Our digital world is changing—faster than we can imagine. The proliferation of digital technology has created an awe-inspiring number of new connections, products, services, ideas, insights, and efficiencies of which previous generations could only dream.
Simply put, there’s never been a more exciting time to be digital.
But for many, the speed of these advancements has come at a price. Technology is evolving at a pace most struggle to keep. Tension exists between the operational necessity to maintain lumbering legacy systems and the technological imperative to invest in a higher-order, modernized enterprise.
Large, dynamic organizations need to transform from closed, proprietary systems to open agile enterprises. The question is, how? It starts with coupling open technologies with open attitudes and understanding several key principles.
“Open” Means More Than Just Open Source
Open source is how our industry learns, and by reusing the best open source code, we learn with them. For example, Booz Allen is a leading contributor in government-curated Githubs and open source repositories. Our entire open source cloud broker platform, Project Jellyfish, is also publicly available via our Github, and integrated with Red Hat’s ManageIQ community.
Beyond open source, however, true open performance also incorporates:
- Open architectures: These provide flexibility, permit interoperability, and allow systems to connect easily to other devices, apps, and systems.
- Open standards: These define what open means, and are the building blocks that enable communities to create ideas together.
- Open communities: Open communities, e.g. GitHub, accelerate digital transformations faster than any company can on its own. They offer the freedom to explore, examine, and scout new ideas from the digital ecosystem. Building and maintaining physical and digital meeting points—intersections between communities, people, and technology—connects great ideas with meaningful causes.
- Open data: When organizations permit scientists and technologists to freely access, explore, and reconfigure their datasets, people have a richer understanding of the world around them.
Embrace DevOps to Transform the Culture of Software Delivery
DevOps is movement toward continuous delivery that demands dedication, persistence, and a collaborative culture in which all participants are inspired to contribute toward building the best possible solutions. It involves frequent, incremental demonstrations of working software to create better products. Automation lets teams test and deploy faster, and it lets the entire software team map and share mutual progress. Releasing software early and often is the best way to capture feedback and build something users actually want to use.
Focus on Reuse
At Booz Allen, we avoid building from scratch. Instead, we assemble and reuse what we already have, and the great technologies that others have developed. Savvy reuse saves time, and it saves our clients’ money.
In fact, we believe so strongly in reuse through assembly that we created Booz Allen STAGE, our open architecture framework built on the principle of savvy reuse. It’s a powerful environment to empower developers and analysts alike to set up, define, assemble, and ship modules and software faster. STAGE makes it cheaper to deploy and maintain services, improves flexibility and security, and accelerates new capabilities across enterprises.
Realize Agility is Much More Than Speed
Agile is fast, but it’s also modular and flexible. Today, large, cumbersome applications are being replaced by modular systems and micro-services. DevOps techniques are overriding traditional development processes, and software delivery is now continuous. That’s why we strive to build small widgets and micro-services that serve as plug-in building blocks for enterprise systems.
The best approach to building an enterprise system is to first break it into pieces that are loosely coupled. It makes assembling the software a more agile process, and allows the team to surge and sprint in a way that’s flexible against timelines and delivery cycles, driven by a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous feedback and measurement.
Ultimately, these modular systems and micro-service-based architectures reduce the cost of system ownership, accelerate the deployment of new functionality, and improve overall system stability. And open source containerization tools, such as Docker, can ease the implementation of this modular systems approach.
