Those of you familiar with Greek mythology have probably heard of Odysseus (Ulysses), the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Following the Trojan war, Ulysses and his crew needed to sail past the island of the Sirens, dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coastline. Thankfully, Ulysses was warned of the danger in advance by Circe, a Greek goddess of magic; she advised him to have his crew place beeswax in their ears, to avoid the lure of the Sirens. Knowing that Ulysses was a curious man, she told him that if he wanted to listen to the Sirens, he would need to have his men tie him to the mast of his ship to avoid certain death. The act of Ulysses restricting his future options (being tied to the mast) to ensure future success (avoid being lured to his death), has since been generalised and is referred to as a Ulysses contract.
One of the strongest, well known examples of a Ulysses contract was that made by Apple in its decision to ensure that encrypted data stored on their mobile devices could only be decrypted by the owner of the device. This decision provided the greatest level of security and trust for individuals in the event that their phone was lost, stolen or taken against their will. Apple’s Ulysses contract restricted their future options (the ability to decrypt data on Apple mobile devices) to guarantee the privacy and security of their customers, even in the event of being subpoenaed.
One of the most challenging but rewarding and necessary voyages facing organisations today, is that of Digital Transformation. Digital Transformation is not a possible future for organisations, but a necessary future in an increasingly competitive landscape. Similar to Ulysses’ voyage past the island of the Sirens, the journey will not be possible without taking steps well in advance to ensure future success.
In a survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review, leaders shared the key barriers facing their organisation on its journey to digital transformation. The barriers included organisational silos, legacy processes, cultural resistance to change, a lack of innovative thinking and a lack of digital leadership. Let’s now explore what a possible Ulysses contract might contain to help prepare us to overcome these barriers.
If we consider the first three barriers, we can see that they are some of the key areas addressed when adopting DevOps. As I have written about in a previous article, “DevOps is an approach to process, culture, and tools for delivering increased business value and responsiveness through rapid, iterative, and high-quality IT service delivery”. Establishing a strong DevOps foundation will not only directly change organisational silos, legacy processes and culture within Development and Operations teams, but can also be leveraged indirectly as a catalyst for change across the broader business. An experienced IT leader will be able to use their earlier success through adopting DevOps to influence business stakeholders to embrace the need for greater awareness and responsibility across silos, to respectfully challenge legacy processes on their relevance and suitableness, as well as the need to increase trust, embrace failure (from the perspective of learning) and focus on continuous delivery and improvement.
This leads us to the first entry within our Ulysses contract - a commitment to a multi-year financial and organisational support to develop and nurture a strong organisational wide DevOps capability.
Let us now consider the remaining two barriers, namely a lack of innovative thinking and a lack of digital leadership. There are a number of seminal works on developing innovation and aligning innovation with your organisation’s strategy. While the Harvard Business Review's book on Innovation is recommended reading, I would strongly recommend expanding your reading to include those written by or for startup companies. If an organisation truly wants to be innovative, it needs to embrace a startup mentality towards innovation. I’ve particularly enjoyed reading a number of books written by Alexandar Osterwalder and collaborators around business model generation and value proposition design.
This brings us to the second entry within our Ulysses contract, a commitment to multi-year financial and organisational support to develop and nurture a centre for innovation, a place where the organisation can incubate new business ideas, technology and collaborative ways for working, a space to explore the art of the possible.
Helping customers become more innovative is a priority for Red Hat. As thought leaders in Open Source solutions, our customers are asking us to play an increasingly important role in their future success. To this end and to address the need to help customers innovate and learn the art of the possible, Red Hat launched Open Innovation Labs in North America in 2016 and I’m proud to announce that we will be shortly launching a lab in APAC to support our regional customers.
Open Innovation Labs is a residency-style consulting engagement focused on integrating people, methodology and technology to address and begin to solve customers’ business challenges in an accelerated fashion. As part of an Open Innovation Labs engagement, customers work alongside Red Hat experts to jumpstart innovation and development initiatives using open source technology and DevOps approaches.
The journey towards Digital Transformation will be a multi-year journey for most organisations and will not be easy. It will require a commitment of resources and cultural change for medium term organisational reward. Like Ulysses’ journey past the Island of the Sirens, Digital Transformation is a necessary journey for organisations that want to be leaders in their field. A strong commitment to support and nurture innovation as well as a broad adoption of DevOps will significantly accelerate your journey and minimise the danger of becoming shipwrecked along the way.