In recent years, we have witnessed an explosion of flashy, daring and creative businesses. Companies that made their mark with brightly colored business apps, quirky user interfaces, and millennial-heavy marketing campaigns. The era of the fast-paced trading strategy has arrived, and there is much to be said for this approach. This has not only led to more established companies waking up to changing customer demands, but also to countless innovations in stagnant markets.
About the Author Michael Cote is a VMware Staff Technologist. Digital transformation has been the figurehead for most of the progress we've seen, but now that we've had the excitement, we need to focus on the boredom. Now is the time to focus on the day-to-day work, to make sure the business is compliant, and to make sure software developments are rolled out continuously, rather than rushed.
Business development
In the past, IT has been the source of many bottlenecks in business development. It took years to deliver projects, at high cost and with a fraction of the functionality promised for a long time. Additionally, systems often crashed or malfunctioned during an early release phase. Most IT organizations still work this way, especially the larger, more established organizations that have years of legacy IT systems. But an emerging cohort of high-performing companies have perfected the way IT builds and delivers software. Software release cycles should now be weeks and sometimes days instead of years and months. By accelerating these cycles and the way software is used, new business value is created more often and organizations stay alive and thriving. Software also tends to work better in such circumstances. The result of these daily or weekly software release cycles, application changes that are incremental and hopefully not noticed by the majority of users, as opposed to a large deployment that completely overhauls existing applications, creating confusion when trying to change too much at once. Small changes may seem boring, but they are also essential for development and growth.
boredom is reliable
For a company, being boring in today's climate can seem like a risk. But boring is sure. It is reliable, comfortable and safe. For all that fledgling startups have, the market and customers love stability and reliability. Getting bored doesn't mean relying on legacy computer systems to do business as usual. In fact, boring means that a company is using advanced technology to implement its small, inadvertent software release cycles. Kubernetes is the cloud service technology that embodies what is exciting, cutting edge, and boring. Joe Beda, one of the Kubernetes pioneers, told KubeCon in 2017 that "boredom is good." A recent report found that two-thirds of respondents (64%) use Kubernetes to operate the site. The companies of these respondents use Kubernetes operations in the environments they operate today, being their implementations for their existing IT infrastructure. This brings immediate business benefits and helps modernize these legacy IT systems so they are less disruptive to operations in the future. The benefits turned out to be better use of resources (56%) and shorter development cycles (53%), the ideal goal for the boring modern business.
Continuous development
By implementing a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, companies can shorten their application release cycles by automatically creating and starting test automation. By working in smaller development and release cycles, you reduce the scope of things that could or will go wrong. If these small projects are part of a larger overall project and are implemented in a short, sequential cascading approach, small changes are often not likely to be noticed by most users. It may seem like this doesn't happen to the average daily user, but in reality, small changes add up to make a big difference overall. While there may be a perception of boredom, behind the scenes, it's far from the truth. Businesses need to focus on how they can ensure they provide services to their customers that outperform their competitors. To thrive in today's business environment, competition is a must. Innovation is the key to maintaining a competitive advantage, and constant innovation is at the heart of business performance. Whether through CI/CD principles, agile software development, or Kubernetes, software developments must be delivered regularly and on time to create a secure, stable, and reliable business. Now, the twist in all this is that when most of your computer stack is boring, you're freeing up time to reliably work on the part that helps your business the most: the applications you develop. You want IT to be as "boring" as possible so that your business is exciting.