Introducing Surround Sight Consulting
I’m starting Surround Sight Consulting to bring Design Thinking principles and Microservice Architecture technologies to small to medium sized IT shops. Design Thinking techniques pioneered at Stanford and MIT have gained significant traction in large enterprises but many smaller organizations have missed this innovative approach. Microservice Architectures pioneered by Born-In-The-Cloud organizations have already disrupted many large enterprises, but smaller organization struggle to recognize the benefits. There is significant opportunity today for smaller shops to provide significant business advantages to their organizations and drive real growth to the bottom line. Design thinking excels in leveraging the observations of a diverse team to garner a 360° view of a problem and find innovative solutions. I want to show you how your team can surround your problems and provide you the insight needed to find new and innovative solutions.
After watching decades of steady evolutionary progress in our industry, I’ve recognized that there are now revolutionary changes taking place. Our industry is being disrupted by a wave of companies who have found new and innovative ways to solve a host of common IT problems. Large enterprises have teams working to modernize their IT practices, but there are a lot of businesses with small IT teams that are facing significant market pressures to improve the quality, scalability, availability, and release cadence of their software while also finding that the traditional approaches to design, development, and operations are more of an impediment than a benefit.
Software teams find that users' expectations for the usability and reliability of their systems is no longer based on historical performance or policy. Their expectations are now based on the services they receive from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, or the like. More than ever our software is measured against the best in the industry, not our own history or even our competitors' performance.
In today's job market, many software teams are facing significant continuity risks. Talent management is a key to successful growth in a challenging market. You may find it difficult to onboard new engineers, and when you do successfully add new talent you see significantly diminishing returns from the investment. Most managers would gladly double the engineering staff if it would actually double productivity. Unfortunately, many find that growing the team is really hard and has a significantly diminishing impact on overall productivity.
Our industry has been disrupted by Cloud Native organizations that have innovated new ways to design, build, and run software. These systems provide unparalleled scalability, remarkable performance, and a high-quality rapid release cadence measured in days instead of months or years. They have innovated new ways to create employee satisfaction, loyalty, and career advancement that makes them a magnet for talent.
Surround Sight uses design thinking techniques to help small teams learn from and adopt innovative cloud native approaches to designing, building and running software.