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Agile and DevOps for Kiosks

Alan Shimel talks with Sam Zietz, the CEO of Grubbrr and Touchsuite, about how software for kiosks can use Agile and DevOps to keep up with a wide range of hardware profiles. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.

Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another segment here on TechStrong TV. I’m really happy to be joined by a good friend of mine today. His name is Sam Zietz. Sam is the founder, CEO of GRUBBRR. You may not know the company but Sam’s going to tell you all about it. Hey, Sam. Welcome to TechStrong TV.

Sam Zietz: Al, thank you for having me on. Excited to see you again.

Alan Shimel: Yeah, it’s been – well, with COVID it’s been a long, strange trip. Sam, we’ve never had you on TechStrong TV though. We’ve never really talked about the company. Why don’t we start with that. Give people a little background on GRUBBRR and maybe a little of your own background.

Sam Zietz: Sure. So GRUBBRR is the leader in self-ordering technology. When you talk about self-ordering technology you think kiosks, mobile ordering, online ordering. And in reality, this was going to naturally occur over the next 5, 15 years. That’s before COVID hit. COVID came about and acted as a huge accelerant. So if you think about how we used to go to a bank and there used to be a teller, that teller got replaced over a 5 to 15-year period of time by online banking and ATMs.

We used to go to the airport, and in the airport we used to see a ticketing agent. That ticketing agent got replaced by a bank of kiosks or QR codes on your smart phone. Same thing was going to happen in many verticals like restaurants and hospitality and retail, and it’s going to be a combination of kiosk, mobile and online, and that online will be the company’s website or a third party delivery service like an Uber Eats, a Grubhub, or a Postmates. What ended up happening through is COVID, and now all of a sudden nobody wanted to interact with a cashier and cashiers didn’t want to interact with consumers either.

This was all of a sudden a hazardous position and people didn’t want to shop any longer for that type of work. So that accelerated the move towards self-ordering technology. Then Joe Biden was elected president, and one of this four pillars was this $15.00 an hour minimum wage, and regardless of where you fall out politically, whether you think it will be successful or not, he has, and whether it’s passed or not the minimum wage has increased. And right now we’re in a labor shortage on that end of the market for a combination of factors, many of which is people don’t want to come back and do those types of jobs.

And as a result, you’re seeing especially in restaurants that they can’t even open their doors many times because they don’t have the employees. So for all of these reasons we’ve accelerated the movement towards self-ordering technology.

Alan Shimel: Yeah. I mean, Sam, this all falls under what we call digital transformation, right? And digital transformation, as you mentioned, was well underway before COVID, but we’ve probably accelerated four to seven years of digital transformation in the last year, year and a half. And the move towards automation, which is what this is, was again well under way. Quite frankly, when we look at should we automate everything – this is a question for academics – should we automate everything, should we automate only what should be automated or should we not automate everything for the sake of preserving jobs, and whether you believe in a Star Trek future where you get a basic, whatever they call it, wage where they send you money or not, quite frankly, if a machine can do it better they don’t take sick days, they don’t steal, purposely anyway.

Hopefully not. They’re a better employee in some regards. So if there’s a machine that can do the job better, a futurist or technologist will say by all means the machine should do the job then because that frees up people to do hopefully higher-level work, more valuable work. Now are there some people that can’t do higher level, more valuable work and what do we do with them as a society – that’s probably a discussion for another day. But the fact is that today we have the technology, to quote an old TV show, to do this, and that’s really what you guys are doing there at GRUBBRR.

Sam Zietz: Yeah. And historically this should’ve occurred years ago. It really was restaurant owners said, “Hey, you know what? We’ve been doing it the same way for the last 20 years,” and because labor was so cheap and because the minimum wage was so low, instead of investing in technology like almost every other industry has they said, “You know what? Let’s just throw cheap labor at it,” and that’s what occurred. COVID has exposed those businesses that had not invested in technology, and quite frankly rewarded those companies that had been proactive.

They were extremely successful during the pandemic, the ones that had digital, they had an online presence, they had these self-ordering applications already in place. They were hitting record numbers. Everybody else either exposed or permanently shut down as a result. And by the way, these aren’t jobs that anybody wants.

Even pre pandemic, the average turnover for a cashier in this country was 150 percent annually. I think Panera put out a stat before COVID that they were at 100 percent. And they were bragging that they were at 100 percent. So they were proud of the fact that every one of their employees –

Alan Shimel: It was only 100 percent.

Sam Zietz: Yeah. So these aren’t –

Alan Shimel: There’s no doubt. Look, I think we’re both saying the same thing. This is the way it was going. We just had an accelerant take place. So let’s talk now about GRUBBRR. So you guys are filling that void by developing software solutions that allow for self-ordering. And whether people are ordering online via the internet for like a third-party delivery or in person, it’s still a software-empowered transaction. Like everything else, software is leading the world.

In your case though, Sam, the challenge is that even with self-ordering it comes in a lot of form factors. It comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. And how do you make a software that is shape and size, form-factor independent? I imagine that’s got to be a challenge.

Sam Zietz: Yeah. Well, we’ve got talented dev people, so from my perspective it’s easy. They do all the hard stuff.

Alan Shimel: You didn’t write too many lines of code. I get it. But the challenge is there.

Sam Zietz: We’re agnostic on the hardware side, so we work with all of the leading kiosk manufacturers too. They bring us in for the software. Why? Because nobody’s going to buy a kiosk by itself. A kiosk by itself doesn’t do anything. It’s the software that does it. Just like your Dell computer doesn’t do anything.

It’s the Microsoft and the other applications that you put on it, that’s the reason you’re buying the computer. So it works the same way on the kiosk. We’re agnostic. So it’s funny, we built this beautiful restaurant of the future in our headquarters here that people can come in and they can see everything in a working environment, but then after they realize we want a kiosk or we want KDS or we want mobile, whatever it is, we take them next door into our showroom and there we have everything.

In there they can decide do we want a wall mount, do we want a tabletop, do we want freestanding, do we want a 15-inch, a 21-inch, a 24-inch, a 32 – you know, whatever they want. Do we want it in a portable fashion where it’s truly mobile? All of those options are there, but the software at the end of the day, the core that’s running it, it’s the same. It’s the same software. And you’re right, that’s exactly what we spent our time building, was software regardless of form factor that will work the same.

