Digital / AI /Cloud - The one major challenge - people

Looking back at the past years and thinking forward into the future one thing has become very clear to me. We will always have new technology trends, global or in specific industries. This is a continuous evolution and there will always be the front runners, the early adopters, and the thought leaders.

The challenge is not with these but rather how technology trends translate into real life benefits for enterprises. How do you ensure that the business benefits on a broad base beyond the lighthouse which is great for marketing but does not change the bottom line?

The key element will be the transformation of the legacy backbone to benefit from technology trends like AI and to enable sustainable business change. This transformation is blocked by three major elements:

• lack of budget to tackle the broad change
• volume of effort needed to modernize the legacy environments
• readiness of the internal staff on new technologies and new ways of working

The first two elements are closely connected as manual effort leads to the high cost of change resulting in the mentioned budget constraints. Automation and modernization strategies help mitigating these elements. I have been through projects where we tackled modernization by using automated approaches to move from monolithic legacy apps to cloud native architectures. The architecture works, the approach works and still enterprises either do not touch this or fail to get the outcome they hope for. The single reason for this is element three - the readiness of the people.

Now, it sounds like getting the people ready is no rocket science but believe me it is, as the new skills touch a large group of people. It is not just solved by creating a virtual center of excellence where the already knowledgeable experts are being forced to collaborate across silos. It helps but does not create the effect of widespread knowledge building. Let me share a few examples of what I have seen.

• We modernized applications for a large enterprise that seemed well prepared. They had a defined training for their CI/CD environment that we even put our developers through and that was mandatory for their application owners. Nevertheless, the client organization was struggling. For some application owners we had to expand the knowledge transfer of our work into training sessions and we spent many additional hours. Sadly, the knowledge build up, internal and by us, was not sustainable as the client let the modernized applications rest and only tried to move these into production many months later. Guess what, since "knowledge not used, is being lost" there was a lack of readiness by the time of deployment. This ultimately brought the modernization to a full stop while the client is contemplating how to upskill the organization in the first place and how to do it in a sustainable way.
• We are running a migration and automation initiative for another enterprise, where we cannot create scale and velocity. The reason for that is a lack of decision speed solely founded on a lack of knowledge and culture shift. While this is an internal challenge to the client it stops us from delivering the potential value, we would be able to bring to the client at full speed.
• Another client is running on an outdated architectural approach and is struggling to cope with the resulting manual efforts for change and additions. Each new client is being implemented from scratch. Now again, the challenge that is preventing the client from driving a change towards a modern architecture is people based. The current set of developers knows the old tech stack but not any new one, they lack English skills and willingness to change. This leads to a high barrier to drive change. The barrier is HR driven, budget driven and ultimately risk driven. As a result, the change is not going to happen, closing the door on benefiting from the innovation trends mentioned above.

Now you could argue, just hire new people, transfer knowledge and drive change through this approach. Apart from challenges on exchanging an workforce and running an increased workforce while knowledge transfer and the change are being executed, there simply are not enough resources on the market. This leads to a fight for the scarce resources and is resulting in higher cost in a market where the demand exceeds the supply. So, we are back to square one and the budget squeeze.

It is time to act. Ignoring the situation will only boil you slowly like the frog. You need to cut through this by investing into your people, by investing into change, by communicating your way to each and everybody in your organization and adjust the organization itself to plan for individual journeys of your employees.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of sample actions to be considered. For a tailored and strategic approach please accept professional help.

• Create roles for people open to change and people resisting change (yes, that is possible and you will benefit from it)
• Modernize your legacy applications and consider sourcing of application operation at least temporarily until your employees are ready
• Tackle the simple applications first to achieve velocity and scale and create a proof point for the internal organization (why struggle with a difficult application and seed doubt)
• Make use of online training platforms, e.g., Udemy or Coursera, and create KPIs that measure progress even on an individual level
• Ensure that upskilling goes along with usage of the new skills
• Tackle the cultural change that goes along with new ways of working head on

And finally at the end, please allow me to give a you a key advice. It is all about communication. You cannot communicate enough if you want or need to change. The more you communicate, the more insight you create the more the people will buy into the change and finally become proponents. Maybe not all of them but the key people, will.