What exactly is the middle platform?

This article is from jianjian wechat, written by Wang Jian, a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks.
Wang Jian will share the topic about China Central Taiwan at A2M Summit in Shanghai on May 18-19. Click on more A2M summit contenthereLook at it.

From the beginning, it seems that an invisible hand has been matching me with “micro services”, “platformization” and “Zhongtaihua”, which has brought me a lot of troubles, thoughts and harvest.

Platformization is on the rise, with platforms popping up in fields from infrastructure to artificial intelligence, with profound implications for software developers and companies alike. However, in China, the mention of “digital platform strategy” may seem abstract and far-sighted; If mention “central Taiwan” everybody will be more familiar with a few.

That… What exactly is the Middle Platform? Could it be another Buzzword? This from the name seems to be from the front and the background between the new fault, it and the front and the background of the difference and boundaries in the end where? What goes to the center stage, and what goes to the front or back stage? What problem does it appear to solve?

The question after question kept pouring out and haunting my mind. Today, more than a year later, with the participation in several platform-based and taiwan-related projects of enterprises on the right track, I can finally sit down and review the practice and thinking of this year, try to answer these questions again, and sort out and write them up for communication and discussion.

First, the zhongtai myth

It’s all over the place, it’s all over the place, and it seems to me that the term has been overused.

• In the eyes of some people: The mid-platform is the technology platform, such as microservices development framework, DevOps platform, PaaS platform, container cloud and so on, people call it “technology mid-platform”;
• In the eyes of some people: Taiwan is micro service business platform, like the most common what user center, order center, all kinds of micro service distribution center, people call it “business in Taiwan”;
• In some people’s eyes: China should be a matter of organization, the release of potential: the evolution of the platform type organization roadmap (douban) platform was put forward in organizations and the concept of China, China this kind of organization in the enterprise is mainly have the effect of investment cast after evaluation and management, similar to the enterprise internal resources dispatching center and internal innovation incubator organization, people call it “China”.

After reading this article you will understand, the above several categories of “medium” division is still reliable, more I see the situation is that everyone in response to the enterprise “medium strategy”, simply put their own system “back end” or “background” to change the name, called “medium”.

What exactly is the Middle Platform? What does it mean to the business? What are we talking about when we talk about the Centre?

Want to find the answer, just silence in their respective “middle stage”, as a glimpse of the leopard, the body into the maze, it is difficult to think clearly. It is better to change the perspective, from all kinds of “zhongtai maze” to jump out, try to think about Zhongtai from the perspective of balanced and sustainable development of enterprises with a higher perspective, and push back its value of existence.

To understand the value of its existence, we need to answer the following two questions:

• Why do enterprises need to be platformized?
• Why does the enterprise want to build middle stage?

1. Why do enterprises need to be platformized?

The answer is simple:

In today’s Internet era, users are the center of the business battlefield. In order to quickly respond to users’ needs, we can get twice the result with half the effort by virtue of the power of platformization. It is the key factor for the survival and sustainable development of enterprises to continuously respond to, explore, dig and lead the needs of users.

Those who truly respect users, even at the expense of adjusting their own subversion to respond to users, will survive and develop in this user-centered business war; Conversely, companies that rest on their laurels in the hope that users will continue to follow them as before will be weeded out.

It’s brutal, but it’s the basic business rule of the day.

Platformization is important because it empowers or strengthens one of the most central capabilities of the enterprise in the modern user-centric business war: customer responsiveness. This ability can help companies to be pre-emptive in the business war and always get the upper hand.

It can be said that in the Internet age, the struggle for business is a competition for user responsiveness.

A bit wide open again, isn’t it? Let’s take a look at some classic examples:

Example 1

Speaking of zhongtai, the first thought should be Ali’s “big zhongtai, small front desk” strategy. Through years of unremitting efforts, ali people have accumulated their own technology and business capabilities into a comprehensive capability platform under the constant catalysis and nourishment of the business, and have the ability to respond quickly to business changes and innovations at the front desk.

Example 2

As early as ten years ago, Haier began to promote the transformation of the platform-based organization and put forward the strategic planning and transformation goal of “the platform-based organization supports the front-line self-operated organization”. It has built a maker culture of “integration of individual and single items” and “user pay”, which has truly raised the platform to the height of the organization.

