WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

For most companies, agile is confined to software development—but it doesn’t need to be. Increasingly, forward-thinking companies are taking advantage of the same agile techniques that have transformed software development. Now they are successfully deploying these techniques in other core business units, from marketing to human resources to finance. When companies implement agile across their entire organizations, ways of working improve dramatically. Agile methods are more collaborative and creative and can be more efficient than other business models. But companies must first understand why their current business structures need to change.

Digital transformation - extending and exposing business processes outside the organisation - by implementing a digital strategy – a statement about the organisation’s digital positioning, operating model, competitors and customer and collaborator needs and behaviour through the delivery of digital solutions defined in a digital architecture – a future state application, data and technology view to achieve digital operating status - is potentially (very) complex. Digital architecture does not exist in isolation entirely separate from an organisation’s overall enterprise architecture. Digital architecture must exist within the within the wider enterprise architecture context. Enterprise architecture provides the tools and the approaches to manage the complexity of digital transformation. 

Technical debt is something that every technology company, large or small, public or private, has to deal with. Technical debt accumulates in a dizzying variety of ways as you build software. Sometimes it accrues through explicit, individual compromise: you deliberately choose to do something in a non-sustainable way in order to get something to market more quickly and tell yourself that you'll clean things up later. Sometimes technical debt accrues because building technology is hard, people make mistakes, and even the cleverest engineers can't predict the future which means that sometimes you build the wrong things. And sometimes technical debt accrues because your teams think mostly about how to ship stuff more quickly, not about the messes that they are making in service of their haste. Individually, it can be difficult to explain why you need to take the extra time to build something "the right way" when what seems like the whole world is anxiously waiting for you to be done.