In this third part of “The Art of Mastering Platforms,” we delve into minimizing cognitive load for both consumers and providers, advertising your platform’s success, and exploring how these approaches can lead to cost savings. Let’s uncover the strategies for streamlining operations and maximizing value in today’s complex IT landscape.
Minimizing Cognitive Load for Consumers and Providers
Today’s IT landscape is a highly complex ecosystem, both for consumers and for those providing IT services. On one hand, you have traditional systems that reliably support your business but lack flexibility. On the other, your business demands agility, speed, and the ability to quickly deliver and make use of new services, such as AI.
While it’s essential to grow and innovate with your platform partner of choice (see also Part 2 of my story), it’s equally important to simplify how services are offered while maintaining governance, regulatory compliance, and scalability. Referring back to the “flow-oriented approach,” (see Part 1 of my story) consumers expect on-demand resources with minimal friction, no more creating multiple tickets for various services and doing a manual integration.
A better approach is to make foundational services accessible and easy to use straight out of the box, without requiring users to navigate different service behaviors or configurations. Sometimes it’s worth taking a look back at all the requests and taking the top 10 repeating requests and automating them as much as possible. Through this, automated policy enforcement can really streamline operations and free up time for new service development and consumer interaction.
Your platform team could define policy sets tailored to specific user groups, such as modern app developers. These policies might grant access to services like Database-as-a-Service or Kubernetes, allowing users to quickly spin up or tear down validated services within predefined limits for compute, storage, and network usage. If your consumers choose any of these pre-validated services, they will have their Kubernetes cluster or database up and running within 5 minutes. But if they need something outside of the proven standard specifications, it will take them longer. And all of a sudden, that specific requirement is not that important anymore. Policies would also enforce restrictions on what is not permitted.
This model enables each product or team environment to operate independently without disrupting other business units or applications. It provides clear cost transparency through charge-back and show-back mechanisms, all delivered in a self-service model that eliminates the need for interaction with multiple teams. And this leads to a very important point in today’s complexity: This reduces cognitive load for consumers, saves time, accelerates time-to-value, and ensures business resilience.
What applies to consumers should also apply to your platform team. Consider lifecycle management in today’s era of “gluing everything together.” What value does it add to your business if your team has to manage software dependencies, integrations, upgrades, or firmware updates manually? Shouldn’t these tasks be automated by the platform itself? Imagine having to handle software and hardware upgrades in the public cloud, this would be unthinkable. In a platform world, focus is on building services that matter to consumers. More time needs to be spent with those users to better understand what to build next. This is also what defines a platform. A platform is only a platform the added value helps the business to generate added value to their customers.
Reducing cognitive load for your platform team is just as critical as doing so for consumers. By automating routine tasks like upgrades and dependency management, your platform team can focus on delivering high-quality services that drive business value instead of being bogged down by technical debt that doesn’t align with your business goals.
Optimizing labor effectiveness and organizational structures brings an additional advantage: the opportunity to implement a shared responsibility model. This model clearly defines who owns and handles specific tasks, fostering accountability and collaboration. As a result, it reduces the mean time to resolve issues, enhances flexibility, and gives customers greater control over their applications. It also prevents the common pitfalls of “throwing issues over the fence” or assigning blame when errors occur.
Advertise your success
It’s interesting to observe that customers build excellent services on truly cloud-like platforms, yet often fail to promote the technology and its added value internally. For example, I recently spoke to a customer whose platform achieved 99.99% uptime, supports hundreds of business-critical workloads, and offered a delivery model enabling consumers to obtain resources within minutes, all in a fully compliant corporate environment, without the usual ticketing headaches. Remarkably, the entire company had been organized according to SAFe principles for two years.
When I asked whether they showcased these impressive KPIs at each Product Increment review, I was surprised by their response: they didn’t see the benefit. Yet, these very metrics, uptime, delivery speed, and compliance, are essential for promoting the platform to both existing and potential new consumers. Highlighting such achievements demonstrates the stability of the platform, the efficiency of the delivery model, and its ability to compete with third-party platforms (e.g. public clouds).
Many people, especially from the business, still believe that innovation is only possible with public cloud services, but these results prove that internal platforms can deliver comparable value. This conversation really changes when the platform team starts to build e.g. joint success stories with some of the business critical services teams that run on the platform. All public cloud providers are building and promoting success stories with their customers. And the same should apply to any platform team.
At a previous job, we started displaying metrics on screens throughout the office, visible at all times. Whenever managers, customers, or colleagues from other departments visited, these metrics sparked conversations and made things more engaging.
Following that, we began using these KPIs in more forums, meetings and conferences to position our work, for example, “We onboarded x new customers,” or “It took x days to get customers into production,” etc. There are plenty of KPIs, stories, and even challenges you can highlight and discuss.
In the daily life of a platform team, success is about more than just technology-it’s about treating your platform as a product. A product is never truly finished; it requires ongoing attention to budgets, customer needs, and internal promotion. To maximize the impact of your platform, you must continuously communicate its value and successes within your organization.
How those approaches help saving costs
In conclusion, the mentioned strategies and approaches can help organizations reduce costs while improving efficiency and innovation. By adopting modern platforms like VMware Cloud Foundation, streamlining processes, and leveraging automation, businesses can minimize operational complexity, reduce resource waste, and focus on delivering value.
Below are the key ways these ideas lead to cost savings:
- Transition from siloed IT structures to integrated, flow-oriented platforms
- Automate routine tasks like policy enforcement, upgrades, and dependency management
- Use self-service models to reduce reliance on IT support teams
- Leverage standardized cloud platforms instead of building custom solutions
- Optimize workforce roles to focus on strategic tasks rather than manual processes
- Implement shared responsibility models to improve accountability and reduce downtime
- Avoid technical debt by automating lifecycle management and using scalable solutions
- Reduce compliance-related costs with automated guardrails and governance tools
- Accelerate time-to-value by adopting pre-integrated solutions from trusted partners
By implementing these strategies, organizations can achieve significant cost savings while enhancing flexibility, scalability, and innovation. These measures not only reduce operational expenses but also position your businesses for long-term success in a competitive environment.
Of course, building everything yourself is an option, and it was common in the market over the last decades. However, as I mentioned in Part 2, it often makes sense to focus on your company’s intellectual property and leverage existing capabilities. For example, Broadcom is investing $2 billion annually in VMware Cloud Foundation to address these challenges, enabling customers to adopt modern paradigms and build robust cloud platforms. This $2 billion is often significantly more than many of my customers’ entire IT budgets. This is something to consider when planning to build a private cloud platform.
And lastly, everything I’ve written can be met with “it depends” or “but what about xyz?” I understand the landscape is diverse and often customer-specific. In this context, I still believe moving forward with standard software for commodity services is the best choice for building a private cloud. After all, anyone can adopt a public-cloud-first strategy, but doing the same on-premise often seems like a non-starter.
I hope you enjoyed my 3-part blog series of “The art of mastering platforms” and I would like to thank you for taking the time to read through it!
Should any of these topics spark your interest and you wish to discuss them further, please reach out. I’m eager to connect!