Cliff's Stand-Up: Digital Transformation Journey

Cliff's Stand-up Series: Cliff Audinet, Xvoucher's VP of Technology, discusses Xvoucher, Technology, Learning and its impact on you. 

“Digital Transformation” is an interesting term.  Sort of like the “Cloud”.  We all know in the back of our minds what the Cloud is…someone else’s servers and services.  The term “Cloud” is the perfect abstraction from the complexities of modern day data centers and the myriad of services and solutions that they contain.  If you were at AWS re:Invent 2021, you know myriad is an understatement!  The Cloud is light fluffy goodness to help us power our businesses to success.

Digital Transformation as a term has many layers.  It can be applied at the business, at devices and content, and at what transports and facilitates our interaction with services, solutions, and the content they enable.  In short, a digital transformation is a journey.  If you have seen or read present day literature on the subject, that point has been driven home…repeatedly.  Like the transition from horse drawn carriages to automobiles and the impact that had on businesses, commerce, and access to goods and services, Digital Transformation is also a legitimate transition that is having a significant impact on business, commerce, and access to goods and services.  

Re-imagined websites, new types of content, new ways to consume content, services that allow rapid packaging of solutions, instant access, streaming, and new ways to interact socially, there are a multitude of use cases for Digital Transformation.  All of which is facilitated by a foundation of new server constructs and handheld devices more powerful than your average desktop computer.  So how do we map these concepts to something that makes sense, that is concrete, and that you can use as a possible way forward for your own business situation?  By way of example. 

The Digital Transformation at Xvoucher is a combination of three key components; mitigating risk, building equity, and applying an Enterprise Mindset.  The first two are straight forward, don’t hurt the business and add value to the business in what you do.  The third component, an Enterprise Mindset, is simply doing what others have done to be successful, applying the approach, architectures, processes, and people in the same way as our Fortune 500 counterparts.  Instead of five thousand servers you have fifty, or five.  Instead of ten thousand employees you have one hundred, or ten.  We focus on always scaling up, but these principles scale down extremely well and allow you to apply an Enterprise Mindset to your business. 

Great!  Now what?  A good question…you have to make a decision.

The decision to begin Xvoucher’s digital transformation journey was comprised of two factors; international sales and the need to support the business in near real time.  Because we manage other people’s money, the platform needed to be compliant with both financial and data regulations globally.  In addition, the growth of international sales meant that we needed a flexible IT platform that could support the rigors of international deployments and keep up with ever increasing business requirements.  And then there was the secret factor.

I’d like to say that you won’t have a secret factor, but most likely you do, and it will influence in some manner the decision you make.  It could be a partnership, a friendship, a business relationship…some type of “ship” that will give more weight to one of the participants in your digital Transformation start point.  My advice.  DO.NOT.IGNORE.THIS. Apply your evaluation criteria equally and then factor in the weight of that secret factor against the business benefit described by your evaluation results.  So what did Xvoucher decide with regards to starting our Digital Transformation?

We went with AWS for the following reasons:

1. Superior support for all things Microsoft.  We have bought into the .NET stack but still wanted the option to carve out non-Microsoft niches.
2. Numerous enterprise grade solutions and services that have/will allow us to build at a point north of scratch.
3. Shared security model and a compliant based ecosystem.  The AWS environments are compliant against 53 regulatory and compliance standards.
4. Fine grained user access for all solutions and services.
5. Numerous tools that allow you to test your environment against those standards.
6. Low cost usage, i.e., charge by the atomic unit for only what you use.
7. Focus on data and machine learning for business and non-technical people.
8. International deployment capabilities including China.

Whew!  We were able to make our decision to start our Digital Transformation journey.  So what comes next?  The next hardest decision you have to make…do something.  In my next post I will detail how we decomposed our next steps and took action to implement our decision to move into the AWS ecosystem and upgrade our business message.  This seems like a no brainer, but as you know, a business can sit on a decision for an eternity.  I will explain how not to get into that position.