it in the age of the customer: how to deliver more ... · pdf file1 diginomica,...

Four strategies for speeding IT delivery – and one option to avoid at all costs.

IT in the age of the customer: how to deliver more applications, faster

I T i n t h e a g e o f t h e c u s t o m e r : h o w t o d e l i ve r m o r e a p p l i c a t i o n s , f a s t e rn e t c a l l . c o m

In large organisations, IT functions are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The vast majority of budget and resources are dedicated to maintaining legacy hardware and software estates, and to managing the vital, back-office applications that the business runs on. But at the same time, there’s never been more demand from the business for digital apps and services.

The business needs these new apps and services to win, serve and retain customers, but IT has limited resources to deliver them. And with modern digital skills in short supply, new developer talent is hard – and expensive – to come by.

Decision time for IT leadersSo, as a senior IT decision-maker, what should you do? Divert budget and resources away from the critical back-office applications and infrastructure that support the business, and focus on delivering the new applications the business desperately needs? Or turn down requests for new applications – and risk losing customers (and possibly also your developers) to more agile, digital companies?

The obvious answer is to do neither of these things, but instead explore a new way of working that supports both kinds of demand. A number of schools of thought are emerging as to what that new way of working should look like, ranging from Gartner’s vision of a “bimodal” approach to IT delivery, to the “agilification” of the entire IT function through the adoption of DevOps.

In this eBook:

Four ways to deliver more applications, fasterThis eBook explores four of the most commonly-advocated solutions – and warns against choosing a fifth option that will only serve to diminish IT’s role in the innovation process.

We hope it provides a useful digest of the options available to you as you navigate the transition to a new era of fast-paced, agile, and customer-centric IT delivery.


The IT Leader’s dilemma – maintain or innovate?In theory, technology and innovation go hand in hand. The relentless pace of technological advancement creates a relentless flow of exciting new experiences and time-saving digital services.

But in many established businesses, the opposite is true. Technology – in the form of the legacy systems of record that the business depends on – has become the enemy of innovation. While digital startups race ahead with game-changing new services, central IT teams are saddled with the responsibility for keeping this vital legacy estate running.

That means keeping decades-old systems stable and serviceable for business users, through continuous patching, upgrades, capacity planning and infrastructure management. It also means keeping core systems aligned with changing business needs, usually by building custom add-ons, reporting layers and point integrations, all of which create their own maintenance problems. And then there’s all the end-

user support that comes with an ageing IT estate.

Too much pressure on IT Analysts usually estimate this kind of work takes up 70-90% of IT time and budget. That may not have been such a problem in the days when back-office systems were almost the be-all and end-all of enterprise IT. But we are now in the Age of the Customer, where the quality of the digital experience is a key factor in a customer’s decision to stay with your brand or take their business elsewhere.


Customer-centric digital innovation has become essential to survival, but very few IT teams have the time, budget or resources to deliver new systems of engagement that will win new customers and wow existing ones. As a result, requests from the business for such systems pile up, and inevitably many are rejected or placed into a months-long development queue.

Something has to giveThe situation has earned IT an unfair reputation for obstructing innovation and progress. The reality is that the vast majority of CIOs and CTOs would like nothing more than to work with the business to design and deliver truly ground-breaking new digital services. But that can’t come at the expense of neglecting the systems that enable the business to operate. As Informatica’s CIO Eric Johnson told Information Week in 2013, “If the systems are down and the phones aren’t working, no one will care how innovative you are.”

So, for IT leaders who desperately want to help the business innovate, but feel shackled by the responsibility of maintaining a complex legacy estate, what’s the solution? The following chapters explore five potential approaches – four which hold considerable promise, and one which innovation-oriented CIOs should aim to avoid at all costs.

The age of the customer

“Empowered customers are shaping business strategy. Simply put, customers expect consistent and high-value in-person and digital experiences. They don’t care if building these experiences is hard or requires a complex, multifunction approach from across your business. They want immediate value and will go elsewhere if you can’t provide it.”

Forrester, Lead the Customer-Obsessed Transformation

“Through 2017, the market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organisation capacity to deliver them.”

Gartner, The Enterprise App Explosion: Scaling One to 100 Mobile Apps, May 2015

“If the systems are down and the phones aren’t working, no one will care how innovative you are.”

