Moving from data to Centers
This was supposed to be further announcement on a Data as Code project which was envisoned as as supporting component of whatever comes along as Version 5.0. We have Society 5.0, and we certainly expect the 4.0’s will provide the on-ramps and lift-off necessary for that.
What came across the desk was the Linux Foundation’s State of Open Standards, the key notes of which are provided below.
Full report available at: 2023 State of Open Standards Survey - Report.pdf (linuxfoundation.org); accessed 01 august 2023
Like we have the 12-factor app guidelines, there are a dozen important revelations in the Open Standards survey. With something of a Center of Excellence playbook under development, it makes sense to try and fit the concepts here, from the composable edge-as-a-Service idea to the Data as Code generator, to the notion that platforms are economies.
One remarks on a regular basis about how teams today have to do much more with much less, and it’s hardly a wonder that the idea about quiet resignations is fitting in so well with the amount of stress jobs come encumbered with. What if we had an aegis that led to provisioning solutions at about the same speed as problems occur? Better yet, what if something like open standards could generate work plans that enabled you to plan the work, work the plan, re-plan the work when unforeseen challenges arise, and work the re-plan? Would it reduce the amount of technical debt we carry or generate, and if it did reduce the technical debt, would be automatically be more productive?
Automatically more productive is an attractive trope. It is so inimical to how we are schooled it’s hard to understand how it gets traction, much less gets widely adopted. In the process of going through a library of texts to determine which ones would be good to donate, the fact that at one time or another, I actually had to read those texts to a level which enabled mining them for materials to use in the context of a profession’s phase, yeah, that time in territory spent not realizing maybe some of all that can become the source of automatic.
Plus, there are so many great perspectives on the one thing most agree on can salvage technology from its own dustbin. Or maybe just its own digital dust that we can’t even see most days. That thing is the capability digital transformation has to release some of the built-up debt into a new currency. Some use the term digital economy. Some the age of the customer. Some modernization. Others keep to digital transformation if only to keep it as a place marker for a time when we could’a, would’a, should’a done better by ourselves and the prospects of the future.
One thing about digital transformations is you can make mistakes in a digital world without harming anyone or anything. If pride is all you have to lose and you can’t afford to risk it by experimenting and learning nothing at worst, or something you didn’t know at second best, maybe pride is not the thing to use as your guide. You, of course, know best.
What cannot be argued much longer is whether to do digital or oppose it. We now have great evidence that digital can span market segmentations (either small, medium, and large, or by industry classification code, or by customer demographic). If it can span all those, all verticals, and all horizontals, that’s something for which Open Standards can provide foundation. And re-foundations, which has been the problem of long pasts.
Using the materials on the Center of Excellence, and converging digital transformation studies to support a Center’s Maturity-Capability Model matrix, a wider range of as Code solutions might be imagined. True, someone has to solve the what in ‘What is Data as Code?’ and there are clues as to how to find that definition in the context of a platform generator. The key to all this is that digital is code and code is digital. The degree to which we can make this transversal both omni-directional and transparent becomes a way to shake loose digital value chains, the greater cause for which we need an effector.
Setting this re-tasking for the composable edge does require some editing and amendment of our mission. The focus is not on the outcomes of the work, not the way the work gets done. By pulling on the thread of data as code, a fortunate occurred.