Breakthrough innovations need a mindset change.
In today's world when customers demand products to be delivered to them quickly, enterprises have to be highly agile in order to develop such products that add value to the customer and deploy software quickly.
How does an IT company get ideas and quickly develop those ideas into products that offer value and are meaningful to the customer? What is required is being is a Lean enterprise that produces fast and efficiently.
An enterprise must essentially change the typical way it works in order to be a lean company that can accomplish great things with its customers.
Whether it is IT services, cloud computing, virtualization, for every industry the challenge has always been to get the idea to deploy and deliver quickly while adding value to the customer. Enterprises must become lean to meet these challenges which require enterprises to incorporate more lean practices throughout the entire process.
A core fundamental element is the communication between silos — business analysis, product or application development, testing, release, and IT operations. Each area needs to be on the same page, both of the process and at which stage the product in the process.
At the core of this practice is employing logical testing methods that are automated to check quickly as to whether the product is working or not the way it is expected.
These capabilities enable the organization to work more efficiently. It is so much more than just writing the code. The ability to set up processes that enable fast feedback, quickly designing and developing software features and IT services in a way that continuously tests what is built achieves what is called “Continuous Delivery”.
For this to occur, cross-functional teams are necessary — one team responsible for the entire process — from idea to development to deployment and delivery. This needs each one to have access to everything that rest of the team is using. Such a radical shift means that the very culture of the organization has to change. Building such great teams with a culture of sharing information and working across silos is absolutely necessary in creating a lean enterprise. If you are using a software partner then he needs to understand this concept and should be able to work with you as part of your team, not as an outsourcing company.
