Its has long been the case that any serious business enterprise is expected to have a digital presence in the form of websites and apps.
This has lead many different companies to become involved in software development activities but at what point to do you become a technology company.
Is it enough for digital channels to represent your primary connection with your users and customers or does the development of technology need to extend further towards the heart of your company's operation?
Deployment Opportunities
A great deal of insight can be garnered from your attitude to your production environment. While no self respecting company should play fast and loose with production up-time or service levels, technology companies are single minded in their determination to reduce barriers to deployment and pride themselves on the rate at which they can deliver change.
Non-technology companies see deployment to production as something to be feared and controlled.
This fear is generally driven by a lack of faith in their ability to be certain code is ready for production combined with an anxiety about the effectiveness of system monitoring to spot issues before users post-deployment.
True technology companies embrace automation as an answer to these questions and find themselves unable to work within the constraints of human process or manual road blocks.
Few companies can claim to be at the scale of a company like Amazon, but as an example of what can be achieved using this mindset in 2014 Amazon used Apollo, their internal deployment tool, to make a total of 50 million deployments to various development, testing and production environemnts (an average in excess one every second).
Whilst this is an extreme example it demonstrates that is it impossible to achieve large scale technology deployment and still keep humans and human process part of the deployment chain.
Data, Data, Data
Many industries used to have a simple model for making profit, a good or service was offered and if users liked it an opportunity to make money would present itself.
This simple model involves a degree of risk that you may misjudge what users want or not be able to fully realise potential sales or interactions.
Technology companies realise that a digital marketplace offers a unique opportunity to monitor and react to users activity, they realise that this data can reduce risk and uncertainty and allow users likes and dislikes to be predicated and measured.
This combined with the potential to rapidly deploy change into production provides a unique opportunity for test and learn, to be continually taking advantage of marginal gains.
This mindset assumes things could always be better, not necessarily by introducing new features or functionality but by monitoring and improving what is already being made available to users.
Leader Alignment
Technology companies are attempting to leverage engineering skill and expertise to deliver profits and growth, they see this as their number one skillset that shouldn't be degraded by any other concern.
To facilitate this they ensure the leaders and decision makers within the business are aligned to their engineering operation and that they have a technological view point combined with an experience of delivery.
This means that they act as guardians for the integrity of engineering practices within the organisation and maintain standards regardless of the pressures to implement change.
This isn't to say that engineering is conducted for engineerings sake, ultimately the needs of the business still need to be fulfilled, but once a commitments is made to construct something then the quality of the engineering employed is not a variable in the process.
Non-technology companies view the engineering function with their business as purely a production line of change that can be scaled and and manipulated easily to deliver any functionality in any time scale.
Engineering quality takes a back seat to the need to deliver and quality is a lever to be adjusted rather than an absolute.
Whether or not you are a technology company or a non-technology company as presented here is not a matter of being right or wrong. Its possible for a company to offer a digital marketplace whilst still only considering it one avenue to attract users but not the only one.
Its possible to develop software but not to feel the need to become a technology company, but if you decide to embark on attaining that label ensure that the mindsets and attitudes within your organisation understand what it takes to achieve.
Certain practices need to be let go and others need to be embraced, trust needs to be placed in engineers as well as an appreciation for what they offer your business.
Nobody should be expecting to mature into the next Amazon or Google but this is simply a degree of scale the practices and principles are universal.
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