And the key to this is that somebody can operate it with no training. So you don’t need to – our competitors in the kiosk space, for the most part, fall into two categories. There are POS companies that turn their POS system sideways and say now it’s a kiosk. Well, that doesn’t work. Or they’re writing an app on an iPad, and that clearly doesn’t work either. So really the advantage in which you were talking about online and now going in store with a kiosk, one of the great things about that is the marketing team and the brand owners can now curate that user experience much like they do with the online experience.

So you can control and provide that consumer the absolute best experience, where before you had a cashier and maybe you taught them at the end to say, hey, at the burger place, do you want fries with that? Okay, and more people buy fries because the cashier asked them if they wanted fries. However, if I’m ordering a salad the likelihood that I’m going to buy fries is pretty low. However, I might take a fruit cup, I might take a healthy treat.

So being able to, again, pair offerings to the items that that consumer would like increases the average ticket and improves the experience for that consumer. You also eliminate all the errors, right? Because now you’re putting it in yourself. How many times have you gone and said, “Listen, I’d like a hamburger – I’ll have a cheeseburger with extra ketchup, no pickles,” so they go, “Got, it extra pickles, no ketchup.” You’re like, no.

So there’s a whole host of reasons why that experience is better and could be faster, because maybe you could only afford to put one cashier in there, but you could put a whole slew of kiosks in there for a fraction of the price of one cashier. Well now you eliminate wait times and you can redeploy personnel into the actual prep of food and improving consumer experience.

Alan Shimel: Yep. There’s another issue I wanted you to touch on, Sam, and that is really one of the inherent advantages of modern software and whether it’s an app, think of it as an app, or it’s just portable software that’s not particularly tied to – hardwired, if you will, into the form factor of hardware, the ability to update on the fly. Right? You change your menu items, you change your price, your running specials, or I mean really, really big functionality – we’re going to start accepting PayPal or Apple Pay or Google Pay or whatever the – we’re going to start taking bitcoin.

I don’t care how you want to pay for it. But right? We need to update that. By having it all dependent on software, not burned into the silicon, we do that as well. How does GRUBBRR handle that? Like the whole update process?

Sam Zietz: Yeah. So first off, we can update everything in real time as well as – so we can also be notified before even the client knows that there’s an issue with software. So maybe their internet went down because their provider – there was a problem, whatever. Many times we’re calling them and saying, “Hey, your internet’s out.” Oh, wow. Somebody was in the closet and unplugged the router or whatever and, boom, it’s back up.

But you’re talking about an entire ecosystem. So because we have the ecosystem instead of a bunch of disparate pieces of technology in there, you’re absolutely right. You make one change. So price would be an example. If we want to change up a price it changes on a kiosk, it’ll change in the POS if they’re using a POS. It will also change on their digital signage, so the menu board above.

Great. We want to change the price. Now let’s say you’re out of avocados. Boom. Now guacamole comes off the menu, so now it’s not even on the menu board if you don’t want it to be. If you run happy hour, great. At 5:00 we change the price, at 7:00 we change it back.

There’s none of that whiteout or cardboard being take up with those changes. We’ve also integrated –

Alan Shimel: [Inaudible comment]

Sam Zietz: – AI and machine learning into it, so based on weather, time of year, time of day, order frequency, items will move up or down on the menu. Because we all go left to right. So what you want to do is you want to feature the most popular items or the items that that consumer’s most likely to order at that point of time to the left so that they can then make their decision quicker and move on in the ordering process.

Alan Shimel: Excellent. Sam, we’re running low on time. I did want to mention, I know you guys recently announced a deal with Samsung, I believe, which is probably one of the largest – I’m going to assume one of the largest kiosk producers in the world – to be powered by GRUBBRR. Do you want to tell us a little bit?

Sam Zietz: Yeah. So Samsung is obviously a very large company. I think they’re the sixth most recognizable brand in the world. They announced on June 30th that they’re entering the kiosk space. I would bet that in short order they will probably be the 800-pound gorilla in the kiosk space. What they’ve really done is they’ve democratized it, bringing that price standpoint down so it’s affordable to everybody.

So you’re going to have a lower price. But traditionally kiosks were kind of hobbled together. They were a shell with a whole bunch of other pieces of technology kind of plugged in to make it look like it was one thing, but it was really five or six things. Samsung has truly built one slick unit that has it all built, which has allowed them to eliminate points of failure so the unit will be more successful. Obviously nobody builds screens as effectively as they do.

In fact, they also have it so from touching it you can’t catch bacteria or COVID or any of that. But the exciting thing for us is, again, as great as a piece of software is, no one is going to buy a kiosk unless it does something, and that’s where we come in. We provide the true value proposition that powers it, and by buying the kiosk with our software you end up reducing OPEX or labor or at least solving for labor when you can’t even find it. More importantly, you increase your revenue.

Typically, our clients see a 12 to 22 percent uplift in average ticket because people will buy more as a result of that curated experience, and we improve customer experience. So those are the value propositions there, but it’s exciting. When you partner with somebody like Samsung it’s not just here in the US. It’s worldwide. And they’ve got unbelievable reach.

Alan Shimel: Oh, yeah. We’ve dealt with them. I mean, just another example, no pun and no irony intended, but software is eating the world. Hey, Sam, you know what we didn’t tell people? Where can get they go get more information about GRUBBRR?

Sam Zietz: Our website’s probably the best place, GRUBBRR.com, G-R-U, double B, double R dot com. So, yeah.

Alan Shimel: Excellent. Alright, man. Hey, say hello to the family. Best of luck with GRUBBRR. Maybe we’ll be ordering somewhere on some GRUBBRR software soon out there. Check it out. Full disclosure. I know Sam a long time, maybe 20 years. Happy to see him doing well with this and playing in the software game. Sam, be well, and we’ll speak to you soon. Come back on and keep us posted.

Sam Zietz: Alright, Al. Thank you again for having me on.

Alan Shimel: Alrighty. Sam Zietz from GRUBBRR here on TechStrong TV. We’re going to take a break. We’ll be right back with our next guest.

