The Holy Grail – Driving Top-line Revenue Generation from I.T.

Can I.T. drive top-line revenue?

It sure can! If you do it right.

I have been on my own personal quest for a career “holy grail” since 2008. It all started after I read a book written after an article that sparked outrage in our industry. In 2003, Nicolas Carr had written an article that said: “IT Doesn’t Matter.” (https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter ) His book that followed expounded on the tenets that he had begun laying out in that article and was called: “Does IT Matter?” (http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=23) The sub-title does a pretty great job of summarizing the entire purpose of that book: “Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage.” His argument was that IT was no longer the competitive differentiator that it was when it first became part of the corporate enterprise. It was now just a cost of doing business. A very expensive cost at that. (One of my mentors and I used to joke after hours that for a while every CIO/CTO of every company we talked to said: “I want to run IT as a Business.” And we would always answer under our breath: “You won’t want to once you see the PnL! It’s a losing business model 100% of the time!”)

Then, he followed that up with a book in 2009 called: “The Big Switch: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google” (http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=21) where he made compelling points about why corporations should stop focusing efforts on building IT departments and start leveraging Cloud and SaaS providers to provide them with the services that they were distracting themselves with on a day-to-day basis in their own IT organizations. He argued that soon, CIO’s would go the way of a title that once existed before Edison – the Chief Power Officer (CPO). Once Edison brought grid power to every company – they no longer needed to invest enormous amounts of money and effort generating power themselves. His argument in 2009 was: “You don’t want to be in the business of IT – you want to sell your product. Why are you investing so much of your time and effort on the infrastructure, network, and operations required just to host a website to sell shoes? <insert product here>”

Both books had a profound impact on me. I had moved into IT from Pre-Med Biology and had been riding an incredible wave – that was the enterprise adoption of open systems infrastructure. I had specialized myself to building open systems datacenters. From computer, network, storage, load balancers, etc. The entire datacenter stack. I built my career on this and here was Nicolas Carr telling the world that my role in the Enterprise was no longer required. That they could eliminate the need for expensive nerds like myself and just buy utility cloud services to host their eCommerce platforms. In my youthful exuberance, I immediately took it upon myself to rally against Nicholas Carr and his books and prove to the world that IT could drive top line revenue and become a competitive differentiator again! And by God, I was going to prove him wrong from where I sat in the datacenter world!

So, I learned everything I could get my hands on about Automation and Orchestration and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as Code, etc. For about 4 years at a major virtualization vendor, I spent my day-to-day efforts on proving that companies could achieve phenomenal CapEx and OpEx savings by utilizing the new technology stacks that were forming around Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC). In 2014, I led a swat team of really smart folks and our primary job was to go into our largest customers and drive Velocity of adoption of the SDDC stack. We did that for 14 companies throughout the year and every time, the same outcome – huge OpEx and CapEx reductions. Couldn’t touch top line revenue generation.

So, at the end of the year in 2014, I found myself sitting in my mentor’s home office and he asked me: “So, any luck driving top-line revenue in any of the accounts?” I hung my head and sighed dramatically: “Nope. I just can’t figure out how to touch it from the I&O side of the house.” He responded and asked me: “Where do you think you need to be in the org to drive it?” Earlier in the year, I had the blessed experience to be a part of a project at a large pharmaceutical company to drive a SDDC transformation with them. The one major difference was that the leader of that project said: “We are going to run this as an Agile project.” I nodded my head in complete agreement, as all good consultants do, and then left the meeting and immediately called my boss and said: “What the hell is Agile?” To which he responded: “I know it has something to do with fast iterations, but you better become damned good at it over the weekend!” That project was a huge success and way different to all the others we had done and I solely attribute that to the fact that they were trying to change the way they worked and transform to an Agile delivery team. We iterated quickly. We failed fast. We pivoted daily. It was glorious. Meanwhile, at other massive organizations, all we heard was: “We want to make sure we dot all our I’s and cross all our T’s before we pull the trigger on anything.” *boooooring* Anyway, the point of that rambling is – I had been drinking the Agile Kool-Aid hard and now I was convinced that I needed to be in the application development side of the house. THAT’s where I could drive top-line revenue. If we could get apps to customers faster and get them buying our goods – we would have achieved our goal. My mentor paused when I told him my answer and said: “Well, it sounds like you know what you have to do.” I said: “I don’t want to leave… I love it here.” He said: “Yes, but you have a plan. And you can’t get there from here.”