Eric Johnson, CIO, Informatica


Whether you call it bimodal IT, fast IT, or two-speed IT, this is the idea that the central IT function needs to be able to operate in two different modes: one “slow and steady”, focused on ensuring the long-term reliability of core systems, and one “fast and agile”, focused on rapidly trialling and delivering new, customer-facing systems that enhance the customer experience.

Although it wasn’t Gartner’s intention, many CIOs have interpreted bimodal IT as requiring two separate teams; one doing the “keeping the lights on” work that takes up 80% of IT’s time today, and the other working with customers to develop new digital apps and services.

Viewing the modes as being delivered by separate teams has led to a certain amount of scepticism about whether bimodal IT can work in the real world. A December 2015 article in Diginomica quotes an array of senior IT professionals predicting conflict between the teams, unhealthy competition for budget and resources, and poor integration between customer-facing and back-office systems.

And these are indeed the kinds of problems that many organisations experience when they set up a “skunkworks” or “labs” team, isolated from the rest of the business, unconstrained by existing obligations, systems, contracts or procurement processes, and with a remit simply to “innovate”.

As we noted in a previous eBook, How to Beat the Digital Disruptors at Their Own Game, keeping digital innovation separate is great for generating lots of leftfield ideas, but less good at generating ideas that are aligned with the business’s strategic objectives. The disconnected nature of the innovation team also makes it hard to embed successful ideas back into the core IT estate.

#1: Adopt a dual-mode approach to IT delivery

“Your organisation must be okay with risk – and the screw-ups, missteps and waste that inevitably accompany it. The problem, of course, is that an organisation steeped in the lore of Lean and Six Sigma naturally views them as sins to stamp out.”

Gartner, Kickstart Bimodal IT by Launching Mode 2 April 2015

“You’ll create a them vs. us culture. None of the novel concepts will ever be industrialised because the [Mode 2] Pioneers won’t develop them enough and the [Mode 1] Town Planners will refuse to accept them for being underdeveloped. Both groups feel they are the most important and both ridicules the other.” 1

Simon Wardley, CSC Leading Edge Forum

1 Diginomica, Gartner’s Bimodal IT Considered Harmful, December 2015


Bimodal: it’s all about the style of deliveryBut seeing Mode 1 and Mode 2 as requiring separate teams is actually disingenuous. A closer look at Gartner’s material reveals it’s the style of delivery that changes between the two modes, not necessarily the group of people delivering it. It’s entirely possible to have the same team deliver in both modes: going slowly and methodically when it’s a case of upgrading or re-architecting a core system, and quickly and experimentally when co-creating a new mobile app to speed the account opening process for Generation Y customers.

The difference in delivery style will be enacted in a number of ways. Mode 1 projects lend themselves more to a linear way of working, for example, like the Waterfall process that many enterprise IT teams already use. Mode 2 projects, meanwhile, benefit from an Agile or Lean Startup approach, in which a prototype (or minimum viable product) is rapidly assembled to test a hypothesis, and then iteratively refined – or rejected – based on feedback from users.

While some developers will be happy working across both modes, some may feel affinity with one mode or the other. It’s often suggested that, given the choice, most devs would choose to work in Mode 2, but that’s not actually the case; some are very comfortable with Mode 1.

That raises questions about whether to train everyone in Agile development and delivery methods, or just the contingent that’s keen to work on Mode 2 projects. (More on that in the next section.)

New tools support a bimodal approachThere are tools to consider, too: Agile development has its own tools for fast prototyping, rapid development and team collaboration across the dev-test-ops cycle, which will mean training and familiarisation for those who haven’t used them.

And one very interesting question, prompted by the emergence of Low-code development tools (see sidebar), is: “Does Mode 2 have to reside completely within IT?” If software can now be developed by business people with basic technical knowledge, could some Mode 2 projects be devolved out into the business to speed up delivery? We’ll examine that in more detail on page 9.

There are many nuances to the concept of bimodal IT, and many different ways to make it work within the organisation. But it does suggest a framework in which IT can deliver more new systems of engagement, faster, without losing focus on the core systems of record that the business relies on.

What is Low-Code development?Low-code application platforms enable people with no formal technical skills to design, prototype, test, build and deliver working software applications that can be used to automate internal or customer-facing processes.

They work by providing a drag and drop interface that enables users to configure, rather than code, the application logic. If a process owner understands how a process should flow, they can quickly configure that process into a working application, with just a few days’ training.

Low-code platforms often come with flexible licensing options, enabling them to be used as an experimental sandbox or to host and scale fully-featured, enterprise-grade applications.

