How are Microservices Supporting CIOs in Realizing Business-IT Alignment?

Business-IT Alignment is considered an important growth catalyst for organizations. The focus has shifted from ‘alienating’ to ‘collaborating’ IT processes with business objectives in order to stay innovative and competitive.

The question is—what’s helping businesses to realize business-IT alignment in today’s extraordinarily competitive industrial space?

It’s the Microservices.

Microservices Demystified

Microservices, a successor of service-oriented architecture (SOA), is a new approach to application architecture that promises agility, efficiency, and quick turnarounds. Basically, it suggests breaking down a system into small, discrete, and autonomous components, which work as a unified whole. These components are separated, tested, and worked on individually, and later joined together to create the complete architecture. Since there’s a greater focus on improving each component and debugging it, a unique level of efficiency, precision, and scalability is achieved.

Moreover, microservices enables small, autonomous teams within an organization to work on these discrete components. This manifests a more inclusive working culture. Multiple teams work independently on various service requirements at a time, which makes deployment easier, accelerates processes, reduces costs and most importantly, allows agility and continuous delivery.

In short, microservices has been a boon for organizations looking for ways to accelerate both development and deployment speed.

Underpinning Business-IT Alignment using Microservices

Business-IT alignment is a monumental responsibility and needs somebody to take complete ownership of the decision. Since CIOs manage and improve critical IT aspects and support enterprise goals, they are the right cutouts for the role.

Microservices for Business-IT alignment requires CIOs to look at the architectural landscape in a new way and enables a culture that brings all the teams together to perform independent tasks. Also, it’s important for them to target and enable IT automation for reducing dependency on manual processes and enabling better productivity.

A well-thought-out effort of all the important drivers will help unleash the true potential of microservices.

• Scalability: Microservices are functionally modular components; each aiming at fulfilling a specific business purpose. It helps businesses in elevating a single component of IT architecture while triggering no change in the rest of the system. 
• Greater Autonomy: Microservices enables multiple development and operations teams within an organization, working autonomously on their respective tasks as a part of a larger objective. This puts all parties in alliance and encourages a close-knit working culture, where everyone ideates, innovates and evolves. 
• Profound Employee-Business Connect: The alignment of multiple development and operations teams within the organization breeds a new connect and a good sense of teamwork.
• High Deliverability: Building automation through High Productivity (HPA) platforms, Cloud, and CI/CD orchestration allows teams to build business-friendly Microservices, which in turn, leads to the greater flexibility of operations and expedites operations.

A Few Points to Remember

Business-IT alignment using microservices is difficult as well as lucrative. It’s worth getting excited about, but if there’s no clarity on how to go about it, it can be damaging for businesses too. A little decisive approach can save the day.

• Microservices is either used to overhaul an existing monolithic architecture, or applied from the scratch. However, the success rates of the former have been higher. 
• Microservices is meant for agile cultures, or the ones taking an active interest in agile methodologies. An organization that’s prone to dragging its feet or shows resistance will crash while aligning to IT processes. 
• Not all organizations require microservices at the remotest level. Some organizations might want it in parts for a few specific business needs. Similarly, not all processes are right for microservices. You can always look for another set of services to architect them better.

Business-IT alignment needs automated IT processes and business teams, which are ready to break the ice, involve, and make the decision together. And, Microservices builds a bridge between IT and multiple operational teams. It’s pivotal for CIOs to recognize how microservices build right coordination with business teams to unlock the real value of an IT organization.

In our next blog, we will discuss the myths of microservices architecture.