Frictionless Enterprise pyramid
The Frictionless Enterprise framework combines the industries major technological movements and concepts into a visual model and categorization system that aids business leaders, architects, designers, and implementers in aligning their efforts in a cohesive and strategic way.
Coarse-grain view
It’s easiest to start understanding the pyramid with a coarse grain lens. Splitting into two trapezoids, and the pinnacle. The top trapezoid is what the business cares about, and the bottom trapezoid is what IT cares about. The top triangle, the pinnacle, is innovation flow. That’s what we want to get to.
Anti-pyramid
While most organizations have many of the foundational and domain components, they’re quite literally spread all over the place, and hidden among a bunch of rigidly interconnected integrated systems.
They’re doing some, or even all of the individual pieces in the pyramid, or they think they’re doing it, or they say they’re doing it, but they’re not doing it strategically, so it’s surface level, without being able to truly realize the benefit.
Lift and shift vs. Cloud native matrix
The power of the cloud model is undeniable. Since its introduction in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst, it has been the underlying engine that has powered wave after wave of disruptive innovation in the marketplace.
As companies now find themselves as the late majority (and even laggards) in adoption, they run the risk of “going to the cloud”, instead of strategically adopting the cloud. Before chalking this up to semantics and dismissing the cloud “as just someone else’s computer”, let’s understand the disruptiveness of the model and the trade-offs:
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Hardware | Specialized, costly, depreciated assets | Commodity, redundant, decentralized | Follow Moore’s law and get good hardware at an economical price point | More individual nodes to manage. Lower reliability requires more redundancy |
Management | Manual provisioning, patching, and sys ops | Highly automated | Lower operations cost doing more with automation and fewer humans | Investing in automations tooling and DevOps infrastructure |
Operating System | Bespoke setup, SysOps care and feeding | Containerized, highly automated | Lower operations cost, less downtime | Investment in automation and DevOps infrastructure |
Application Hosting | Over provisioning | Isolated
workloads | More efficient utilization of compute
resources | Applications must be
designed for cloud native and horizontal scale |
Application Model | Client-Server, N-Tier, Relational DB, ACID transactions | Microservices, distributed, NoSQL, Eventual Consistency | Smaller, highly scalable, fault tolerant services | Applications must be designed for cloud native and horizontal scale, Eventual
Consistency |
Scaling Model | Scale - Up - Vertical - Capital Investment | Scale Out -
Horizontal - Elastic | Smaller, highly scalable, fault tolerant services | Applications must be
designed for cloud native and horizontal scale |
Financial | Capital intensive, linear manual operations cost | Operations expense | Scale elastically to match demand and revenue | Variable Cloud spend directly impacts the bottom line |
Pyramid by team type
The Frictionless Enterprise pyramid brings together concepts from across business, software architecture, and engineering domains to give us a framework for problem solving, team organization, and focus.
One lens you can use to look at the pyramid is by team type, or who in your organization cares about which part of the pyramid.
The Bottom Trapezoid
The bottom trapezoid is our stable base. It’s the combination of the technical platform and operational platform consisting of our infrastructure, our supporting capabilities, and the generic capabilities we’ve chosen as our core building blocks.
The Foundation
The base of the pyramid is not just a solid foundation upon what all modern systems should be constructed, but it also represents something that you should not be spending good money recreating from scratch.
The automation loophole
There IS a loophole that can be exploited though, but it’s often the very thing that’s the first to be cut from any budget, coded / automated testing.
The Top Trapezoid
The top trapezoid in the pyramid is all about strategic differentiation. This is where revenue is generated. Where the C-Suite has their focus. Its bedrock is Design-Led and Experience-Driven.
Where to put your best people
This is where you must put your best people, most strategic partners, and most innovative thinking. This is what differentiates you from your competitors and allows you to win in the marketplace.
The perils of mis-categorization
This might seem like semantics, but when you don’t correctly categorize a problem space and solution space correctly, best case scenario is you waste time and effort on something that you can buy much cheaper. Worst case scenario, you allow someone else to control your strategic differentiation.
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Software Delivery - Agile Project Mgt | Core | Generic | Negative ROI |
eCommerce -
Product Catalog | Generic | Supporting | Higher cost of catalog maintenance |
Product Life Cycle - Product Catalog | Generic | Core | Lost revenue, longer time to market |
The Seams
Much the same way that the brain is the most important component of the human body, one can think of a company’s core domains, their strategic differentiators, as that most important organ. It must be protected from outside toxins and contaminants. This protective layer is present in the pyramid, at the edges between the domains.
Enterprise Aware & Unified Seams
The waterfall process
In 1970, Dr. Winston Royce published a paper called “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems”. That paper has (falsely) been credited with giving birth to the waterfall process because of the diagram on page 2 of the paper.
Architectural Reference Patterns and the trade-offs
First sketch of the Frictionless Enterprise pyramid
April 25, 2022 3:57 PM. 35K feet over the middle of the USA