Example 3

A few years ago, Huawei put forward the corporate strategy of “artillery fire on a large platform supporting elite troops to fight”, “let those who can hear the sound of artillery call for artillery fire”, which vividly interprets the battle strategy of small front desk supported by a large platform.

This extremely flexible and powerful method of combat allows it to respond quickly to the rapidly changing battlefield, and once the target is locked, powerful fire support can be quickly and accurately delivered to the battlefield through large platform artillery groups.

Visible, like a tiger on the Internet, the fourth time the dawn of the industrial revolution is coming today, companies can be truly “user-centric”, and constantly improve their own user response to follow even lead user’s footsteps, continuous innovation, large-scale will decide whether or not a business in such full of challenges and opportunities of the last laugh on the market, In the business for a long time to maintain innovative vitality and competitiveness.

Platformization can help enterprises do this faster and better, so this answers the first question — enterprises need platformization.

2. Why do enterprises build zhongtai?

Ok, so here’s why we need to platform. However, platformization is not a new concept, and many enterprises have made efforts and accumulation in this direction for many years. So why has the relatively new concept of “Zhongtai” sprung up again in recent years? For enterprises, why can’t the traditional platform architecture of “foreground + background” meet the requirements of enterprises?

This brings us to our second question: why do enterprises build Zhongtai?

Define foreground and background

Because the term platform is too broad, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let me define what I mean by foreground and background in the context of this article:

• Front desk: a front-end platform composed of various front desk systems. Each foreground system is a user touch point, that is, the end users of enterprises directly use or interact with the system, is the intersection of enterprises and end users. For example, websites, mobile apps and wechat public accounts directly used by users all belong to the foreground category.
• Background: A back-end platform composed of background systems. Each background system generally manages a class of core resources (data + computing) of the enterprise, such as financial system, product system, customer management system, warehouse logistics management system, etc., which constitute the background of the enterprise. As the core computing resources of an enterprise, infrastructure and computing platform are also part of the background.

The backstage is not made for the foreground

The front desk and the background are defined. For the second question (why enterprises build the center Stage), I will also give my answer first:

Because the enterprise background is often not very good to support the rapid innovation of the front desk to respond to the needs of users, the background is more to solve the problem of enterprise management efficiency, and the center is to solve the innovation problem of the front desk.

Most enterprises have some background, or the front desk is not used at all, or not good, or change speed can not keep up with the pace of the front desk.

At the beginning of the establishment of many enterprise background systems, the goal is not mainly to serve the front desk system innovation, but more to realize the electronic management of back-end resources and solve the efficiency problem of enterprise management.

This kind of system is either spent a big price outsourcing, need to pay a lot of service fees every year, and the version is old, customization is difficult; Or it is to spend a lot of money to build, disrepair, a patch, also difficult to change, is the enterprise so-called “legacy system” disaster area.

To sum up, there are only two words “slow” and “expensive”. They are slow in responding to business and spend a lot of money if they change a small function at every turn.

Some people will say, you can’t talk about the legacy system, we can build a new backend system, the whole 2.0 problem will be solved.

However, even the newly built background system, because it manages the key core data of the enterprise, considering the enterprise security, audit, compliance, law and other restrictions, it often cannot be directly used by the front desk system, or cannot be rapidly changed due to various restrictions to support the rapid innovation needs of the front desk.

At this time, the foreground and the background are like two gears with different speeds. The foreground needs to respond quickly to the needs of the front-end users and pay attention to rapid innovation and iteration, so the faster the speed is required, the better; As the background is facing relatively stable back-end resources, and the system is old and complex, and even subject to laws and regulations audit and other relevant compliance constraints, it is usually stable first. The more stable the better, and the slower the speed is naturally the better.

Therefore, with the continuous development of enterprise services, the problem of “foreground + background” gear speed “matching imbalance” has gradually emerged.

With the development and expansion of enterprise business, because of the high cost and risk of background modification, we are driven to choose to maintain the stability of the background system as far as possible.

But because also respond to user constant demand, nature will be a lot of business logic (business) directly to the system, the introduction of repetition will cause swelling at the front desk system at the same time, become bloated, formed a huge mud ball “chimney type monomers application”, gradually brought down the front desk “user response force” of the system.

With the decrease of user satisfaction, the competitiveness of enterprises also decreases continuously.