To learn more about Low-code platforms, visit www.low-code.com.


An alternative option to the bimodal IT approach is to move the entire IT function to a DevOps way of working.

DevOps takes the principles of Agile development (building prototypes, iterating in short sprints, testing with users and gathering feedback throughout the process) and extends them across the whole technology lifecycle, from development to QA and management of live systems in production.

In a DevOps world, software applications are viewed not as complete, monolithic structures that take months or years to build, but as collections of much smaller, loosely-coupled services that can be worked upon independently and integrated back into the whole, for faster results.

That may not sound feasible, or even desirable, when it comes to big, legacy systems of record. For many CIOs it may sound simply too risky, which is why Gartner advocates a more traditional, Mode 1 way of working to deal with these systems.

New tools support a bimodal approachBut not everyone is so conservative. In a December 2015 paper called “Forget Two-Speed IT: DevOps Enables Faster Delivery Across the Board”, Forrester makes the case for taking a DevOps approach to all applications, not just new, customer-centric systems of engagement.

“The race for customers has turned into a race to deliver high quality applications faster. AD&D leaders understand that all applications need to be delivered faster, not just mobile and Cloud apps. While customer-facing systems of engagement (SOE) are the tip of the spear, the force behind them is the data managed in systems of record (SOR). SOE change more frequently, but SOR can’t stand still. When organisations deliver modern applications they have to coordinate software delivery across a wide range of platforms including social media, search-based advertising, various SOE platforms and multiple SOR. Businesses’ need for speed range [sic] from fast to faster.”

The way to deliver faster, according to Forrester, is for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals to “fundamentally change the way their teams organise staff, collaborate, and automate” – and that means moving wholesale to DevOps.

And it’s true: DevOps requires a major shift in just about everything enterprise IT takes for granted today – from culture, governance and process down to where people physically sit, what they spend their days doing, and the tools they use to get the job done.

For many companies, the move to DevOps is bound up with a strategic move to the Cloud; re-architecting legacy applications into loosely-coupled services that are easier to integrate with other applications, and which can make the most efficient use of the scaling capabilities of Cloud services.

#2: Go DevOps across the whole IT function

“All applications need to be delivered faster, not just mobile and Cloud apps.”


Reducing project timescales with DevOpsMoving legacy applications to the Cloud provides an opportunity not only to modernise the underlying code, but also to modernise the way apps of all kinds are managed and delivered. In a Cloud and DevOps world, applications can be continuously modified and updated, making it incomparably faster to roll out new functionality – in both customer-facing and back-office applications – whenever business users or customers need it.

Modern automation tools also make application maintenance jobs faster and less admin-heavy, which frees up time to work on designing and delivering new software. And in a DevOps environment, developers, testers and ops teams are equipped to share each other’s tasks, removing bottlenecks and ensuring that no team has to sit around waiting for another team to do something.

No one says it’s an easy journey, and there’s plenty of advice out there on how to make DevOps work for your organisation – including in the Forrester report cited above. But mature organisations that have moved to a DevOps model report that they are able to move much faster to design and deploy new software and services to meet customers’ needs.

UK insurance company Hiscox, for example, says it has achieved massive efficiencies in time and manpower by breaking down silos between teams, encouraging collaboration, making better use of automation, and using modern software delivery tools with a virtualized environment. In a blog post for Puppet Labs, Hiscox’s DevOps lead Jonathan Fletcher summarises the results as follows:

“In general, DevOps has meant big improvements in reliability and visibility, and those lead directly to improved productivity and speed of releases. With more reliability in your delivery process, you get a faster pace of change.” 2

The big advantage with DevOps is that everyone goes faster, not just the people working on “Mode 2” projects. And when the whole IT function goes faster, customers’ needs are met faster, and more time is freed up to work on applications that meet those needs.

2 Puppet Labs, Reducing the Cost of Release by 97% with DevOps July 2015


#3: Outsource to a new breed of IT partner

So far in this eBook, we’ve assumed that the central IT function resides inside the enterprise, and all application development and maintenance work is done in-house. But that’s actually a rare scenario in a mature organisation. It’s more likely that at least a portion of this work has been outsourced to one or more IT consultancies or systems integrators.

Outsourcing can deliver huge advantages in terms of cost savings in both manpower and infrastructure. It can also provide the organisation with access to skills that are difficult, expensive or impractical to hire in-house.

