Foreward

On a wet November morning in 2017, a legion of followers queued outside Apple's Regent Street store in London, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Apple's new (iPhone X) product. Those scenes of anticipation were repeated across the globe. Online pre-orders sold out within minutes. One man in Tokyo, Japan, camped outside the Apple store for six days, awaiting the new arrivals.

These global events exemplify the power of The Brand, the principal form of advertising, and ultimately, of sales. Yet these events are the exception, not the rule. Many other brands have tried and failed to replicate it, squandering opportunities, and in some cases inflicting serious damage on themselves.

We've witnessed epic [1] data breaches and exfiltration at some of our largest, global corporations, in some cases leaving their services incapacitated for weeks. There's been the theft of sensitive staff information, including those within law enforcement. A string of serious failings at major banks [2] have led to the disruption and unavailability of critical customer services, for days, sometimes weeks, leading to customers being unable to access their accounts or pay bills. How about the (semi-regular, it seems) disruptions in airline systems, leaving thousands of irate customers adrift, and headlining national news, or outages during the live streaming of sports events due to insufficient capacity/spike planning, or the disastrous release of certain AAA video games that caused some to pull its sale?

Events of this ilk often signify major (and lengthy) disruption, customer frustration and hardship, plummeting share prices and shareholder fury, (sometimes hundreds of) millions of dollars in fines and reimbursements, regulatory intervention, the untimely (?) exit of chief execs, branding blitzkriegs, and reputational harm.

And here's the uncomfortable truth. This is just a taste. It's not going away, and it's not likely to get easier. Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized, signaling greater digital dependence and expectation, complexity (digital products, and therefore their systems, are getting increasingly complex, not less), and, to some, a more tempting target.

***

In most of the above cases, the reported catalyst was a technical failure (either by mechanism, or by practice, but a failure in a technical quality, such as security or resilience), leading to the inevitable business crisis. That for me though, is a little too convenient, maybe even a bit lazy, uninformed, and parochial. Revisiting these events, what really caused them? A flaw in securing a web framework? A poor backup and recovery strategy? The inability to develop a resilient solution? Poor security or testing practices? Yes. But these are all technical causes, and fundamentally, I argue in this book, not the root cause.

Let's consider it from a few different perspectives. Would the executives in those affected businesses have permitted security flaws, single-points-of-failure, brittle systems, untested upgrade paths, or unchecked growth (without consolidation), had they understood the ramifications? Of course not. And would the technical staff, working in those organisations, have pushed harder to strengthen the offering had they known the repercussions? Of course they would.

Might I suggest then that many of those key stakeholders didn't appreciate (or were ill-advised of) the problem, and certainly didn't foresee the consequences. It's caused by a disharmony between business and technology, a communications breakdown, inattentiveness (towards each other), and a lack of understanding, not some technical failure that's ultimately responsible for these incidents and requires attention.

***

Interestingly, staff in many of the affected companies described earlier stated culture as the underlying issue. Some even intimated that they'd forgotten about their customers! [3] Sifting through some of the social commentary is elucidating, and suggests a Cultural Stasis. Time and again, the following indicative words arise: “culture”, “reactive”, “siloed”, “organizational structure”.

So, to my second posit. Failures also stem from cultural flaws, caused by (for instance): siloed teams and thinking, an unwillingness, or inability, to improve or innovate, a business model that fails to consolidate technology, or even a business' partiality towards Constant Reaction.

Consider the Agile or DevOps movements. They are cultural shifts in how we work, organise ourselves, define value, interact with others, and behave. They exist - at least in part - to resolve some of the aforementioned cultural concerns.

***

Many of the aforementioned incidents (and the ones yet to happen) could have been avoided, through the closer alignment of business and technology. Yet I find that many employees working with technology (at any level or role) have little appreciation of the effect that technical and business qualities have upon one another, and therefore of the consequences of doing (or not doing) something [4].

A partial answer is to use a common language. Unfortunately, it's pretty shallow. A meaning is typically just another word for definition, and is quite different from an understanding. It doesn't explain why something happens, nor its effects. This is easily demonstrable. For instance, I suspect we can quickly agree to the same meaning (definition) for the concepts of Time-to-Market (TTM) and Technical Debt, but do we both understand their relationship? That's a more complex concept, but one that's critical to make better decisions. After all, it's the relationship that explains the effect. What about the relationship between Scalability and Reputation, or Releasability and Sellability, or Testability and TTM? You get my point.

That's what's missing. A comprehensive set of (bidirectional [5]) guiding principles to shape our decisions; e.g. "if I change X, it will have this effect"; "if I want to improve business pillars Y, then I must consider qualities A, B, and F". By addressing this gap, we create greater comprehension, transparency, and understanding, regardless of our area of expertise.

This concept can be extended further, thereby delivering greater value. By aligning your goal and strategy to the desired business pillars, you can trace a path (through the relevant technical qualities) to its realization; i.e. the activities, principles, practices, technologies, tools, and cultural changes required to make your goal a reality. That's a very powerful concept. You can now target activities that directly influence your business' goal [6], and I believe, create more predictable outcomes. That's what I'm offering. I hope you'll join me.

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