Gatner proposed a solution to this problem in his 2016 report “Pace-Layered Application Strategy”, which is to divide the enterprise’s Application system into three layers according to the “Pace” (exactly corresponding to the three layers in front, middle and background). Different layers employ completely different strategies.

In addition, the Pace-Layered Application Strategy also provides theoretical support for the inevitability of the emergence of “middle stage”.

Pace-Layered Application Strategy

In this report, Gatner proposed that the system constructed by enterprises can be divided into three categories from the perspective of Pace-Layered: SOR(Systems of Record), SOD(Systems of Differentiation) and SOI(Systems of Innovation).

Due to different objectives, concerns and requirements, different Pace-Layered systems will naturally change at different rates. Matching systems also need to adopt different technical architectures, management processes, governance architectures and even investment strategies.

The background systems mentioned in the previous chapter, such as CRM, ERP and financial system, are mostly IN SOR Pace-Layered.

At the beginning of the construction of these systems, the main purpose is to normalize the processing of the underlying resources of enterprises and the core traceable documents of enterprises (such as financial documents and order documents). They change cycles tend to be long, but because of the law of the audit law, and other restrictions, leading to their change to declare rigorous approval process and higher test deployment requirements, and this leads to the changes they often changes of low frequency, high cost, high risk, change cycle is long, can meet the rapidly changing driven by the user at the front desk system requirements.

We should try our best to keep the SOR stable and reliable, and the SOI small and beautiful, fast iteration. The problem of “gear mismatch” mentioned above appears, feeling that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Just as the deadlock was reaching, a voice floated in the sky.

Every problem encountered in software development can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction!

At this point, a thunderclap rolled over, “Zhongtai” foot colorful auspicious clouds, bearing SOD(Systems of Differentiation) in the past life, suddenly born.

Let’s first try to define the platform:

The center platform is really born for the front desk platform (can be technology platform, business ability and even organization), its only purpose is to better serve the front desk scale innovation, and then better respond to the service to lead users, so that the enterprise really achieve their own ability and user needs continuous docking.

The middle stage is like a group of “speed gears” added between the front stage and the back stage, matching the speed of the front stage and the back stage, which is the bridge between the front stage and the back stage. It was born for the foreground, easy to use the foreground, the background resources flow smoothly to the user, respond to the user.

Much like SOD in Pace-Layered, the midstage provides greater stability than the front stage (SOI) and greater flexibility than the back stage (SOR), finding a wonderful balance between stability and flexibility.

As a change gear, the middle platform links the core resources of users and enterprises, and solves the problem of speed:

• With the new Pace-Layered fault, we can “settle” the stable general business capability of the bloated front desk system into the middle stage, reducing the weight of the front desk and restoring the response of the front desk.
• Can also need frequent changes in the background system or need to be directly used by the front desk business capabilities “extracted” to the middle layer, giving these business capabilities stronger flexibility and lower change costs, so as to provide the front desk with more powerful “ability fire” support.

Therefore, in the process of platformization, enterprises need to build their own middle stage (including technical middle stage, business middle stage and organizational middle stage).

3, summary

I have thought and answered the two core questions about the value of Zhongtai proposed at the beginning of the article, which has solved my confusion about Zhongtai. Do you have any inspiration for you? Let me conclude by saying:

User-centered continuous large-scale innovation is the core goal of Zhongtai construction. The business response ability and scale innovation ability of enterprises are the core embodiment of comprehensive competitiveness of enterprises in the Internet era. Platformization, including centralization, is only a means to help enterprises achieve this goal, not the goal itself.

Middle China, business China (either technology or middle) construction, fundamentally is to solve the enterprise response force, make up the innovation drive at the front desk of rapid change, stable and reliable driving cycle is relatively slow to change the contradiction between the background and provide a middle tier to fit the front desk and the background of pace, precipitation, Get through and smoothly link foreground requirements and background resources to help enterprises continuously improve user response.

Therefore, what the middle stage is not important at all, how to continuously improve the response of enterprises to users is the most important. And platformization or in Taiwan, just happen to walk in this right avenue.

Two, exactly what does the platform look like?