[End of Audio]

February 17, 2022
Best of 2021 – From Agile to DevOps to DevSecOps: The Next Evolution
As we close out 2021, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the ninth in our series of the Best of 2021.

As the workforce shifts to remote locations, networks are becoming more diffuse as the edge gets farther away. At the same time, the number of devices and applications on those networks continues to rise. Some estimates suggest that, by 2030, there will be 15 connected devices for every person on the planet.

The rapid expansion of the remote workforce and their associated application needs has created a significant challenge for both application developers and the IT professionals tasked with deployment and maintenance of applications. Finding the right balance between speed of release and stability and reliability of applications – never an easy task – is paramount for the success of any organization.

Agile and DevOps evolved to help organizations strike this balance, providing the best possible customer experience in the shortest realistic time frame. But have Agile and DevOps fulfilled that promise?

The Promise of the Agile Manifesto

While Agile as a methodology has been known and followed for nearly two decades, the ways in which organizations have applied Agile have been as varied as the organizations themselves.

The Agile manifesto set out four basic values when it was first written in 2001:
- Individuals and interactions take precedence over processes and tools.
- Working software takes precedence over comprehensive documentation.
- Customer collaboration takes precedence over contract negotiation.
- Response to change takes precedence over mindlessly following plans.
Agile processes are applied across a range of development activities, from development of standalone applications to development of cloud-native business applications. The Agile Manifesto also contains several more principles that further explain what the values mean when put in practice.

These Agile principles can be condensed into a few areas of focus:

Prioritize the customer over the product

Agile development requires continuous customer engagement throughout the entire development process, with the end goal being frequent product delivery based on specific customer feedback. While this can present challenges for an Agile team, particularly when customers demand changes late in the development cycle, Agile maintains that the best way to elevate customer experience is to make the customer part of the development process.

Trust Agile Teams to Self-Organize and Self-Manage

Agile focuses on smaller teams that remain in constant communication with customers, as well as with each other. These teams should include both developers and those with knowledge of the larger business requirements being met through development. For these teams to work effectively, trust is key. Agile posits that self-organized teams, given leeway to pursue their projects in the way they see fit, result in the shortest development cycles.

Keep it Simple

Agile teams require simplicity. This correlates with Agile’s disdain for overuse of process. Agile seeks to minimize the total amount of work required, thus minimizing overall development time.

Agility Leads to Agility

Just as Agile teams continuously improve their product and the customer experience, they also constantly improve themselves. Constant evolution of teams and the processes they employ (remember, teams before processes) improves team agility itself.

While the Agile values and principles seem simple, effective application of the values and principles is another story entirely. Indeed, at times, the implementation of Agile development has violated the very first value of the manifesto by focusing on which tools and processes should be used. But, in an environment where more users are clamoring for more products and services, implementation of Agile methodologies is not just important, it is imperative.

Building on Agile with DevOps

The precise meaning of the term itself and the scope of DevOps remain a source of debate. At a high level, DevOps is the marriage of the development cycle with post-development activities, such as deployment and maintenance.

According to open source contributor Barbara Ericson of Cloud Defense, “Instead of IT operations and software development being siloed off from each other, DevOps breaks down the traditional boundaries that previously existed between them in order to achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of quality software features and applications to end users.”

Just as with Agile, the effective implementation of DevOps requires cultivating a DevOps culture within the organization. However, Agile and DevOps are also not mutually exclusive. That is to say, DevOps is not merely a replacement for or an evolution of Agile. Although Agile and DevOps differ in their structures and approaches, they can work in unison to achieve the ultimate goals of speedy deployment and enhanced customer experience.

While Agile and DevOps share common goals, they have not always agreed on how to achieve those goals. DevOps differs in many respects from Agile, but, at its best, DevOps applies Agile methodologies, along with lean manufacturing principles, to speed up software deployment.

One area of particular tension between Agile and DevOps is that the latter relies heavily on tools; in particular, when it comes to the automation of testing and deployment processes. But DevOps can overcome the resistance of Agile developers to tool usage simply by applying Agile principles themselves.

Effectively, DevOps proponents must convince Agile teams that dogmatic adherence to the underlying principles of Agile is actually inconsistent with Agile in the first place. Ironically, Agile developers who insist that the process is always bad actually violate Agile principles by refusing to acknowledge the benefits offered through change, another Agile principle.

The challenge is to have the Agile development teams trust in the automation efforts of DevOps, while at the same time encouraging the DevOps team to consider the business goals of deployment rather than pursuing speed of deployment for its own sake.

With constant communication between the Agile team and DevOps team (another Agile principle), development can achieve a degree of comfort with DevOps tasks and processes. This means that testing and deployment automation can proceed quickly, resulting in a decreased time to market, overall.

Ultimately, Agile and DevOps can work together most effectively when they recall their shared goals: smaller change increments based on feedback resulting in faster delivery cycles.

Continued Evolution: DevSecOps

As networks expand and businesses continue to integrate cloud-based services (in many cases, building multi-cloud environments), security issues become more and more complex. One area in which Agile is lacking is in integrating security into the development process. Unfortunately, in an Agile environment, application security is often an issue addressed after development, rather than as part of the process. Enter the next iteration of DevOps: DevSecOps.

DevSecOps revolves around three basic principles: ensuring data security while minimizing inconvenience for users in accessing data, using development tools that identify risks as early as possible in the development process and ensuring data encryption using technologies such as secure sockets layer (SSL) and virtual private networks (VPNs).

While DevSecOps and Agile may also disagree about the priority of tools, security must become an integral part of any development project. This is why Agile, DevOps and DevSecOps must all work together to ensure not only rapid deployment but secure deployment.

The Next Evolution

Agile and DevOps were both important evolutions of the software development process, but DevSecOps is the next evolutionary step. Despite a few disparate characteristics, Agile, DevOps and DevSecOps can and should work in unison to achieve their shared goal: the best possible customer experience and short deployment cycles.
December 24, 2021
The Need for Agile, Adaptable IT Infrastructure
Through the adoption of Agile concepts and new best practices such as automated testing, organizations can move beyond the innovation curve and bolster their IT infrastructure. In fact, the need to build agile and resilient IT infrastructure has become increasingly pertinent over the past 18 months.

