Finding the way with broad-scale transformation

By-design architectures are rising in popularity as organisations take a more purposeful and measured view of their technology decision-making and investments.

Many organisations land on their current-state architecture ‘by accident’ rather than ‘by design’ — IT decisions were made project-by-project and change occurred organically on an as-needed basis. By design is the opposite approach. It invites architectural planning and decision-making that is well thought out, well paced and well executed. According to Chris Gardener, Research Director at Forrester, it’s “trickier to execute” but getting things right first time, out of the box “can pay off huge dividends”.

The rise of by-design architectures coincides with the trend towards whole-of-business transformation. Such transformation programs have broad spans, aiming to simplify operations across all functional domains. They’re also typically programs where businesses are chasing financial and productivity dividends.

New or refreshed technology infrastructure is a core piece of transformation, and this is becoming more resilient and expansive by design. Organisations are making purposeful decisions to embrace a variety of infrastructure options — from cloud to the edge — that are not a traditional data centre.

As market intelligence firm IDC notes, successful organisations are assembling “digital infrastructure architectures that prioritise workload-optimised deployment choices, consistent AI/ML-driven software-defined automation, policy-driven operations, API-enabled integrations and SLAs tied to business outcomes and KPIs. Successful digital businesses … enable more modular, consistent and ‘distributed by design’ architectures to take full advantage of the next generation of digital infrastructure technologies.”

In addition to infrastructure, organisations are transforming the software applications they use to conduct and perform work.

All of these technology pieces need to be secure, integrated with one another and support intelligent automated workflows and processes to the maximum possible extent, to ensure that current and emerging requirements and use cases can be met.

Ideally, all three of these pillars — security, integration and automation — are in the transformation program by design: that is, they have been taken into account and factored into every step and every decision made.

Engaging with a trusted partner with visibility and experience across the infrastructure and application landscape can help organisations undergoing transformation to understand their options and vet potential systems for their security, integration and automation capabilities and prospects from the start, so that all the right decisions are made and costly missteps can be avoided.

Security by design

The most familiar of the three elements is likely to be security or secure by design. In today’s threat landscape, organisations must start with security in mind so they can have assurance that whatever technology path they go down, it will not expose them or their users to unnecessary risk.

Organisations are still very much split on this. A recent study by Deloitte found only 48% of organisations are secure by design, meaning 52% are not. The latter cohort is still taking security into account, but not till after they’ve started coding. While it isn’t too late at this point, it may be costly to wrap in security after the fact.

Australian government guidance is for “secure-by-design principles and secure programming practices [to be] used as part of application development. They can assist with the identification and mitigation of at risk software components and risky programming practices. In addition, providing mechanisms to assist in determining the authenticity and integrity of applications, while configuring them in a secure manner, can assist with software supply chain security activities.”

But it doesn’t stop at development: secure-by-design thinking needs to permeate any application or infrastructure selection, provisioning, configuration and change decisions. The security consequences of every step need to be well understood.

A self-governed security framework run in lockstep with the transformation can ensure security requirements are consistently applied across the life of the program of work.

Integration by design

A cohesive technology environment is one where all the systems run in a highly connected fashion, can ‘talk’ to each other to perform searches or execute transactions, and can exchange data as and when required.

Most technology environments are assembled from a collection of best-of-breed software solutions, since there is not one single vendor that has software that does everything well. Each piece of software should connect via API, but this needs to be put to the test well before any software licences are purchased. It is important to ‘look under the covers’ and evaluate prospective applications for suitability as early as possible.

The danger of not incorporating integration into these programs ‘by design’ is that problems with integration between critical systems, such as poor API functionality, are discovered in the middle of the program, resulting in untimely delays to remediate or preventing the realisation of efficient outcomes.

Automation by design

Intelligent automation is an umbrella term that covers a range of new growth opportunities and capabilities, from business analysis and data analytics through to process automation, application integration and business process optimisation.

There’s a lot of opportunity in this space to improve operational efficiency, reducing the time and effort required to process transactions, run workflows or other tasks. It is far easier to incorporate intelligent automation into a process as it is being designed (or redesigned) from the ground up than to try to add it in later when choices about which applications to use and how they are configured make things more challenging and costly.

In summary, Australian businesses are finding success in broad-scale transformation by embracing a by-design approach. By prioritising well-planned architectures, secure software applications and intelligent automation, they are streamlining operations and maximising outcomes. This proactive strategy ensures efficient integration, minimises risks and positions them for continued growth in the digital era.

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