Listing so many different types of middle stage, and finally talking about the organizational level, is there a feeling of more and more dizzy? What thing seems to add a “middle stage” suffix can rely on the middle stage come up? It is estimated that we will soon see such as AI, VR, search, algorithm… By the way, the algorithm center already has…

Let’s quote a quote from Ali Xuan Nan in an interview that I agree with:

In this article we have always mentioned a word is “ability”, from the mysterious interview can also be seen that in Ali “ability” is also the core of the Center.

To distinguish between the central government and the central government, we must return to the problems that the central government should solve, which is the main concern of me above. In my opinion, all platforms that aim at “user-centered continuous large-scale innovation” and transform various backstage resources into easy-to-use capabilities at the front desk to help us win this user-centered war can be called China Platform:

• The business center provides reuse services, such as user center, order center and other reusable capabilities out of the box, providing a powerful background artillery support capability for the battlefield, on call, powerful;
• The data Center provides data analysis capabilities to help us learn, improve and adjust direction from data, and provides powerful and timely radar monitoring capabilities for the battlefield to help us control the battlefield.
• The mobile and algorithmic Center provides frontline fire support capabilities that help us provide more personalized service, enhance the user experience, and provide army support capabilities for the battlefield.
• The Technical Center provides technical support for the self-built system, helps us solve the underlying technical problems such as infrastructure and distributed database, and provides excellent weapons and equipment for the front special forces.
• The R&D Center provides management and technical practice support capabilities for self-built systems, helping us to quickly build projects, manage progress, test, continuous integration and continuous delivery. It is a training base for front special forces and a mobile transport unit for fast delivery to the battlefield.
• The center provides investment management, risk management and resource scheduling for our projects. It is the headquarters of the battlefield, the brain of the war, the front line and the rear.

Therefore, to judge whether a platform is called mid-stage or not, the final judgment standard is not technology or appearance, but the front desk. After all, the front desk is the key to the war, and it is the part of the people who can feel the cruelty of the battlefield and see the users.

Whether the front desk wants to use it or not, whether it likes to use it or not; How much help to the front desk, how much benefit from zhongtai, willing to take out how much profit to help the construction of Zhongtai, these are screening zhongtai construction right or wrong standard. For the center, the front desk is the user, user-centered, also applicable in the center.

Third, Zhongtai is “enterprise capability reuse platform”

If LET me give a definition, at present I think the most appropriate should be: Taiwan is “enterprise capability reuse platform”. It’s easy. A little disappointed, isn’t it? But it has taken me almost two years to find a definition that works, and while various definitions have emerged, this one, at least so far, seems to me to be the closest, simplest, and most accurate, and it can explain almost all the questions I encounter about the Middle Stage, such as:

• Why can there be so many in Taiwan, like the above mentioned business in Taiwan, data in Taiwan, search in Taiwan, mobile in Taiwan, which is in Taiwan, what is the ceng hot?
• What is the division principle of center stage and front desk?
• What is the difference between Chinese and platformization?
• What is the difference between Centralization and servitization?
• How should central Taiwan be built?
• And so on…

These nine words seem simple, but what is important is the interpretation of the value of “Central Taiwan” behind them. Let me break them down for you.

enterprise

When building the middle Platform, it must look at the business panorama from the perspective of the whole enterprise and jump out of a single business line, looking for reusable capabilities for precipitation, so as to eliminate data islands and business islands through the reuse of capabilities, on the one hand, support enterprise scale innovation, help enterprise reform, and foster ecology.

So although the construction process of central Taiwan can be bottom-up, point and surface. But the driving forces must be top-down, global, and require some top-level design. This also explains why it is often cross-business units, such as CIO-level leaders or strategic planning departments, that drive the mid-stage development in the enterprise, because it is these roles and organizations across multiple lines of business that often reflect and promote enterprise level reuse.

This point also leads to a key difficulty in the construction of Zhongtai, namely, the adjustment and evolution of organizational structure and the redistribution of interests, which cannot be solved by technology and is also the strongest resistance to the construction of Zhongtai. At the same time, enterprise-level is also the key point to distinguish the taiwanization of enterprises from the servitization of application systems. In short, taiwanization is the enterprise-level and global perspective, while servitization is more system-level and local perspective.

Therefore, we can see a trend from the rise and outbreak of the middle Taiwan, that is, more and more enterprises, whether due to the reasons of enterprise operation efficiency or the need for innovation and development, have improved the capacity precipitation of enterprises across business lines from a global perspective to an unprecedented strategic height.

