Mark schwartz how to#
Mark schwartz software#

Now the central platform organization is actually making things faster for the delivery teams, because they don’t have to assess the security of those resources, don’t have to do any supplemental security engineering, and don’t have to justify the cost-effectiveness of the resources they are using. Instead, the platform team has set up the platform in such a way that when the teams self-provision their infrastructure, they automatically use cloud resources that the security team has vetted and configured and that the finance team has approved for cost-effectiveness. The teams can self-provision any infrastructure they need, without waiting for the platform team to do it.

Mark schwartz software#

Imagine, now, a centralized cloud platform team that provides software delivery teams with a prepared infrastructure on which they can work. Of course, we don’t have to worry about datacenters anymore because we have the cloud. If, however, the centralized team had set up the contract, pre-negotiated, with fast processes for teams to get their own infrastructure when they needed it, then it would have saved time for the teams and would therefore have been beneficial. As it was set up, it slowed our teams down when they needed infrastructure. For example, take DHS’s oversight of the contract for managing the datacenter. If the centralized organization provides services that would otherwise take the teams time to provide themselves, and does so without administrative overhead that would slow the teams down, then it is good. In what cases should you centralize functions? My first answer is: Only when it actually speeds up those decentralized teams and supports their innovation. That’s my starting point, but the question demands a more nuanced treatment.

When an autonomous team depends on a centralized function, it slows them down, adds administrative overhead, and imposes bureaucracy that tends to limit innovation. The teams can remain close to the customer, easily sense changes in the market, incubate ideas with cross-functional participation, and execute work with no handoffs between functional silos-that is to say, quickly. They are best facilitated by decentralizing authority, by working in those autonomous, empowered, cross-functional teams.

Mark schwartz how to#

To get a handle on how to manage the tradeoff, I like to start from the principle that speed and innovation are critical in today’s environment. Unsurprisingly, it comes up in one form or another in most conversations I have with enterprise leaders. The tension between centralizing and decentralizing is at the core of today’s digital IT environment. In our case, DHS headquarters was responsible for security across the entire enterprise, and negotiating vendor contracts centrally allowed us to leverage our purchasing volume for better discounts. This is difficult to reconcile with centralized functions and governance! On the other hand, there are some functions that just cannot be decentralized or that introduce inefficiencies when they are. Today’s digital ways of working call for decentralized, empowered, autonomous teams.

Centralization seemed to get in the way of everything we wanted to accomplish. It also governed the delivery of software systems and was consequently oriented around huge capital investments and physical objects. For IT projects, we had to follow the onerous requirements of DHS’s oversight framework MD-102 (yes, that’s the one I make fun of frequently in my books and speeches), which was designed to oversee the building of Coast Guard cutters (the Coast Guard is also part of DHS). Our network infrastructure was shared with other DHS components and managed centrally, so making even small network changes required paperwork, reviews, and long timeframes. Whenever we wanted new servers or changes in the datacenter, we had to appeal to the DHS contracting organization, which oversaw the contractor that managed the datacenter. How should enterprises decide what to centralize, and how can they best organize the centralized services and their interactions with decentralized units to reduce waste?Īs the CIO of one of the component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), I considered myself the victim of burdensome centralization. When done poorly, the centralized functions can become frustrating bottlenecks, and the interactions between shared services and decentralized teams can lead to administrative waste. Some organizations decide to create a shared services group others look to centralize governance over security and architecture, or to centralize procurement and financial management. Most large IT organizations, at some point, have to make decisions about what to centralize and what to decentralize.