In his highly-regarded book, “Crossing the Chasm”, Geoffrey Moore presents a model for broad commercial adoption of new technologies. Moore’s macro-view of the technology adoption lifecycle and the chasm created by new or disruptive technologies has been a guide to many in the IT industry. Moore’s crossing-the-chasm concept can be loosely applied at a micro-level to customers hoping to drive adoption of technologies such as CA DevTest©. While few (or no?) customers avoid Moore’s adoption chasm altogether, many use fast-track techniques that reduce time, cost, effort and frustration. This series of blogs will share insights and best practices from customers and CA Services – focusing on CA Service Virtualization (SV).
Consider the graphic:
Generally, CA Service Virtualization projects start well and make genuine progress in a short timeframe. Successes in this initial phase cause expectations to track upward. However, when CA Services disengages, some customer teams begin to slide down a slippery slope and find themselves in “the adoption chasm.” Some of the challenges that manifest are:
- Early successes have caused adopters to prematurely declare victory or shift critical attention away from further developing adoption strategies.
- Unjustified hope that superior technology results in strong adoption
- Setbacks after the CA Services engagement ends cause projects to be de-resourced or de-prioritized.
- Organizations postpone SV training, integration and business process changes
- Good practices are not engrained
- Effort and budget expended on implementation and early deployment leaves insufficient resources for high value integrations, solution architecture improvements, business process transformation
- Metrics describing business outcomes are not developed and reported
- Operations teams are tasked with both running an ‘adequate’ implementation and discovering, recommending and applying improvements to the deployment
These challenges, and more, result in higher long term costs and greater near-term frustration within the organization. When one or more of these challenges slows the pace of adoption, a gap, as seen in the following graphics, develops between expectations and delivered value.
Organizations that successfully address these challenges do so by implementing tactics, good practices, and strategies that shorten the trip through the chasm (or avoid the chasm altogether) and produce measurable business outcomes.
I have observed that through our own transformation and hundreds of successful SV engagements, CA has accrued and developed insights and strategies that help organizations build robust and mature SV capabilities. So in this series of blogs, we’ll share some of these maturity strategies. The blogs will highlight key activities for developing SV maturity and building the scale necessary to consistently deliver the right business outcomes. The series will include topics such as:
- Making the Most of Your Service Virtualization Assets
- Change Management: A Key Element of Your Service Virtualization Strategy
- What Type of Adoption Models Support SV Expansion
- SV Requires Transformation to Drive Maturity
- Common Pitfalls on the Path to SV Maturity
- What Do Federation and Communities of Practice Look Like
Stay tuned for more very soon. In the meantime, I welcome your comments and questions below.