Heads up, thought leaders! In this episode, we will respond to the survey published last Friday about Brain plasticity, Organizational plasticity, and the Cloud. Let’s go!
Let me start by saying that I am well aware that most of the readers of this episode have a high school biology education level (as is my case). But that doesn’t mean that with a little bit of creativity, common sense, and humility, we can’t create great content for thought leadership and collaboration.
That may be why the survey had yet to respond, even though it was viewed 200+ times, with 10+ CEO/founder views, 10+ CxO/director level views, and interactions in 10+ countries. Thank you all for your interest, and I hope this content will be interesting enough to invite you to participate in the comments.
OK, no more comments. Let’s go ahead and get started.
Brain plasticity—what is this about?
Let me say that brain plasticity has been an area of research since 1890 (Wikipedia) but became mainstream in 2016 because a neuroscientist, Merzenich, received the 2016 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience “for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function.”
Essentially, “brain plasticity” refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout an individual’s lifetime. “Brain plasticity is essential for learning and memory formation and allows individuals to adapt to new experiences, environments, and social trends.” (Thanks, ChatGPT!) This process involves the creation of new neural connections and the strengthening or weakening of existing ones.
Why is brain plasticity relevant for business?
Brain plasticity occurs at a very low level of the brain, at the brain unit level (neurons) and their connections (synapse). So, if a company wants to increase its capacity to change and adapt throughout its lifetime, agility must be enabled at the “brain” unit level. No more biology, I promise.
I got it, Jose, but I need some guidance. Can you please explain more about the organizational brain?
Enterprise Business and Enterprise Brain
Let’s say that an enterprise business is a collective team of thought leaders that makes decisions to create a win-win relationship with society.
The enterprise brain is a coordinated set of technologies, processes, and people that work together to enable these decisions. IT, especially enterprise architecture and applications, plays a critical role here.
So, plasticity, in this context, is related to allowing the applications to be reconfigured quickly to respond at high speed to changing needs.
OK, Jose, I got you, but how is this connected with the cloud?
Enterprise Brain, Plasticity, and the Cloud
Let me explain. The connection between these three topics is related to digital transformation.
We have constantly been reducing complexity, from monolithic applications
running on mainframes > to distributed systems > to monolithic applications running core systems > to redefine applications via microservices
The cloud, especially the public cloud, plays a critical role because it offers a couple of great benefits:
- Scalability: You can virtually scale up or down your resources as needed using public cloud solutions. In contrast, private clouds require investments and significant planning to increase capacity.
- Cost-effectiveness: If free is not a choice, what is better than pay-as-you-go?
- Ease of deployment: Standards, in many cases, catapult productivity. Public cloud providers offer preconfigured templates and automation tools that allow your resources to focus on business innovation rather than operational activities.
- Innovation: Did you realize the investment public cloud providers made to create hundreds of solutions to address specific needs? I will address this again in the context of plasticity in a minute.
- Security: security, security, security. Without security, without our capability of protecting our access and customer information, it is impossible to do business.
I left innovation and security as the last topics because, in my opinion, this is where plasticity resides.
The organizational plasticity journey
Let’s say you want to move to the cloud and ask for a roadmap. The initial step, in many cases, is to migrate your solutions as is. Typically, this is called “lift and shift.”
This is like a brain transplant, right?
Yes, organizations do this because it is a low-risk approach and they receive cost savings immediately. But doing this does not improve the new brain plasticity.
I see the point, so what’s next?
Next, businesses implement multiple application transformations to optimize their agility and gain organizational plasticity. Here are a couple of stages to highlight:
Application Transformation Stages Related to Plasticity
There are multiple stages in the organizational plasticity journey connected with optimizing your cloud journey. I will mention five stages, or steps, in no chronological order.
I. Lift and Shift
Migrate an application to the cloud with minimal changes to the application’s architecture.
The main benefit is to minimize the time and effort required to migrate an application to the cloud, but no additional plasticity is obtained.
II. Cloud Native
Optimize an application for the cloud, taking advantage of its scalability, elasticity, and automation capabilities.
The main benefit is to increase the performance, scalability, and flexibility of applications in the cloud. Two plasticity benefits are noteworthy enough to mention:
- It is simple to develop new functionalities, and
- It is simple to incorporate new technologies to accelerate competitiveness (AI, ML, IoT).
This is achieved on an application basis.
III. Cloud Architecture Optimization
Design and build applications that adhere to best practices for cloud architecture. This is a critical step. Often, it is intertwined with the previous step.
The benefit is ensuring cloud applications are reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective.
The plasticity benefits are related to the following:
- The new capability to change processes dynamically to respond to new market opportunities (new business trends or market research)
- The capability to scale up or scale down dynamically without affecting performance, optimizing resources, and
- The capability to incorporate new technologies to learn from and respond to the market in real time
What is the metaverse? What is the purpose of using social media trends to understand customer preferences?
IV. Cloud Cost Optimization
This is a tricky one, and it is a unique benefit of public cloud providers. The goal is to optimize the cost of running applications in the cloud.
By reducing infrastructure costs and optimizing spending on the cloud, you can use these savings to leverage other priorities.
Plasticity is the consequence of becoming a learning organization capitalizing on lessons learned.
What is intelligence?
V. Enterprise Security in a Cloud-Optimized Environment
Implementing security measures to protect applications and data in the cloud sounds like a simple task. Still, it is one of the most complex tasks to accomplish, and it is also a critical value for public cloud providers.
Back when you had a monolithic application, security was limited to protecting the I/O port.
Now, you have a learning organization comprised of a plethora of small applications (biology: neurons, business: microservices) connected by smart links (biology: synapses, business: APIs), and you need to ensure that all the puzzle pieces are correctly secured.
The good news is that using solutions from the cloud provider portfolio ensures that these solutions have built-in security. You only need to deal with security on the application end, such as policies, governance, authorizations, access, etc.
The bad news is that this journey takes time and effort. It is a topic of continuous reviews and improvements to protect new solutions enabled periodically.
Working with a managed service provider can significantly reduce this complexity and risk.
But your ending goal is now achieved: You have an organization that is cloud-optimized and ready to play the plasticity game: to respond to business needs and business drivers’ changes in real time.
There is much information to think about. Do you have any final comments?
Yes, one final comment.
Regardless of your cloud service provider’s preference for doing business, each has a unique way of naming each transformation stage.
Sometimes, this is done to differentiate their naming (branding), and sometimes, the naming reflects some unique approach or value they offer to clients.
Good Enough?
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Get ready, and let’s make it happen!