London Microservices User Group

Introducing New Technologies To Traditional Organisations

@peetdenny

Introducing New Tech to Traditional Organisations

❖ Is often challenging

❖ Disconnect between business goals and tech goals

❖ Business sponsor mistrust of our ability to delivery

❖ Past failures

❖ (The mention of CRM is banned in one company!)

The Problem of Introducing New Tech to Traditional Companies

IT: New tech! The business: erm…

–Disgruntled business owners everywhere

“How can we get these guys to stop working on their own thing for long enough to build

something for us?”

Start With The (Business) Goal

❖ What do we want to do as a company this year?

❖ Get all of our hotel rooms booked out

❖ Cut costs by £1.5M

❖ Drive more purchases through new channels

❖ Sell more insurance policies

❖ How will introducing this new tech help us reach these goals?

❖ Then pitch to the business sponsor (e.g. Product Owner)

Gather and Understand the Challenges❖ You are usually not the sole influencer

❖ Depending on the size of the organisation, there may be a large number of stakeholder groups impacted by the choice

Development  App  support    

Middleware  support  Infrastructure/Unix/Windows  

Enterprise  Security  Build  and  release  management  

Monitoring  Team  Enterprise  Architecture    

❖ Their views may not always be positive

❖ Meet with each group and strive to understand what led them to have this view

❖ They may be right! Keep an open mind

Group Example Beef

Development Why am I being forced to use this? I could work much more quickly with X

App Support How will we support this? It’s new tech that we have no experience of! We’ll need 6 months to learn it

Middleware supportWe have all of these tools that we’ve built/configured to

support TIBCO and Websphere, now we have to start again from scratch!

Infra/Unix/Windows How can we capacity plan if we have no experience with this tech?

Enterprise Security We’re going to have to spend £10k on a pen test since we’ve never done this before

Build and release It took us 9 months to automate build and deploy for Weblogic, it’ll probably take the same for this

Monitoring Nobody knows how to monitor DropWizard, you’ll have to design a whole new monitoring strategy

Architecture JBOSS is our strategic choice. You’ll never get funding to move everything off of JBOSS onto this new thing

Prove and Persuade❖ Prove that the challenges can be overcome

❖ (You have to be right first)

❖ Identify main pockets of resistance

❖ Take ‘em out for a coffee

❖ Get on the same page

❖ Don’t leave it until the ARB/TDA!

❖ Build a network of support

Persuasion

It’s not enough to be right, you also have to be believed

“But you didn’t persuade me” - Idi Amin

Network of Good News

Wut?

!

????

:D

Day 1:New Idea

Day 30:Everyone’s got an opinion

Day 90:Everyone’s rooting for it

Dubious Sponsor Dubious & Confused Sponsor Delighted Sponsor

Prove and Persuade Not just for the bad guys

Implement Something Small

❖ Time to put your money where your mouth has been❖ Build something small which delivers real value to the business

❖ Prove that our assumptions work in practice❖ Build goodwill❖ Generate desire to use this technology more

❖ Choose either a small project, or a small part of a larger project❖ But make sure that what is delivered gives value to the sponsor❖ Make sure it’s awesome!

Win & Celebrate Success❖ Now that you’ve delivered the

awesome, cash in on your win❖ Go out to the pub, get some

pizzas in, rent a floor in a nightclub, fly to Vegas, depending on scale -microservices are small :(

❖ Make sure to invite the sponsor❖ Publicise: Write blog posts, do

an internal roadshow, get your success out there

Iterate!

❖ Once you’ve tidied up after the party….time to do it again!

❖ Hopefully process has raised the profile of both the technology you’ve introduced and you yourself.

❖ Conduct a retrospective of what worked, and what didn’t and go around again

❖ Time for more Microservices!

The 7 steps

Start with the business benefit

Understand all the challenges

Prove and persuade

Implement something small

Win &

Celebrate!Iterate err…profit!

@peetdennypeet@bestboyelectric.io