Picture it, Sicily 2023^*

Don Splunk takes €200 out of the ATM and lights his cigar with it. Cigar aficionados would react appalled to this; at least use a butane lighter or even better, a cedar spill. But if you’ve got money to burn…

No mafia here. We’re trustworthy organisation. We take pride in our work, providing great service to our customers and making a healthy profit next to that. But we’re also throwing money away…

DRY vs WET

Part of that is due to our aim to have autonomous teams. Therefore, we don’t practice DRY (don’t repeat yourself). We do WET (write everything twice or thrice). And that means that our housekeeping chores (like removing technical debt) will multiply, leaving less time for adding business value in order to stay ahead in the game. It’s after all a fast and ever-changing landscape we live in…

Autonomy

Moving away cross cutting concerns from the teams and transfer ownership to a dedicated one, that will closely collaborate with architects and SMEs, enables us to create a solid foundation to work on. Just like infrastructure teams provides us with a platform to build and deploy our applications and services.

Same applies to the frameworks and libraries we use. We use different artefacts within the teams to accomplish the same thing. Why not pick one? Preferably the standard proposed by the organisation. Might save some headaches on vulnerability management as well…

Picture it, Leiden 2024

By keeping things small and concise, agility will follow. It will enable the teams to autonomously focus on implementing product features no one has ever seen before at a pace that will dazzle the competition…

What I’m writing down here is of course one of my many opinions. And to every ‘voordeel’, there’s a ‘nadeel’. We create a dependency, and we don’t like dependencies! But fortunately, those can be managed. There may be other pros and cons and I’m happy to exchange thoughts and adjust my opinion.

There are a lot of exciting developments coming our way which will allow organisations to become more autonomous. Instigated by the new architectures and new innovations. And monitoring our process flows every step of the way by means of orchestration. It will bring the business closer to IT and IT closer to the business.

^*Sophia pictures it many times on Golden Girls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KB9PCevkLU)