When writing this article and during my daily work, I often have the challenge of communicating and explaining different topics. Sometimes it is challenging to explaining low-level technical aspects to high-level managers.
This article attempts, and I will bounce in wordings and argumentation between technology language and business language.
It is a thin line between explaining something and a basic listing of buzzwords. At least, I try to define some expressions concerning my perspective.
Within the age of digital transformation, a significant change within enterprise IT Infrastructure will take place. Micro-services will play a vital role in serving the customer.
Here, digital transformation describes all enterprise activities to leverage customer value by utilizing data prioritized.
This concise definition already shows the complexity behind the expression of digital transformation. Sooner or later, it covers all the activities of our daily work, at least every task which generates data or consumes data.
An enterprise is any human endeavor involving people, its purpose to serve a customer, where various kinds of platforms support each activity.
The customer value describes an enterprise’s heart while delivering the value is often done via services and products affecting humans and their environment.
The term data covers all digitalized information mostly managed via IT infrastructure appropriately.
From a technology perspective, digital transformation is the path towards data-centric decision making resulting in data-centric value delivery.
Within the endeavor of a digital transformation, a significant change within enterprise IT Infrastructure will take place.
Micro-Services will play a significant role in the restructuring of the overall IT architecture. The change will have benefits for developers as well for the organization.
The significant change is the grouping around services instead of libraries.
A service links to a customer’s need, while a (software) library typically defines a collection of functional (software) packages made generally available.
However, a (micro-) service should fulfill a customer need (internal or external). Its design is managed and owned by joint development and operation teams with an active link to business units. The business units have to review their value regularly.
Here, we can see the link to organization design and the consequences behind it. The technical terminology links to the DevOps movements; for the top-level management, it is the organizational structure question. Who is responsible for building and managing a (digital) customer service.
It is all about purpose /value grouping instead of identical skill /functional grouping!
In summary, when discussing (technical) artifacts with practitioners or top managers, only the terminology changes, the purpose should remain the same — delivering value to customer’s needs, independent of internal or external customers, respectively.