From remote working and managing the diverse needs of employees in remote locations to the growing rates of cybercrime, the move from the physical world to the virtual one has seriously impacted the ability of organizations to operate. It comes as no surprise that business leaders are increasingly investing more in new tools and technologies to improve their IT infrastructure, transform operations and drive business value.

That said, it still remains relatively rare for enterprises to wholly adopt Agile approaches and techniques, despite the fact that doing so can help improve the efficiency at which goods and services hit the market. The fact is that many technology companies still do not use Agile as it is difficult to implement at scale. In addition, Agile transformation demands a cultural change, which can often take time.

Nevertheless, sooner or later, Agile IT will need to be implemented across businesses in various industry sectors, as well as across all branches of an organization. Our experience has been that Agile transformation will help your business grow and succeed.

What is Agile IT?

Agile is a philosophy—a mindset that can be applied to improve the provisioning, management and operation of digital infrastructure. Agile promotes business-led development, whereby a product owner and software development team collaborate as a single entity to deliver tasks that are prioritized based on business value. These tasks are also delivered over a short timeframe, such as via two-week sprints.

Essentially, your infrastructure is far more likely to be both secure and resilient if Agile concepts are implemented throughout the software engineering process. As a result, new digital products can be delivered to customers more quickly. For example, Agile ways of working include making small, iterative changes to deliver high-quality results with speed. You can also spin up infrastructure when needed, which keeps the cost of innovation down.

The Differences Between Agile and Traditional IT Infrastructure?

Infrastructure agility is best achieved using modern solutions such as cloud technology. This significantly differs from the traditional approach of having on-premises infrastructure, which cannot be scaled up or down as needed. In fact, on-premises solutions often require extensive upfront capital, while investing in cloud resources works on a pay-as-you-go model to deliver flexibility and elasticity for strategic needs.

The conflict between adaptive software methods and predictive methods is another significant difference between these approaches. Development teams follow a comprehensive plan in traditional waterfall approaches, and any changes must go through stringent change control management. Agile requirements, on the other hand, require flexibility, allowing teams to adjust to changes as soon as they occur. This method is suitable for smaller projects that must be performed quickly and efficiently.

Benefits of Implementing Flexible IT Infrastructure

The advantages of having Agile IT infrastructure are numerous. In fact, the adoption of Agile methods not only promotes business growth but is also a great way to reduce costs and improve team performance. By working in sprints, teams can turn around features more often and nurture their value throughout the business. Agile transformation also enables organizations to offer new products or solutions to customers faster, gain early feedback and make changes if necessary, thus avoiding error from the very beginning.

Cost optimization is another benefit to consider. With Agile infrastructure housed in the public cloud, IT leaders can expand or decommission resources based on consumer demand. Cloud companies’ pay-as-you-go strategy also ensures that costs are kept to a minimum viable level. For example, maximum limitations can be set for the scaling out of resources. Most importantly, agile working methods eliminate the need for substantial upfront investments, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI).

How to Achieve Agility

The benefits of Agile transformation are clear; however, the journey to achieving this can take time. First and foremost, becoming Agile requires a clear understanding of what it means and why it is important for your business’ competitive context. Once the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are defined, the ‘how’ becomes easy. The three core steps to achieving this agility are:
1. Implementing new methods
  Instead of trying to rework existing IT management tasks and procedures, it is often better to think of new ones as part of the Agile journey. This will ensure that your system’s performance and availability are in line with your core goals.
2. Investing in the right tools
  Agile is all about delivering smaller outcomes quickly. To achieve this speed, automating key stages of the software development process is key. There are a host of tools available to undertake this automation, including hybrid cloud solutions that can seamlessly switch between the public and private cloud. A careful selection of the tools that best fit your needs and the correct implementation of these throughout the organization is paramount to achieving success.
3. Changing the culture
  To become an agile business, the entire organization requires a cultural change—from how the business discovers a problem to how that problem is resolved by technology teams and monitored in production to enable a faster feedback loop. At every stage of the process, team members need to perform tasks differently, which often requires training, buy-in from the wider team and a collaborative approach.
Investment in Agile IT is a smart decision for business leaders hoping to transform their operations, ensure resilience and drive business value. By choosing infrastructure that caters to these needs, you can save money and ensure confidence at critical moments.
November 10, 2021
Your Tech is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure

A few weeks ago, one of my neighbors dug a ditch in his yard, hit a fiber internet line and knocked out my internet for eight hours. There I was, ready to start working, and I was cut off from my colleagues for an entire day.

That experience highlighted the importance of a good digital infrastructure—both at the office and at home—particularly as the pandemic has ushered in a hybrid work model. When the pandemic hit, organizations that were agile and had a strong digital infrastructure (including processes) were better able to quickly shift to remote work. Those that were not as digitally mature were forced to adapt.

Eighteen months later, it’s clear that the hybrid model is here to stay, making it even more vital that organizations ensure their workers have the right tech tools to work effectively—and it all begins with a strong digital infrastructure.

Just Because it’s On a Screen Doesn’t Make it Digital

Let’s begin with a definition of digital. I recently had a conversation with a business owner who proudly proclaimed, “We’re digital now.” In actuality, all he had done was put a PDF form on an iPad. Once his clients filled out the PDF, he still printed it and put it in a paper folder. That’s what I call an immature vision of digital, and it’s an extreme example of the ambiguity that often exists around the concept of digital transformation.

It’s not that paper is anathema to digital processes; in some industries (health care, for example) we want paper as a backup. For instance, if I’m a physician at your bedside and the power and/or Wi-Fi goes out and I can’t access your digital records, I need to be able to look at your chart and treat you. So there is a need for paper. But when considering the hybrid or remote work environment, the goal should be to move processes online.

Digital Infrastructure is the Key to Agility

As noted earlier, agile businesses are better able to adapt to changes like the move to a hybrid work model. Agile simply means the ability to move quickly and easily, the ability to move fast and make decisions in a fluid way. To do this, we must remove unnecessary steps so we’re able to focus on the end goal and the essential parts of the process.

