This is the second of a two-part interview with Mobiquity CTO Ty Rollin. In part one, Rollin highlighted three trends making CIOs' jobs more complex.
What trends are likely to post the biggest problems for IT during the next couple of years? Ty Rollin, CTO of the mobile technology company Mobiquity, takes a look at some of the issues CIOs and CTOs will be facing going forward.
1. Change Management: "Change management is becoming a block to agile business," Rollin warns. "It is preventing the adoption of faster, better business processes." The problem, he says, is that the speed of technological change is way beyond the control of corporate IT departments or tech leaders. "The depth of change is being highlighted by hackers," he adds. "For instance, Heartbleed and other malware show that not changing and not actively testing your own systems means you will get hacked."
Meanwhile, technological complexity at most enterprises is so great that neither processes nor IT employees can get their arms around the problem. And that complexity is continuously increasing as IT copes with more and more diverse systems, business demands, and legacy technology.
What's a CIO to do? IT's approach to change management must evolve, Rollin says. "IT must stop saying no and embrace a culture of change." Begin by implementing continuous delivery (in which software deployments are automated), he adds. "Continuous delivery is core to your business. It is the framework to agility, and you need to get it going first."
Next, he says, "Evaluate standard operating procedures (SOPs) and adjust them to support agility. For instance, does your RFP process enable a faster, more nimble business?"
2. Automated Infrastructure: "Automation has freed every piece of infrastructure," Rollin declares. "Location of service is no longer a constraint. Data location is the last frontier for agility."
Hardware innovation is episodic and driven by existing capital assets, while software innovation has a lower barrier to testing, adjusting, and iteration, he adds. "Networking gear is aging, providing wide vectors for attacks. And data center management means that shrinking teams have to cover too much ground."
All these factors are why every enterprise should be looking at or deploying automated infrastructure. "Newer solutions minimize the need for physical hardware within the enterprise," Rollin says. Many data center tools make this easier, he adds, especially with new networking approaches such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
"All infrastructure must be defined in automation scripts," he says. "Get your infrastructure into an automation script and now you can deploy it anywhere. You have new models for disaster recovery and global deployment — instant infrastructure in China is as easy as running your script!" It's also wise to get your staff trained in automation tooling he adds, and start eliminating data centers and other physical systems. "The longer data centers stay around, the greater the opportunity cost to your business."
If all this seems like too much too fast, Rollin recommends a baby step: "Reduce the number of pets in your infrastructure. You need to think in terms of cattle." [In the pets v. cattle analogy, 'pets' are unique, lovingly cared for, and nursed back to health when they get ill. 'Cattle' are considered interchangeable, and if one gets ill it is simply replaced. The idea is that most of your infrastructure should be cattle, with very few pets.]
3. Microservices: "Microservices is a software architecture where applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using APIs. The services are highly decoupled and each focuses on a small task," Rollin explains. Microservices support continuous delivery and support agility, he adds, bringing simplicity to software architecture.
"And it's a great way to separate UI-driven services, allowing UX to be adapted easily without changing the underlying systems," he adds. "Adopting microservices will grow your capability faster than you can plan while simplifying your enterprise architecture. Watch for an increase in usage of common services across your organization."
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