A Microservices Adventure: Make IT the Agile Growth Engine of the Organization

With microservices, IT can truly become the powerful strategic tool that you already know it can and should be. This is also true for large companies and organizations with a long history. Even though your admirable size and history are good explanations for why your IT has grown disproportionately large, there is still no reason to throw in the towel.

Regain agility in your IT development with microservices and take on the small and agile new players in the market. In a modern and digitalized market, IT is not just a support area. IT can and should be your organization’s primary growth engine.

Further down, you can read about Blinds DK – a fictional market leader in the blinds sector – and how they use microservices to put business and domain at the center of IT development. But first, an explanation of the term microservices.

Microservices: Breaking down the monoliths 

Microservices represent a completely new way of thinking about software architecture. It is a departure from the traditional monolithic software architecture, where an IT system consists of one large indivisible block. A block that can only be developed as a whole and therefore becomes too cumbersome to handle in a dynamic and ever-changing reality.

Instead, microservices are modular; a network of small domain-focused applications, each serving its own specific purpose. The applications operate independently of each other because they run their own standalone processes and communicate more simply as a result.

The need for microservices typically arises in larger and older organizations where the IT system has grown out of proportion. As the system’s responsibilities have expanded, it may have lost its clarity. Different unrelated domains are presented as one. As a result, the IT system becomes a monolith that almost by default dictates the possibilities your organization has for thinking, developing, and doing new things.

With a microservice mindset, you can break up the large monolith and focus your IT so that it is driven by your domain and business, rather than the technical decisions you made in 1992.

A Microservice Adventure: John and Jane Save the Day with Microservices

Blinds DK, does that ring a bell? Not quite? Okay, but bear with me for a moment, as we use our imagination to clarify the potentials of microservices.

Blinds DK is indeed a very good – albeit fictional – example of how you, as a company, can use microservices to reestablish a very important space for action in the battle for customer favor.

Alright then. Blinds DK is a (fictional) large Danish manufacturing company. They produce blinds for both the Danish and international markets. The company started in the analog 1970s and, apart from a brief downturn in the lean eighties, has always been a leader in its field.

At Blinds DK, like many others, they face fierce competition both domestically and abroad. In their nearly 50 years of operation, they have managed to innovate their product time and again, making them the perfect choice for the modern and style-conscious blind consumer. Their blinds are the best in the world.

Start-ups challenge Blinds DK’s market position

Blinds DK are masters at innovating physical blinds and the way these blinds are sold to end customers. However, in the past year, Blinds DK has experienced new competitive parameters, and particularly the digital battlefield seems difficult to dominate.

Several new competitors have succeeded in challenging their position with new business structures, touchpoints, and digital innovations. And although Blinds DK has tried the same several times, it seems almost impossible to get ahead of the new competitors.

Many years of experience are not only an advantage

Blinds DK is not alone in being overtaken by younger competitors. Organizations like Blinds DK lose the competition to younger companies partly because they are burdened by the history and IT debt that a long life brings.

You might know this from your own organization and daily life. That thing about getting a good idea. An idea that should be easy to execute, but when you start working on it, challenges suddenly pile up. The work comes to a halt before you even get started.

Jane gets a good idea, but the monolith stands in the way

At Blinds DK, their product manager, Jane, has just experienced exactly that. After an inspiring meeting with one of her suppliers, she got a fantastic idea on how Blinds DK’s blinds can get a step ahead of the competitors.

Blinds DK’s monolithic IT system is not built to handle more complex customer interactions. It wasn’t even a consideration when the IT work started almost 20 years ago.

Jane’s idea is shelved. Not because it wasn’t good or relevant, but because the nearly 20-year-old IT system cannot handle the new functionalities.

IT-John and Product-Jane form a new winning microservice alliance

Fortunately, Jane has a forward-thinking colleague in John. He is the CTO at Blinds DK, and several of his best people have gradually introduced him to the microservices concept. He is ready to try out the new architectural approach, but he is still grappling with how to best tackle the work.

A complete overhaul of the IT system at Blinds DK is too big a task to solve right now. But when John hears about Jane’s otherwise shelved customer engagement idea in a side remark at a management meeting, it becomes clear to him that this is exactly the kind of idea he needs.

A concrete idea for a smaller application that can be established alongside the existing IT setup. With Jane’s idea, John and his team can get their hands dirty, so to speak, and try out microservices work in their organization.

The right project team becomes the key to unlocking the microservices potential at Blinds DK

John and Jane sit down together on a Tuesday morning to assemble the perfect project team. A team that can turn Jane’s idea of customer-driven blind design into reality. A broad spectrum of skills is needed to complete the task, but fortunately, most can be found internally.

It is crucial that the project team includes both development, business, and operations specialists, and that they can work together across their areas of expertise.

The ‘Customer-Driven Blind Design’ project is launched, and within a month, the application is ready for use. The focused work results in a customer-facing application tailored specifically to the business’s needs and operational maintenance requirements. The developers and architect have chosen the programming language and platform that best match the specific solution.

WIN-WIN: Jane gets a targeted application, and John gains valuable experience

With a cross-disciplinary and focused effort, Jane gets her ‘Customer-Driven Blind Design’ application in a very short time, and John, along with the project team, gains experience with microservices work and the requirements it places on understanding both solution design and operational reliability.

Overall, collaboration becomes a key word for microservices. Especially the developers and the internal IT department experience a newfound sense of unity. It is crucial for the specific application’s success that these two roles have a great understanding of each other.

And although this project was just a start, Blinds DK is now a step closer to an IT architecture that once again puts the business and domain at the center of development work.

Even more benefits with microservices: shorter time-to-market and lower downtime costs

In the microservice adventure above, it hopefully became clear that the grand goal of moving from a monolithic software architecture to microservices is to make the organization ready to compete on equal terms with the new and more agile players in the market. It’s about making IT a growth engine rather than a brake for the business.

With an agile and microservices-based IT organization, time-to-market is significantly reduced, and companies like Blinds DK suddenly have the opportunity to innovate on equal terms with newer players in the market.

Another very significant effect of microservices is that you minimize the consequences of system downtime. When something goes wrong, it’s not the entire system that goes down, but just the individual microservice that is affected.

“There must be some downsides to microservices,” you say…

And you are right. Microservices are not for everyone and far from the easiest solution at first glance.

The elephant in the room is the significant effort required to overhaul a typically very large IT system that has evolved and grown over decades. And this is certainly where the biggest challenge and most important consideration lies – is it really something for you?

To approach this decision, our advice is to take a long-term perspective:

• How does your competitive situation look today, and in which direction is it developing? 
• Do you already experience today that IT sometimes stands more in the way than it supports your business?

If not, it might be too early to start the microservices work. 

But maybe you should keep the microservices concept in mind the next time you need to develop IT for your organization. If the challenge can be solved with a small standalone solution, like in the Blinds DK adventure, then give it a try.

And remember, you can indeed eat an elephant – it’s just one bite at a time.

You don’t need to wipe the slate clean. Draw on the wall instead.

In summary: For many large companies, microservices are the way forward. And many are already on their way. The trick is to give power back to the domain and the business. It is not the IT monolith that should automatically set the stage for innovation and rethinking your organization, but the other way around.

The work is demanding and extensive, and like all other software and innovation, it’s about thinking big but starting small.

If there’s no space on the board, then draw on the wall instead and see for yourself. Do microservices work for you, or do they not work in your organization? This way, you get a very good starting point for further work with microservices on the path to a more agile organization.