Designing Delivery

Chapter 5. The Journey Is the Destination

Post-industrialism demands radical changes in the way businesses understand and conduct themselves. It essentially means turning themselves inside out. Products give way to service. Broadcast gives way to conversation. Hierarchies give way to networks. Scale gives way to speed. Efficiency gives way to adaptability. Robustness gives way to resilience.

Twenty-first-century business confronts IT with the need to undertake an equally radical transformation. IT must turn itself inside out in the same fashion, along similar dimensions. Controlling change gives way to enabling it. Silos give way to collaboration. Systems give way to service. Preventing failure gives way to incorporating it.

Previous chapters have introduced a set of practices that share a cybernetic mindset. They can all be helpful in implementing post-industrial IT. Service design, Agile, DevOps, cloud, and microservices mutually reinforce one another to create a responsive, resilient platform for digital brand conversations.

The key to transformation is not, however, simply to replace an old checklist of best practices with a new one. The central challenge for CIOs is not to make sure their organizations are doing Agile or DevOps, or using cloud or microservices. Ensuring success doesn’t just consist of remembering to ask, “Do we hold retrospectives every two weeks?” or “Do we have a chaos monkey?” or “Did we run a game day before last month’s release?”

The CIO’s most critical ...