Can outsourcing work for Mode 2-style delivery?When it comes to maintaining the stability and reliability of core systems – the Mode 1 style of IT delivery we looked at in section 1 – traditional IT outsourcing comes into its own. But when it comes to moving fast to design, develop and deliver new, customer-facing systems of engagement – Mode 2-style delivery – outsourcing to traditional consultancies can often present difficulties.

Real-time collaboration, for example, can be a challenge if the outsourcer maintains an offshore development team. Many outsourcing contracts aren’t flexible enough to permit experimentation or shared risk, making it difficult to work with the partner to test out ideas.

Some outsourced development teams are simply set up to receive pre-gathered requirements, rather than actively work with customers to co-create solutions and work collaboratively on them. And while some outsourcers are starting to embrace Agile and DevOps ways of working, it’s extremely hard to bring those that don’t along for the ride if the organisation decides to go DevOps internally.

Some traditional outsourcers are aware of these limitations and are working to address them, but those that stick to more traditional and rigid ways of working can be a barrier to fast and experimental application delivery.

The need for a new breed of partner – and partnershipForrester recommends that CIOs re-evaluate their current contracts to see if existing suppliers are geared to working in a faster, more agile and more customer-centric manner, and if not, to forge new relationships with suppliers that are. In its note: “(Re)define Your Strategic Tech Vendor Relationships For The BT Agenda”, Forrester says:

Forrester is mainly talking here about technology vendors, but the same holds true of systems integrators and other outsourcing partners. Fortunately, a new breed of partner is emerging to fill the void; with business models and ways of working that enable rapid, experimental co-creation of new apps, not just with their clients, but also with their clients’ customers.

“The business technology (BT) agenda is driving a broad array of industry changes that today favours focused, smaller, and nimbler technology and services companies that don’t have an IT agenda lineage to sustain.”


Design thinking can produce customer-centric apps fasterOne such consultancy is Pancentric, a London-based firm of consultants that uses design thinking to take a customer-led approach to application development, predominantly for insurance companies. Pancentric teams its design thinking approach with rapid application prototyping and development, using a Low-code application platform (our own MATS).

Interviewed in February 2016 for the MATS blog, Pancentric’s director James Downes talked about the benefits of design thinking and Low-code development in rapidly delivering customer-friendly digital services:

“Insurance companies don’t tend to score well for customer experience, and that creates an opportunity for insurers willing to experiment with radically different approaches. Collaborating with customers using a design thinking approach is a great way to uncover new opportunities in value creation and innovation. And Low-code is a great way to experiment with those to quickly find out which ones are likely to resonate best with customers.”

Forrester, too, sees design thinking as an essential skill for building new, customer-centric processes that will improve the customer experience. In its February 2016 report “Build Design-Thinking Skills to Drive Customer-Centric Process Change”, it contrasts the empathetic and experimental design thinking approach with the more traditional systems-thinking approach that emphasises “logic, reason and predictability”, and urges businesses to bring design thinking skills into their armory.

While Forrester is talking about process design, the need for design thinking necessarily extends into application development, since applications are the embodiment in software of business processes. Partnering with a consultancy that specialises in design thinking, rapid application prototyping and agile development can provide instant access to those skills, and get more customer-facing application development projects moving faster.


#4: Empower business users to build their own apps

An interesting concept that has been gaining ground recently is the “citizen developer”. These are business users who would previously have gone to IT with ideas and requirements for new systems, but who now have tools at their disposal to build their own solutions.

Citizen developers have always existed – they’re the resourceful folk you find in every business, who build their own time-saving solutions and workarounds using tools like Excel and Microsoft Access. In the past, these people would get stuck when it came to building more sophisticated or robust solutions, because they lack the necessary software development skills. They would either have to wait for a developer from IT to come and help them, submit their request into the central IT project queue (in the knowledge that it might be rejected), or – and only if there was budget available – hire an external consultancy to build it.

Low-code is empowering citizen developersBut now, the game is now changing dramatically for people with this kind of drive and understanding of what needs to be done. Now, Low-code application development tools enable people with no formal technical skills to design, prototype, test, build and deliver working software applications that can be used to automate internal or customer-facing processes.

For IT departments struggling under the weight of project requests from the business, this presents an intriguing set of options. Could some of the work in the pipeline be devolved to citizen developers?

No CIO wants to lose control of application development, but Low-code offers an opportunity to enable citizen development in a controlled way.