This is where a strong (and reliable) digital infrastructure comes in. When you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for digital infrastructure, the foundation is electricity and the internet, and then you build on that. I need computers and hardware and a network, and then I need software platforms and then I need an end-user interface.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; let’s go back to the basics. Once we have reliable electricity and internet, we need to look at other technology that can benefit the remote worker, like upgraded microphones and cameras for all those Zoom meetings.

These upgrades shouldn’t be an afterthought on the part of organizations; they are at the center of their employees’ hybrid experience and can be another key to success. It’s not enough to send employees home with a laptop and a monitor anymore. Employers must focus on ergonomics (standing desks, good chairs) and the hardware their employees need to be effective at home. If the employer doesn’t provide them directly, they might consider offering a stipend for employees to make the upgrades themselves.

(Organizations might even consider providing generators to workers who live in rural areas. I have one at my house. And once satellite internet service comes to my town, I’ll have a much more reliable digital infrastructure.)

Now we can start building on that infrastructure. Start with audio and video communication (Zoom, Teams, Dialpad). Then add chat (Slack, Google Chat) and a good customer relationship management (CRM) system (Salesforce, HubSpot). Where does your data live? Having a great CRM system is critical.

Using Digital to Put People First

Organizations ignore the importance of digital infrastructure at their peril. Not only are the days long-gone when employees stayed with a company for 30 or 40 years, but we’re now in the midst of the Great Resignation, where workers are leaving their positions in droves. So it’s incumbent upon organizations to listen to their employees and give them what they need to be successful in a hybrid environment.

And we’re not just talking about tech. Organizations need to keep employees engaged to really understand the pulse that’s around the organization because, as we all know, the culture and tone of an organization can go ebb and flow. It’s critical for organizations to really listen to what employees are asking for and to be flexible so that they can react and adapt to changing times.

If they don’t, a ruptured internet cable may be the least of their worries.

October 8, 2021
How to Successfully Scale Agile

Agile has proved its value to businesses across industries and geographies. In fact, the pandemic elevated it to an absolute necessity for organizations’ success and survival. Business leaders around the world invested aggressively in Agile transformation as they scrambled to meet changing customer demands through newly hybrid and remote workforces. Not surprisingly, the faster they adopted Agile methodologies at scale, the higher the value it delivered for them. Research indicates that the value Agile delivers can be a chance to grow ahead of peers as high as 63%.

What enterprises in the U.S. now need is to move the right Agile levers to maximize business outcomes. The same research prescribes an agenda to make that happen:

Mapping Customer Journeys

This involves assessing what purpose the company’s offering serves and how value flows through the systems that surround it to the customer. By identifying the critical path of value flow and prioritizing Agile investments at the nodes of value, both volume and velocity of value to customers can be impacted. For example, at Marcus by Goldman Sachs, every team, no matter which department they belong to, responds to the question about what they do with an answer that has clear customer focus: Enabling customer onboarding, improving the customer service experience or helping with the customer password journey.

Using Customer Insights

This can be achieved through A-B testing techniques and analytics platforms to unearth the attitudes and motivations that cause customer churn, build loyalty and convert emotions to action. This involves gathering customer feedback through surveys, discussions, and, in the case of digital channels, insight from the channel itself. Additionally, this lever enables diverse perspectives as customers are onboarded, with inputs all the way from design to operations. Kraft Heinz, as an example, leverages Snowflake’s platform to leverage data to drive new digital experiences for consumers. Snowflake gives them real-time ability to sense, respond and evolve, with insights resulting in more meaningful interactions with customers.

Organizing Teams Around Offerings Rather Than Functions

This involves bringing together skills and capabilities to launch disruptive products in the market and win back market share. Product-centric agile value delivery is especially helpful in scenarios that involve multiple handovers between internal teams that could lead to delays and siloed developments. For instance, Daimler draws on the principles of swarm to pull in expertise from various departments and create cross-functional teams to collaborate when developing new products.

Upskilling the Workforce

It’s imperative for organizations to upskill their workforce for continuous delivery, strategic vision and skill alignment within autonomous, cross-functional teams. The rapid pace of development required to meet changing customer needs often creates a skills gap that needs to be bridged. Siemens is a great example. They accelerated their digital transformation journey in 2020 and realized how vital it is for every employee to easily access upskilling and reskilling opportunities. To stay ahead of the curve, they deployed an agile digital learning platform for their employees while leveraging and simplifying their existing learning ecosystem.

Taking the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Approach

This lever assesses real value delivery, validates hypotheses and enables quick course correction as required. Budgets are always limited, and an agile MVP approach also maximizes investment value with faster delivery, optimized processes and increased flexibility. A recent case in point is the approach bp took when started work on an integrated energy-as-a-service (EaaS) offering that will provide end-to-end management of a customers’ energy assets and services. Their first step was to pilot the plan in an innovation center/work campus before exploring opportunities to manage energy more broadly at industrial and business parks.

Expanding the Agile Workplace

Companies need to extend and adapt the agile workplace concept for a hybrid reality by creating remote analogs for meetings, sales execution and IT support along with advanced collaboration tools. A great example is GE Appliances; at the very start of the pandemic they accelerated their workplace with automation-driven agile services support across their global command centers and service desks.

Amplify Agile with Cloud

Scaling Agile without sound cloud infrastructure is a good job half done, especially when firms want to buttress speed and utility with business resilience. In fact, the very best firms stand to take a good share of the $414 billion in profits cloud generates across industries and regions every year.

August 24, 2021
4 Steps to More Agile Operations

After over a year of business disruptions, modern enterprises have realized that speed and agility are the only way forward. In fact, according to Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 eBook, “Organizations that don’t focus on efficiency, efficacy, and business agility will be left behind.”

In order to stay future-ready, organizations across all industries are moving to adopt an operating model that is agile and competitive.

Roadblocks on the Path to Agility

Driving operational agility is easier said than done. Enterprises face a variety of challenges when it comes to streamlining their end-to-end processes, including a lack of visibility into business gaps, monolithic legacy systems, siloed departments and evolving regulatory requirements.

Enterprises have no choice but to overcome these hurdles and streamline their operations or else they will fall behind their competition.

