet settings. LibraBFT further refines the HotStuff protocol to introduce explicit liveness mechanisms and provides a concrete latency analysis. To drive the integration with the Libra Blockchain, this document provides specifications extracted from a fully-functional simulator. These specifications include state replication interfaces and a communication framework for data transfer and state synchronization among participants. Finally, this report provides a formal safety proof that induces criteria to detect misbehavior of BFT nodes, coupled with a simple reward and punishment mechanism.

We present Move, a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain. Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic: a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations. These safety guarantees are enforced statically by Move’s type system. Despite these special protections, resources are ordinary program values — they can be stored in data structures, passed as arguments to procedures, and so on. First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies. The safety and expressivity of Move have enabled us to implement significant parts of the Libra protocol in Move, including Libra coin, transaction processing, and validator management.

The Libra Blockchain is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world. We present a proposal for the Libra protocol, which implements the Libra Blockchain and aims to create a financial infrastructure that can foster innovation, lower barriers to entry, and improve access to financial services. To validate the design of the Libra protocol, we have built an open-source prototype implementation — Libra Core — in anticipation of a global collaborative effort to advance this new ecosystem.

To get a deeper understanding of the lifecycle of a Libra transaction, we will follow a transaction on its journey from being submitted to a Libra validator to being committed to the Libra Blockchain. We will then “zoom-in” on each logical component of a validator and take a look at its interactions with other components.

The Libra Blockchain is a cryptographically authenticated distributed database, and it is based on the Libra protocol. This document briefly describes the key concepts of the Libra protocol. For a detailed description of all the elements of the Libra protocol, refer to the Libra Blockchain technical paper

Speed is critical, which means grocers must jettison their traditional—and slow—approach to implementing new initiatives. They should instead take an agile approach using “concept sprints.” Characterized by quick decision making, a focus on tangible outcomes, constant customer validation, colocated and multidisciplinary teams, rapid iteration, and careful attention to internal capability building, concept sprints can reduce time-to-market from four to six months to just four weeks.

Exhibit 5 shows how concept sprints can be used across the organization to accelerate the launch of high-priority initiatives. Leading retailers have used such an approach to introduce new in-store digital solutions, refine picking algorithms in warehouses, or develop new products.

When I speak to leadership teams or consult on agile transformation with corporates I’m always keen to stress that there is never one all-purpose solution to what a successful digital transformation looks like.

Many brands going through a digital transformation struggle to structure their teams. This framework can act as a guideline.

What’s Squad? It’s a small cross-functional self-organized team with usually less than 8 people. They have end-to-end responsibilities and they work together toward long-term missions. On Squads, the key drive is autonomy.

Each Squad has autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it, and how to work together while building it, although they need to be aligned with the Squad mission, product strategy, and short-term goals.

“Be autonomous, but don’t sub-optimize!”.