How can you encourage your company to adopt a new technology when the idea fills them with fear? Who are the main stakeholders to get onside, and how should the idea be pitched? This lightning talk, given at the Microservices User Group Meetup in June 2015, presents a seven step process which was used recently to successfully introduce Microservices to a very traditional company.

1. London Microservices User Group
Introducing New Technologies
To Traditional Organisations
@peetdenny

2. Introducing New Tech to Traditional Organisations
❖ Is often challenging
❖ Disconnect between business goals and tech goals
❖ Business sponsor mistrust of our ability to delivery
❖ Past failures
❖ (The mention of CRM is banned in one company!)

3. The Problem of Introducing New Tech to Traditional Companies
IT: New tech! The business: erm…

4. –Disgruntled business owners everywhere
“How can we get these guys to stop working on
their own thing for long enough to build
something for us?”

5. Start With The (Business) Goal
❖ What do we want to do as a company this year?
❖ Get all of our hotel rooms booked out
❖ Cut costs by £1.5M
❖ Drive more purchases through new channels
❖ Sell more insurance policies
❖ How will introducing this new tech help us reach these goals?
❖ Then pitch to the business sponsor (e.g. Product Owner)

6. Gather and Understand the Challenges
❖ You are usually not the sole influencer
❖ Depending on the size of the organisation, there may be a large number of stakeholder
groups impacted by the choice
Development
App
support
Middleware
support
Infrastructure/Unix/Windows
Enterprise
Security
Build
and
release
management
Monitoring
Team
Enterprise
Architecture
❖ Their views may not always be positive
❖ Meet with each group and strive to understand what led them to have this view
❖ They may be right! Keep an open mind

7. Group Example Beef
Development
Why am I being forced to use this? I could work much
more quickly with X
App Support
How will we support this? It’s new tech that we have no
experience of! We’ll need 6 months to learn it
Middleware support
We have all of these tools that we’ve built/configured to
support TIBCO and Websphere, now we have to start
again from scratch!
Infra/Unix/Windows
How can we capacity plan if we have no experience with
this tech?
Enterprise Security
We’re going to have to spend £10k on a pen test since
we’ve never done this before
Build and release
It took us 9 months to automate build and deploy for
Weblogic, it’ll probably take the same for this
Monitoring
Nobody knows how to monitor DropWizard, you’ll have
to design a whole new monitoring strategy
Architecture
JBOSS is our strategic choice. You’ll never get funding to
move everything off of JBOSS onto this new thing

8. Prove and Persuade
❖ Prove that the challenges can be overcome
❖ (You have to be right first)
❖ Identify main pockets of resistance
❖ Take ‘em out for a coffee
❖ Get on the same page
❖ Don’t leave it until the ARB/TDA!
❖ Build a network of support

9. Persuasion
It’s not enough to be right,
you also have to be believed
“But you didn’t persuade me” - Idi Amin

10. Network of Good News
Wut?
!
????
:D
Day 1:
New Idea
Day 30:
Everyone’s got an opinion
Day 90:
Everyone’s rooting for it
Dubious Sponsor
Dubious &
Confused Sponsor
Delighted Sponsor

11. Prove and Persuade Not just for the bad guys

12. Implement Something Small
❖ Time to put your money where your mouth has been
❖ Build something small which delivers real value to the business
❖ Prove that our assumptions work in practice
❖ Build goodwill
❖ Generate desire to use this technology more
❖ Choose either a small project, or a small part of a larger project
❖ But make sure that what is delivered gives value to the sponsor
❖ Make sure it’s awesome!

13. Win & Celebrate Success
❖ Now that you’ve delivered the
awesome, cash in on your win
❖ Go out to the pub, get some
pizzas in, rent a floor in a
nightclub, fly to Vegas,
depending on scale
-microservices are small :(
❖ Make sure to invite the sponsor
❖ Publicise: Write blog posts, do
an internal roadshow, get your
success out there

14. Iterate!
❖ Once you’ve tidied up after the party….time to do it
again!
❖ Hopefully process has raised the profile of both the
technology you’ve introduced and you yourself.
❖ Conduct a retrospective of what worked, and what
didn’t and go around again
❖ Time for more Microservices!

15. The 7 steps
Start with the
business benefit
Understand all
the challenges
Prove and
persuade
Implement
something small
Win
&
Celebrate!
Iterate err…profit!

16. @peetdenny
peet@bestboyelectric.io