Ability to

When it comes to the Centre, the word most often heard is “ability”. Maybe it’s because the word ability is simple enough and broad enough.

Enterprise capabilities may include multiple dimensions, such as computing capabilities, technical capabilities, business capabilities, data capabilities, AI capabilities, operational capabilities, research and development capabilities… Most of them can be further refined and expanded twice, thus forming a multi-dimensional enterprise capability network. It can be said that the center is all the enterprise can be “multiple front desk product team” reusable ability carrier.

reuse

We’ve been talking about “de-reuse” for years, but if you think about it, most platform-based initiatives focus on de-duplication (eliminating duplication) and not enough on “reuse”.

Many companies claim to have built a variety of mature platforms, but ask yourself, how many platforms are business driven? How many front-office product teams have voluntarily plugged their products into the platform? How many platform builders really care about the platform user experience of the front end product team?

“De-duplication” is more backward looking, technology-driven; “Reuse” is more forward looking, business driven and user driven.

Therefore, although “deduplication” and “reuse” often appear and are mentioned together, they are not the same thing at all, with different purposes and difficulties. It is already very difficult to achieve “deduplication”, and even less attention is paid to “reuse”, so:

• “Reuse” is the target of more attention in Taiwan;
• “Reusability” and “reusability” are important indexes to measure the construction quality of zhongtai.
• “Business responsiveness” and “business satisfaction” are also important criteria for assessing the construction progress of Zhongtai.

For better reuse, improvements are often made in two directions:

• On the one hand, the general business logic of higher abstraction (such as business model level) will be sunk to the middle stage after abstraction, so that the foreground will be lighter, the cost of learning and development and maintenance will be lower, and the more quickly it can adapt to business changes; The downside is that the higher the level of abstraction, the more difficult it is to reuse, requiring the architect to have a deep understanding of the individual businesses and a very strong ability to abstract.
• On the other hand, we can reduce the resistance of the front desk team to discover and use the CAPABILITIES through SaaS packaging, and even quickly locate and use the capabilities through self-service. At present, many enterprises are trying to internal API bazaar or data store is in this aspect of efforts and attempts.

platform

Platforms here are primarily applications or systems that differ from large units. Traditional enterprise digitization planning is more about business architecture, application architecture and data architecture. Outputs are also digital construction plans based on applications and systems, such as specific systems to be purchased or built by oneself, such as ERP and CRM.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this process. It can be understood that at this time, these independent systems carry various capabilities of the enterprise. Since each line of business of the enterprise uses a unified application or system, it also naturally realizes the reuse of capabilities.

But problems often arise in two ways:

• One is that the business response capacity of the large unit system is limited and lacks “flexibility”. When the business develops to a certain stage, a large number of customization requirements will inevitably occur. With the gradual increase of the proportion of internal customized modules, the response capacity will decline exponentially and become the bottleneck point of the business.
• The other is that it is usually difficult to get through between systems, and it is easy to form business islands and data islands.

Therefore, more and more enterprises begin to learn from the Internet and reshape the enterprise IT architecture in a platform-based way, so as to provide enough “flexibility” for business to meet the needs of rapid response and reuse for business.

summary

Although the definition of “enterprise capability reuse platform” seems simple, after such a long time of practice and thinking about ZHONGtai, I think the meaning behind the definition as described above is the most appropriate interpretation of the value of Zhongtai at present:

* “enterprise” defines the scope of the mid-platform, differentiating single-system servitization from microservices;

* “capability” defines the main carrying object of the middle platform, and the abstraction of capability explains the existence of various middle platforms;

* “reuse” defines the core value of ZHONGtai. Traditional platform does not pay enough attention to the reusability. The proposal and rise of Zhongtai makes people pay more attention to the platform’s support for the front desk business from the internal platform through reusability;

* “platform” defines the main form of the platform, which is different from the traditional application system piecing together. Through the identification of finer capabilities and platform-based precipitation, flexible reuse of enterprise capabilities is realized, and better support for the front desk business.

With the definition, the idea of how to build zhongtai is suddenly revealed: if Zhongtai is “enterprise capability reuse platform”, then Zhongtai is “the process of using platform means to discover, precipitate and reuse enterprise capability”.