Now more than ever, business and IT leaders must recognize the importance of investing in business agility when it comes to their bottom line. Especially since, as the Gartner report said, “agile software development practices are fueling software innovations globally. Agile techniques create more value for the business, and faster, than do traditional methods.”

The real question is: how can enterprises seamlessly shift to a more agile operating model?

Agile Operating Model: The Four-Step Approach

Understand Business Needs

An effective agile operating model is rooted in a comprehensive and deep understanding of an enterprise’s needs and gaps. This goes beyond identifying business goals, requiring organizations to analyze the nuances of their operations, the challenges impacting day-to-day functions and all their expected outcomes.

Based on this holistic picture, business leaders can begin to recognize which technologies and strategies to implement and where to generate the most return on investment (ROI).

Connect, Collaborate, Contextualize!

The bedrock of agility is a connected enterprise, and so bridging operational and departmental silos is of the utmost importance. Every relevant stakeholder across the organization must have complete visibility as well as access to collaborative tools such as live dashboards, remote and mobile functionalities and personalized user interfaces.

By leveraging modern technologies to enable anytime, anywhere collaboration, enterprises can make intelligent decisions and changes without compromising on speed or quality.

Focus on Generating Value

Of course, the overarching goal of implementing an agile operating model is to generate business value; however, to ensure that expected outcomes are met, enterprises must clearly define—and periodically redefine—how value and ROI are assessed.

By leveraging process analytics and monitoring tools, business leaders can maintain complete visibility into their operations, quickly readjusting their approach whenever necessary.

Empower Employees with Modern IT Infrastructure

Organizations can drive continuous improvement and increase productivity by embracing modern technologies and low-code development capability.

To respond to the evolving business needs, enterprises can leverage new-age technologies, including cloud, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning while maintaining a well-integrated IT infrastructure.

Furthermore, with low-code, enterprises can empower their employees by helping them easily develop applications per business requirements, with less dependence on IT.

Agility: The Need of the Hour

There is no slowing down for modern enterprises. To successfully navigate growing competition, heightened customer expectations, and a continuously evolving market, organizations must prioritize business agility. In fact, “with the speed of change expected to continue, the need has never been greater for an operating model that can keep up.”

And so, for business and IT leaders with their eyes on the future, the time is now to take steps toward establishing a more agile enterprise.

August 5, 2021
Programmability is Key to Agile Transformation

Enterprise agility has rapidly become one of the most crucial variables for a business’s long-term resiliency. With the COVID-19 pandemic, never-ending disruptions to the global supply chain and nearly every industry’s typical processes flipped upside down, there has never been a more important time to prioritize agility than now.

While the rewards of agility are high, organizations are struggling to implement key technologies and adhere to the methodologies that can get them there. In fact, the 14th Annual State of Agile Report notes that 59% of organizations are following agile principles, but only 4% of these organizations are getting the full benefit. But the ability to adapt quickly, seize new opportunities, and reduce costs is critical for survival in the ever-evolving and hypercompetitive digital age.

Agility is about adapting quickly to changes and increasing productivity. Importantly, agile methodologies are not agile themselves and therefore will not magically transform enterprises into agile organizations. Instead, the focus needs to be on practicing the correct principles to become truly agile. With this in mind, let’s look at how two of these critical principles—programmability and observability—can increase productivity and allow for innovation across the business.

Programmability

Programmability describes the capability of hardware and software to change and accept a new set of instructions that alter its behavior. Let’s look at each of these two forms.

One way programmability is used is to connect analog devices with software, for example, software-supported network routers. More recently, programmability has been extended to use networking to control the hardware involved and bridge with software systems. The rising popularity of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has increased the demand for programmability and brought concepts, such as infrastructure-as-code (IaC), into the realm of reality.

The other use of programmability is to extend existing software capabilities. The two most widely known examples of this are application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs). Using both approaches, a developer can extend the default capabilities of an existing program. The rebirth of APIs as business APIs has significantly extended the introduction of programmability into application software systems. The approach is particularly popular with application service providers since it enables end users to extend and customize the core capabilities provided by a product or service.

Connecting Agility and Programmability

So how are these two concepts connected? Agility requires a foundation and the right kind of environment to provide optimal results. Programmability is an enabler for creating an adequate path for agility. An organization with highly programmable components increases the ability to automate repeatable tasks. Let’s look at two scenarios: a business use case and a technical use case.

Programmability in Business

When a purchase order (PO) arrives, the customer care representative must verify the organization’s ability to fulfill the request and then create an order in the back-end customer relationship management (CRM) system. Traditionally, this process has required a good deal of manual effort: first, extract the PO data; then verify the details using other systems or spreadsheets and, finally, type the data into the CRM system.

By contrast, consider a person working in a modern environment with high programmability. The PO can be received in an electronic format, such as JavaScript object notation (JSON), extensible markup language (XML) or electronic data interchange (EDI). Then it can be validated by connecting to other systems and reference data repositories, prompting the user to verify it and feed the data into the CRM system.

Programmability in a Technical Environment

In a typical technical use case, software developers will finish writing code; quality assurance (QA) engineers have to test the release; release engineers have to verify it and the DevSecOps team has to deploy the released artifacts. Similar to the business use case, this technical workflow has traditionally required extensive, tedious, manual work.

However, the process becomes significantly more streamlined when the development organization makes the environment programmable. In this case, once developers commit the code, the automation flow will kick in, exert the committed code, run through the life cycle stages and deploy it into production.

Through automation, which is enabled and extended by programmability, organizations can streamline their repeatable tasks and provide more time and space for users to work on essential or innovative tasks.

Now, let’s look at the implementation details of the two use cases.

Programmability in the Digital Supply Chain

In the business use case, the automation of a workflow, such as PO processing, is treated as part of a modern digital supply chain initiative. The systems, messaging and data involved in such a flow are linked together using integration technologies.

Integration approaches first involved point-to-point connections and then evolved to the use of centralized enterprise service buses (ESBs). More recent, modern approaches have centered around API-centric, integration microservices and integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions that use decentralized models and cloud-native technologies.

Now, organizations build or acquire digital platforms by combining APIs, integration and security technologies to create digital supply chain flows. Critical to the success of any digital supply chain is the ability to select systems with built-in API capabilities and enable existing systems to expose applications and services as APIs and make the entire enterprise programmable.