It was at that time that I reached out to a friend in the industry and asked him what he was up to and wanted to tell him my crazy idea of abandoning what had been a decent career in infrastructure to head back to the dreaded - *cough*- app/dev side of the house. I expected his answer would be something like: “You are going to go work with those jerks!? No way, man!” Instead, he started laughing and said: “That’s hilarious… I just told my boss I am leaving infrastructure to go start a shared service group whose primary charge will be to change the way we deliver software at this 200-year-old bank… You want to come join me? You can run the PaaS side of the house.” And that was how I jumped head first from a Silicon Valley tech company to work for a 200-year-old bank who swore up and down they were ready and willing to transform to a DevOps organization. I won’t go into all the gory details of how that year of my life went, suffice to say, I learned an amazing amount. Mostly, how NOT to do DevOps transformation. All the hurdles that still existed in the organization. All the bad process that remained and caused problems every day that wouldn’t be solved. I learned a LOT. But the primary thing I learned while I was there was:

“Just because you write apps and can push them into production faster does not mean you can drive top-line revenue.”

Fast forward to me making another pivot in my career to go work for a company that was based entirely in IT Service Management (ITSM) and all things ITIL. I didn’t go to that company because I believed that they had the secret sauce. I, admittedly, was following my mentor to his new gig. We were putting the band back together and it was clear that I was never going to achieve anything at the bank, so I made the leap. Once again, we had a very funny conversation that went: “What do you know about ITSM?” To which I answered: “That’s that stuff that all the ops teams used to give us crap about, right?” He said: “HA! Yeah. You need to get really good at it and fast.” 😉 (I’d be lying if I said that isn’t my absolute favorite thing to hear…)

I began learning everything I could about ITIL, IT4IT, ITSM. I read books and listened to countless videos and within a week of being at the new company a lightbulb went off in my head and I had a major epiphany that was:

1.)    Service Management is SUPER important to the success of any DevOps project.

2.)    I had never cared about Service Management and felt really dumb that I hadn’t.

3.)    I had never done anything “as a Service” correctly up until I got to that job.

Within 2 months of being at the company, I had run across 2 use-cases where our ability to improve process and drive automation and orchestration had resulted in us helping companies drive top-line revenue! I was blown away. In a complete twist of luck, fate, karma, whatever – I had discovered the key to driving top-line revenue in companies and it was in an area I never would have looked at had I not been forced to.

For the last 3 years, I have been preaching to the world: “Hey! DevOps is awesome, but for “traditional” companies (Traditional vs Born-in-the-cloud Companies. A whole other blog topic. But, most of the G2K is traditional) the only way to make it successful is to make sure you take an end-to-end service management approach to DevOps and build processes that increase flow across the entire organization. Then, you can eliminate all the roadblocks that cause companies to fail. Then, you can achieve the goal of driving top-line revenue. And that brings us current. I continue to preach that the future of DevOps is DevOps+ an Enterprise perspective on Service Management. Gene Kim agrees. He wrote in his DevOps Handbook (https://itrevolution.com/book/the-devops-handbook/ ) about the myth that DevOps kills ITIL/ITSM/IT4IT. His response was quite the opposite. In the myth that DevOps is incompatible with ITIL, he responds that ITIL becomes more relevant and necessary than ever before, but the caveat is – it must be Automated ITIL. Agility with Governance.

In conclusion, my quest for guidance on how to drive top-line revenue for organizations has led me through a decade of work experience and learnings and has delivered me, quite happily, to a place where I can see a future technology organization that is absolutely critical to driving competitive differentiation and becomes a place where companies are excited to invest money – not to keep the lights on – but to grow the company and outpace their competition. In almost every industry we are seeing the “born-in-the-cloud” disrupting the established companies of old. The born-in-the-cloud companies can move fast. They can pivot on a dime. And they can adapt to what customers want – months or years ahead of the traditional companies. DevOps with an Enterprise approach to service management is the key to unlocking top-line revenue growth and driving competitive differentiation.

As always, thank you for stopping by. Please feel free to provide feedback or questions and any other ideas for content that you would want to see.