Architural Migration And Governance
Integrating the Agile Cloud Manager into your organization can optionally include upgrading your enterprise governance process, if your team wants. Agile cloud governance needs to be cross-functional and iterative. The goal of agile cloud governance is to improve the efficiency with which the IT organization delivers on the enterprise’s business roadmap. Achievement of this goal requires a combination of clear vision with a clear understanding of the evolving present state.
The diagram entitled “Develop A Roadmap” illustrates several steps through which you can iteratively both implement the Agile Cloud Manager and also consider possibly upgrading your enterprise governance process.
Step One: Vision & Demo
The orange boxes at left in the “Develop A Roadmap” diagram show how the vision work at the start includes reading, discussion, and quick setup of the working demos that are available at AgileCloudInstitute.io.
You can start to cultivate vision by sharing the articles from AgileCloudInstitute.io and by holding meetings of your stakeholders.
At the same time, one of your engineers can follow the tutorials at AgileCloudInstitute.io to set up working demos of the Agile Cloud Manager for your organization in multiple clouds.
Your stakeholders can start to lay out a governance process that your organization can use to plan and manage the work of migrating to this more agile architecture.
Step Two: Clarify Governance Process
Next, the box labeled “2” in the “Develop A Roadmap” flowchart illustrates a simplified view of a governance process.
Different people in different job functions provide input at distinct points within a clearly defined process. You can clarify a governance process in many possible ways. For example:
- You can also layout your governance process as a matrix to specify which types of decisions get made by which types of employees at each phase of the process.
- Then you can define document templates and standards that are used to structure the inputs of each stakeholder at each point in the process, and you can put those documents and standards under version control.
- You can also define the tools that are used for managing all the systems and requirements. This can include defining an enterprise architecture repository.
Your organization no doubt already has some practices or standards for managing these types of decisions.
We are therefore using the event of demonstrating and evaluating the Agile Cloud Manager as an opportunity to engage cross-functional stakeholders in a possible upgrade of your governance processes, if desired.
Step Three: Agile Cloud Readiness Assessment
An agile cloud readiness assessment can be the first project to run through your governance process. You can see this in the box labelled “3” in the flowchart. Your cloud readiness assessment includes:
- Documenting the current state of your systems and of your organizational workflows.
- Identifying re-usable elements.
- Documenting how your current systems integrate with the workflow relationships across your organization.
From this assembled data, you can determine what must change the fastest, including:
- Which elements of your systems offer the highest return.
- Which elements cause your organization the greatest pain.
- Which elements must be created as enabling prerequisites before other elements can be created.
- Which elements are the lowest hanging fruit in terms of being the easiest to implement.
This will include building business cases for each of the systems that might be migrated to the Agile Cloud Manager. Each business case can take the form of a spreadsheet comparing financial cost line items between the present state of using existing systems versus the future state of using the Agile Cloud Manager for each system. You can read more about this in the article “Quantifying the Financial Benefits.”
Step Four: Select The Pilot System
Fourth, from this analysis, you can select the first system with which you can pilot test the Agile Cloud Manager within your organization.
Step Five: Pilot Program
Fifth, the pilot program can begin with a proof of concept that uses the Agile Cloud Manager to create a working clone of one of your systems.
The remaining 3 steps of implementation, migration, and evolution are illustrated in whatever governance process you come up with in step “2” of the “Develop A Roadmap” flowchart.
Once the proof of concept has been completed, your governance team can approve implementation of the system. Implementation will include operationalization and monitoring.
Step Six: Migration
The following diagram entitled “Migrating To An Enterprise Pipeline With The Agile Cloud Manager” illustrates how you can migrate from one successful pilot of one system.
Each numbered phase in the flowchart is composed of a series of steps starting with a business case, followed by a proof of concept, and then implementation.
Number “1” in the diagram includes a “Migrate” step in which the successful system template can be adopted by other parts of your organization. For example, if your pilot was for a storage system, you could migrate the storage system throughout your organization.
Then number 2 in the diagram shows how the next step can be to upgrade one of your domains to become an appliance.
Then number 3 in the diagram involves upgrading your remaining domains to become appliances.
Finally, number 4 in the diagram is when you create one enterprise-level pipeline composed of all the appliances.
Step Seven: Ongoing Evolution
The next diagram is entitled “Enterprise-Level Governance Simplified By Agile Cloud Manager”, and illustrates how ongoing evolution can be managed by feeding feature requests through a more clearly-defined governance process that the Agile Cloud Manager makes possible. This is the same Figure 16 from our article “Architecting The Agile Organization with the Agile Cloud Manager”, except that here we are elaborating on this diagram.
Number 1 in the diagram illustrates how governance of “Platform-As-Code” is organized into 4 specific types of Agile projects which together reflect the architecture of the Agile Cloud Manager. Each Agile project is associated with one or more specific repositories so that every aspect of your software-defined platform can be accountable to an Agile governance process.
Number 2 in the diagram illustrates how the Agile application governance process that you might already have in place can have a very similar structure to the “Platform-As-Code” governance process which the Agile Cloud Manager greatly simplifies.
The Agile Cloud Manager’s architecture can greatly simplify the work of governing enterprise platforms because the Agile Cloud Manager’s Domain Specific Language DSL and Command Line Interface CLI enable you to operate on units that have meaningful business value while abstracting away lower-level details into logical groups. The amount of code in the lower-level objects can also be substantially reduced because the Agile Cloud Manager’s architecture enables each template to be reused by multiple groups whose requirements can be managed using Agile project management tools. At the same time, the Agile Cloud Manager’s automation algorithms can replace large amounts of redundant pipeline code.
Together, the chart illustrates how “Platform-As-Code” governance and application governance feed directly into enterprise pipelines, so that every aspect of your Agile, software-defined enterprise platforms can be controlled by an Agile governance process, leading to faster corporate evolution and more complete satisfaction of customer needs.