Programmability in a Secured Software Supply Chain

In the technical use case discussed earlier, DevSecOps automation provides the foundation for automating various aspects of the software life cycle. Here, development tools, testing tools and governance-related tools are all connected using a pipeline.

IaC and automated build servers are two popular technologies used in automating such flow, which we call a secured software supply chain. Puppet, Chef and Ansible are widely adopted IaC scripting languages while Bamboo and Jenkins are popular build servers. However, as the DevOps space has evolved with cloud-native and decentralized technologies, GitHub and GitOps are also playing a vital role in building effective pipelines.

Similar to the business use case, the components involved here need to connect to the build pipeline, and therefore the programmability of each element involved plays a significant role in automating the workflow. Furthermore, in order to build a comprehensive pipeline, the code quality, unit test, automated test, infrastructure provisioning, artifact building, dependency management and deployment tools involved have to connect using APIs and extend the required capabilities using IaC.

Observability

By analyzing both the business and technical use cases, we have a clear idea about the impact of automation and how it is enabled by programmability. However, we have missed one important element: observability. Let’s examine this here.

The environment created by automation and programmability provides a good playground for teams to be practice being more agile, experiment with new ideas and take them to production rapidly. While agility increases, the responsibility of running healthy systems that provide a continuous digital experience is vital.

Observability helps detect and predict issues using analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Modern cloud infrastructure provides a certain level of observability at the operational level. Meanwhile, some modern programming languages, such as BallerinaLang, have built-in support for application-level observability associated with the specific language. When working with languages that lack this functionality, developers will have to either use a third-party tracing library that is compatible with the programming model or directly insert observability instructions along with tracing and debugging instructions.

Enterprises today are on a journey towards agility as they seek to optimize their digital strategies. However, organizational agility needs to catch up with project agility—and then, with each individual’s agility—to be more effective. This is the concept of “structured agility,” which is being fueled by “two-pizza teams” or self-organized teams.

APIs are the foundation of programmability, which makes it possible to connect analog and digital systems, as well as extend software systems. Programmability increases the speed of delivery, enables an enterprise to become “composable” with high reusability and allows a flexible environment by opening it up for innovation—the core principles of agility.

July 22, 2021
Swinging the Pendulum of IT Back to QA

I was reading Nuria Manuel’s excellent article about quality assurance (QA), and it got me thinking about the wide variety of ‘pendulums’ that impact IT. I call them pendulums because they follow the rule of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” and they work on fundamental truths of IT. For example, the one that has probably been going on the longest is centralization/decentralization of IT and its assets. No sooner is everything consolidated and cost savings realized than adaptability concerns and needs of individual business units start the process of decentralization. Then, once decentralization is realized, everyone is painfully aware of the chaos that fifteen miniature IT departments, each going their own way, can cause … and centralization begins again.

Quality assurance is another such pendulum. Much like soldiers in peacetime, most people don’t recognize the value of QA efforts when things are going well. And when they’re not going well, then it is considered a QA failure—assuming there is a true QA function. Otherwise, it becomes the impetus to launch a formalized QA function … until things are going well and budgets are tight. The problem with QA is that for years, timelines, budgets and Agile management styles have all conspired to swing that pendulum away from a formal QA function. Oh, companies pay the price, but they quite often don’t see it as a cry for a valid QA function, and just treat this particular issue as a one-off that they should make sure doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately, issues in production have become both commonplace and accepted because of this. The only issues in production that seem to actually generate angst are ones that keep users from accessing the product. Anything short of that and workarounds or delayed fixes are seen as okay.

But the apps you are rush-building today will still be around in 10 years—or, at least, some of them will. Some of them won’t for a variety of reasons–including quality issues. Those that are around in 10 years are going to have to be maintained. QA now can save you over the years, so why all the resistance to it? QA might delay the release of new app. It is understandable that delays are to be avoided if possible, but so are bugs, so maybe constraining how long QA can delay the release and building that number right into the schedule would be a decent compromise.

That way, QA is looking at the most important/used parts of the app, but not getting buried in the weeds (where there might be bugs, but the ROI for addressing them probably isn’t there). The app will be delivered on time because QA’s time was built into the schedule. This does require that we not allow the traditional and abhorrent practice of shortening the QA window to make up for developers not meeting deadlines. Let us be very clear about this: when developers are rushed because they missed deadlines, that is precisely the time that you want QA to look very closely at their code before release. The last thing you should do is less testing in this scenario. The absolute last thing.

This is completely doable in your environment. The only really difficult part is holding the line on QA. Business owners are going to want to meet their original timeline, but cutting any phase of testing to get there is just a bad idea, so the struggle will be to hold the line. And figure out why devs missed the deadline in the first place so that the issue can be avoided for the next project.

You all are rocking it. Make sure all that sweet code-and-deploy work is not undermined by quality issues! Go ahead, implement a QA policy and make it an actual policy. Keep rocking it, get accolades from the rest of us. Maybe even from your employer. Maybe. But definitely from us. Because you’re killing it, month after month.

July 21, 2021
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Org-as-Code
We are all familiar with ‘everything-as-code’—a pattern that started with infrastructure-as-code and has now extended to other areas such as architecture-as-code, security-as-code and more. However, all the incarnations we have seen so far have been less than ambitious! The dawn of cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology is moving us firmly toward organization-as-code. Org-as-code is the most disruptive evolution we have seen so far. The crypto world uses a different term for it: decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Before you freak out because, “OMG crypto!” let me assure you that I am not trying to sell you any of the 9,000 (at last count) cryptocurrencies. Undoubtedly, crypto has polarized public opinion. There are crypto maximalists who believe that crypto is the solution to everything. You often hear, “Bitcoin solves it!” Then, there are the crypto skeptics who dismiss the movement as simply digital tulips—a Ponzi scheme at scale for the internet age. Only time will tell if they are right.

Now, my opinion falls in the gray area in between, where some groundbreaking new ways of working are evolving. People across the globe are collaborating in decentralized, efficient, democratic and non-hierarchical ways in the world of crypto. Radical new constructs for the internet age are being piloted—DAOs, smart contracts, pseudonymous identities, tokenomics, etc. just to name a few.