And in fact, at Netcall we are seeing more and more organisations exploring ways to bring citizen developers together to design and build new applications faster than IT can manage on its own.

80% of enterprises are planning

citizen developer initiatives,

and can expect to increase their

development resource by 3x

if they do.

- IBM

What is a Citizen Developer?A user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. In the past, end-user application development has typically been limited to single-user or workgroup solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today, end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared services, fourth-generation language (4GL)-style development platforms and Cloud computing services.3

- Gartner IT Glossary


One interesting model of this type is the Low-code Innovation Lab. In this model, the lab is sanctioned and overseen by IT, but the majority of the developers who build and test ideas in it are citizen developers from across the organisation.

Those developers bring their ideas to the lab, where they can use a Low-code platform to rapidly configure a prototype, and test it with a sample of users. The good ideas get refined and deployed –even commercialised. And with the not-so-good ideas, lessons are learned quickly so there’s less risk of sinking large amounts of development resource into a flawed scheme.

The Low-code Innovation Lab is a safe place for citizen developers to rapidly test improvement and innovation hypotheses. And because Low-code platforms are quick and easy to learn, there’s no limit to the number of employees who can become citizen developers – so it’s an excellent way to scale innovation efforts.

IT remains in controlBut the involvement of IT remains crucial. In the models we have seen, IT acts as the guardian of the Low-code platform, providing guidance and advice, and validating that it’s being used properly. And whenever there is more technical work to be done, such as adding custom integrations to source systems, IT is on hand to carry out that more skilled programming work.

The Low-code Innovation Lab enables many more people across the business to innovate, and greatly reduces the burden on IT teams. But IT remains in control, which is an infinitely preferable method to our final, “don’t-go-there” option...


For CIOs confronted with more project requests than their team has the capability to deliver, there’s one final, nuclear option: just let the business get on with it.

Shadow IT is already a major issue in large organisations. When business users can’t get what they want – or can’t get it fast enough – from IT, they resort to unsanctioned alternatives. That may be subscribing to SaaS applications; installing new productivity tools to get things done; commissioning external agencies to develop mobile apps; or even hiring developers and letting them loose in the public Cloud with the departmental credit card and a license to experiment.

None of this is a recipe for success. For a start, costs can quickly start to get out of hand, especially where external consultancies are involved. The application estate swells, creating support and security headaches. But perhaps most frustratingly of all, it leaves IT out in the cold when it comes to designing and delivering the next generation of digital services.

Don’t get left out of innovation effortsIt’s often said that shadow IT is the business trying to innovate, and that should ring alarm bells with IT leaders who want to take an active – and indeed leadership – role in the innovation process. By turning a blind eye to shadow IT, CIOs are “including themselves out” of the organisation’s innovation efforts, and for that reason alone, it’s not an option that any future-looking CIO should countenance.

Fortunately, as we hope this eBook has demonstrated, there are at least four better options to explore than simply abdicating responsibility and letting business users take their own paths.

#5: Turn a blind eye to shadow IT


ConclusionMost CIOs will agree that if their organisation is to continue to compete and win in the Age of the Customer, they must increase and accelerate the delivery of new digital applications and services. This eBook has explored four ways of making that possible. Not all of them are suitable for every business, but CIOs should be able to identify an approach or combination of approaches that could work for their organisation and circumstances.

One thing is clear: speeding application delivery not only requires new ways of working, but also new tools. Whether you adopt bimodal IT, go DevOps across the board, work with a new breed of innovation partner, or empower your citizen developers, a Low-code application platform is an essential investment to enable more people to develop more applications, faster.

Visit netcall.com/lowcode to start your Low-code journey or drop us a [email protected]

And if you’d like a demo of how a Low-code platform like Netcall works in practice, please do get in touch.


© 2 0 1 8 N e t c a l l Te l e c o m L i m i t e dN C E 3 - LC- 0 2 1 7 - 4 0 2 1

Introducing NetcallThe Netcall Low-code platform gives you everything you need to build, deploy and improve apps without coding.

Netcall helps process professionals beat the IT queue, giving them the power to fix the processes that need fixing and the freedom to experiment and innovate – and deliver a real competitive advantage.

Ready to learn more?

Take a look at our case studies to see how organisations including Thomas Cook, UPG and Nationwide are making this new approach to process improvement and process innovation a reality.

And if you’d like to see just how easy it is to use the Netcall Low-code platform, request a demo – we’ll be happy to show you.

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