Technology Vision Statement

At the start of the year, we were presented the “Technology Vision Statement” for 2022 by our CTO. Since we are around half-way through the year, I thought I’d revisit and critique it.

“The year 2022 will be the year of delivering cloud-ready, higher quality software at a faster pace. Our data will be integrated across products and be accessible via standard interfaces and we will begin a common user experience across our settings. Our business transformation will continue with SAFe, nurturing our talent management and the introduction of DevOps.“

Technology Vision Statement

So picking out keywords from this statement – are we on target for achieving this?

Cloud: Some teams are on projects involving “the cloud” but some of the projects are very basic and not exciting to the users. One project involves migrating a single column from a single database table into cloud storage. That’s right, one single column. The user won’t see any difference, it’s just some internal benefits but I think it has been a few months work.

Faster Pace: I completed a project back in January and I think we are planning on releasing it at the start of July. We are releasing software at the slowest we have ever done.

Data accessible via standard interfaces: I don’t know what this refers to. It sounds like we are implementing some amazing API that can work across all of our products.

SAFe: This is the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise. Most teams are working in this way, but my team isn’t.

Nurturing Our Talent Management: I think recruitment has been minimal and I think we have lost more than we have recruited.

Introduction of DevOps: We already had “DevOps”. I suppose we have improved the test environment pipelines so this might be the closest we have got to achieving this vision statement.

“Our people are valued, empowered and trusted. We are inclusive, authentic and thrive on our shared success.”

We were then shown a “hype cycle“. There wasn’t much explanation on this and I’d never come across this terminology before.

It looked pretty identical to this graph that I stole from the internet. 

It had loads of products/features along a graph but the labels don’t exactly give a positive view on them. Are you hyped for a product that releases during the “Peak of Inflated Expectations“, or the “Trough of Disillusionment“. Maybe I need to read more into what this means.

Another similarity was that our graph had a lot of similar jargon-based features. Many that I didn’t think we would release, and I haven’t heard anything about these projects either such as: “Assisted Robots”, “Application Marketplace”, “Consumer Wearables”. Given the labels have products that are up to 10 years, I suppose they could just be conceptual ideas of where we want to be headed.

We then were shown a list of objectives under different categories which aim to “deliver the strategic vision“. Many are repeats from the vision statement, but then there’s added buzzwords and ideas like “innovation“, “increase efficiency“, “control costs“, “implement tech strategy“, and “implement agile coaching team“.