For quite a while now, I feel that more and more companies follow Kostolany’s old advice: “Own what you need, rent what you don’t need”. Consequequently, software is not bought as perpetual licenses anymore, but rather rented. This also holds true for mission-critical software, such as CRM (Salesforce, anyone?) and portfolio planning/program management toolchains.
Companies following a cloud-first strategy are focusing on their core mission here – and considering everything outside this focus as muda/waste.
Wouldn’t it be a logical next step to consider the whole enterprise a service? In a very naive and positive line of thinking, employees just need an environment which cultivates their skills and talents – besides that, be left alone (you realize how this is provoking to start a discussion, right? 🙂 )
Employees are getting s**t done, they are picking up the phone when our clients call, they have ideas and fix problems — all this is adding customer value. At the same time, all the admin overhead, bureaucracy, legal stuff is technically muda — so in the best #devops line of thinking, this “pain” should be automated away. The nerd in me imagines data endpoints like “GET /resources/{skill}” or “POST /myTimewritingDataButLeaveMeAlone”
This in turn would leave us with networks/hubs/communities of practice of motivated people, working on a common goal.
The enterprise or corporation, with all the politics and hierarchies in it? Just a dotted line around them, eventually fading away….