The digital platform piece of the Ross model is starting to make sense for me. It’s all about the fact that it can easily become a problem unto itself.
I would say the primary logic behind the component is really speed. All right? It’s reuse. So let’s make sure that we don’t reinvent 20 ways of, you know, queueing a message, handling machine data sets on whatever. So, a lot are actually pretty technical, they may not be…the degree of innovation would vary from one to another, but the common, the common thinking is that, you know, those are services that are better shared rather than unique, right? So, everything that you need, we try to drive reuse, because it gives us speed, and it gives us also the fact that we’re not creating tomorrow’s technical debt, right? There’s only one set of services that we have to maintain, improve on.
HERVÉ COUREIL
I’m not sure if I agree that starting with technology is always a bad thing.
We try to make sure we don’t start with technology. We start with a problem, right? We start by identifying problems that are going to be common across a portfolio of offers. And we have a team that’s really engaging our various business unit, our various lines of business, and, you know, trying to understand what are features that are going to be common, and then we define whether a particular feature is going to be at an application level, because, okay, it’s unique, right, or whether a feature is going to be actually useful across the board, in which case it’s going to be shared, in which case we’re going to embed it at a platform level.
HERVÉ COUREIL
I’d argue that if you start with a technology with many applications, you start at a good place. Like Dart/Flutter, for instance.
We try to avoid starting, “Oh yeah, we found a fantastic new technology, we love it, do you want it?” No, it’s really, no. We have spent a lot of time, sort of, disciplining ourselves, I guess, and the organization, and let’s put technology second, let’s start with a business problem worth solving. And of course, the follow-up of that is that, you know, in— when you have a portfolio of offers, if you have 40 ways of invoicing a customer, 40 ways of managing a subscription, 40 ways of queuing alert messages, the operational cost would become crazy. And what you realize with, with digital is that, you know, a traditional organization would spend a lot of time on the development costs. But then you realize that the cost of operating, right, is actually much more significant over time because it keeps, it keeps going, right, of course you have a recurring revenue in front, but it keeps going. You want to make sure that you make the right shared versus unique decision at the outset, because you don’t want to be operating systems that are duplicative.
HERVÉ COUREIL
Getting the governance of shared components is so hard … hmmmm.
We try to be at the right level and connect with how can we solve a business problem? And then, does solving this business problem require components that are unique to this problem, or does it require creating components that should be shared at the platform level?
HERVÉ COUREIL
