Delivering more things, more quickly, is the challenge that companies are tackling through digital transformation. This transformation involves adopting new technologies, processes, organizational structures, and, in most cases, dramatic cultural changes. It is made more difficult because many of the processes and structures being replaced were created to support specific technology choices.
“There hasn’t been an enterprise who has nailed this transition yet. That evolution, the future of those enterprises, is really going to be that someone’s going to figure out how to build abstractions for how people work, and how the technical systems that they work with behave, that can easily swallow these technical shifts. As long as moving to something like containers is also tied to a dramatic cultural transition in the way that we develop software, it’s going to be pretty difficult to have a large enterprise be able to adapt to whatever comes after containers.”
Adam Jacob in an interview with Derrick Harris on the ARCHITECT Show.
Container adoption is a great opportunity for all of us to improve the way we incorporate new technologies that force us to change how we work and collaborate. Most organizations that use containers are still trying to adapt to the “learning cliff” that Michael Ducy pointed out on Twitter over a year ago.
Containers in Dev vs Prod pic.twitter.com/YqDHvigW8r
— Michael Ducy (@mfdii) February 10, 2016
This cliff is why Habitat recently added new features to make it easier to build, deploy and manage containers. These features are examples of how open source software is a big part of making transformation work better and faster (as Microsoft has noticed). As people learn what it takes to be successful with new technology, their experience improves the product.
“There’s going to be a lot of shifts in technology and the modern enterprise needs to be able to move through those shifts quickly. We found the more open we are, and remove friction for both getting on and off our platform, this actually drives and increases broader adoption.
As organizations continue — or begin — the journey to digital transformation, we will have opportunities to learn about how to best take advantage of new technologies. As long as we keep sharing what we learn, and applying it to improving both the tools we use and how we work, we’ll all be better prepared for the next big thing.