This post is firmly focused on DAOs.

So, What is a DAO?

A DAO is a way to work with like-minded folks around the globe where the business (the org) is owned and managed by its members in a democratic way.

“In traditional organisations, people are at the core and automation is at the edge; whereas in DAOs, automation is the core and people are at the edge.” – Vitalik Buterin

As opposed to traditional organizations that are structured in a top-down hierarchy, with many layers of management and bureaucratic coordination, DAOs provide an operating model for people and institutions that do not know nor trust each other, who might live in different geographical areas, speak different languages and, therefore, are subject to different jurisdictions. Instead of legal contracts managing the relationships between people, computer code enforces the rules.

Some of the key features of a DAO are:
1. An organizational setup based on rules and policies that are encoded as computer code.
2. The rules are transparent and controlled by members, not a central authority; usually, on a public blockchain.
3. Rules are executed by a set of smart contracts independent of human (not even the creators!) involvement.
4. Built-in treasury that no one has the authority to access without the approval of the group/community.
5. Decisions and ideas are governed and funded by proposals that are voted on and managed through voting by token holders.
Colony.io is one startup that helps set up DAOs. A screenshot below from their site gives you an idea of the elements of organizational design that can be (re)defined in the radical new DAO world.

Do We Really Need DAOs ?

Here are a few challenges that DAO attempts to resolve that you often see in conventional centralized organizations:
- Good ideas struggle to reach the top.
- The system incentivizes authoritarian leadership.
- Failure to tap into the wisdom of the crowd.
- There is a higher probability of spectacular failures driven by the greed of a few, as evident from examples such as Enron or the 2008 financial crisis.
- There is usually a lack of transparency in decision-making.
- Good policies exist—usually on paper or hidden away in by-laws—but are not executable.
- Single points of failure are natural due to the asymmetry in organizational structure.
Examples of DAOs

Before you dismiss this as utopian and unrealistic, here are a few real-world of examples of DAOs in play
1. Nexus Mutual—A decentralized ‘people-powered’ alternative to insurance which operates as a DAO. It is run entirely by its members. Only members can decide which claims are valid. All member decisions are recorded and enforced by smart contracts on the Ethereum public blockchain.
2. DAI and MKR—A stable decentralized currency (DAI) and platform for decentralized finance apps (with a market cap of about $5 billion).
3. The DAO ( Đ)—A form of venture capital that started as a crowd-funded token sale. There was no conventional management structure or board of directors. But it got hacked in 2016, and a third of funds were siphoned off. (This is a key example to remind ourselves that if the org is code, then security issues can be near-fatal.)
4. DASH —A digital cryptocurrency. A DAO run by a subset of users called masternodes, which perform standard node functions like hosting a copy of the blockchain, relaying messages and validating transactions on the network, and which, in addition, act as shareholders, voting on proposals for improving DASH’s ecosystem.
5. Flamingo DAO—A DAO that deals in digital art via NFTs. NFTs are non-fungible tokens, not non-functional testing!
6. Gitcoin —Uses DAO to fund digital public good projects ( $24 million funded so far using a quadratic funding model)
These are just a few examples. Adoption is exploding, and stretching into areas like charities, freelancer networks, venture funds, investment clubs and more.

DAOs are still emerging, and there are many aspects that are yet to be fully explored, especially around legal status, regulatory frameworks and compliance. It is, however, only a matter of time before the DAO way of working becomes mainstream.

In my view, it is not a binary question between DAOs and conventional organizations. Adopting many of the practices of DAOs will strengthen traditional organizations and reduce some of the weaknesses we touched on earlier.
July 9, 2021
Shhhh! It’s a Secret

In one of our regular back-and-forth breaks, Lori and I were talking shop a week or two ago, and she shared an excellent report by GitGuardian with me. Frankly, none of the information in the report was a huge surprise for me–Git is filled with information that companies probably don’t want out there, but that is nearly impossible to track proactively. That’s what GitGuardian tries to do for you, but honestly, I’ve not yet dug into them, so caveat emptor. Or, read someone else’s opinion to help you decide if they’re a good idea – I’m just going to talk about the report.

The key takeaway is that you are asking your DevOps teams to move faster and faster. Putting a section of code they are working on into a public repository is an easy way to “take work home” or share it, especially during lockdowns. It is also a good way to hand over critical information to anyone searching for it—about your infrastructure, or even critical bits of data like SSL keys or credentials. And with the current level of cyberattacks against nearly every industry, I’d say there are people looking for that information, no matter what industry you are in.

This is not really a DevOps-specific issue–credentials and such in code has been a problem for IT for as long as I’ve been working in the field. At some point, any automated system needs to perform AAA, and that means the data required is stored somewhere. A multitude of approaches have been attempted to resolve the problem technologically, but none have been a silver bullet. Yet. Eventually, someone will figure out a way to make it work; then a whole new attack vector will arrive, probably aimed at the tool that is settled on to protect this very data.

This is a personnel/policy issue that is exacerbated by the speed of Agile and DevOps. Your best solution, at this time, is to write a clear policy that contains consequences for putting secret data into a public repository. We’re short on “consequences” right now, preferring to say, “Right, let’s make sure that can’t happen again,” but in the case of putting secrets out in public, it is a different level of ‘bad’ than a coding error getting checked in. Those secrets can actively be used against the organization, and if the not-to-be-shared data is clearly delineated, any violation can be viewed as intentional, be it because of convenience or malfeasance.

According to the report, there are millions of bits of privileged information out there. Not all of them are from enterprise IT shops—but some are. And some might be from your organization. Set expectations, get feedback. Make it clear you do not want to stop progress on delivery of systems, but you also don’t want to implement a system with a built-in back door for attackers to use. It is easy enough to use alternative delivery methods for those few bits of data, and put the bulk of the source out where it is needed.

And keep rocking it. Toward Data Science says there are 128 million public repositories out there (Q1, 2021). Think how many lines of code are in those repositories, and how many secrets potentially are, too. Just make certain yours are not included in the list. No sense keeping your next great solution from running because your critical data leaked.

July 8, 2021