Resilient Executive: Which Key Digital Technology Enablers Should You Worry About for Future Strategy?
One fundamental understanding guides how we approach digital strategy at CBG: the digital landscape is dynamic, unpredictable, rapidly evolving, and we need to stay in front. Harnessing the concept that “we’re fueled as a startup” and we must “innovate or die,” we have slotted ourselves as a healthcare disruptor to provide the most flexible, secure, scalable, and quality solutions in the shortest amount of time.
NOTE: It’s going to be tempting to use the phrase “digital transformation” in this post, because everyone else is. I don’t love the phrase because the majority of companies I’ve worked at use it to subtly say “we think IT isn’t quite fast enough and needs to change, so here’s the project to do it.” In reality, digital transformation is an effort requiring the entire organization to change, beginning with culture; everyone will need to get faster, better, smarter, and work together. From here on out though, you won’t see the phrase “digital transformation.”
When thinking about digital solutions and technology at CBG, we foster a specific mindset that drives most decision making.
- Solutions need to be timely, in that they are at the right time, at the right cost
- They need to be business-prioritized initiatives, not something “IT decided”
- They need to be focused around improving some measured KPI that matters to our bottom line
In theory, this mindset is what propels us forward in achieving a challenging vision: to build and support myriad healthcare entities through acclaimed clinical, operational and digital expertise and solutions to accelerate proven outcomes.
But there are a few key enablers that need to be in place to accelerate that forward trajectory. We want enablers in place because they mean we’re more likely to build world-class cloud-native healthcare services, embrace DevSecOps, launch AIOps, enforce Infrastructure-as-Code, integrate Chaos Engineering to our testing practices, put automation everywhere (including self-healing), widely adopt serverless architectures everywhere, prioritize edge computing, continue to evolve microservices, and easily connect separate and siloed data sources to provide meaningful, singular member experiences.
Part 1 will be focused around technology. Part 2 will be focused on people and will be key to enacting any kind of digital evolution across an enterprise or startup. So buckle up and let’s get going on three key technology enablers that are actually centered on technology.
Microservices
Microservices are services that are built and run using the following principles: automation, componentization, product focused, and decentralization. They are developed and operated by autonomous, self-organizing teams focused on core business domain capabilities, organized around services, not technologies. These teams typically embrace a lightweight & agile framework to guide their delivery of such services, so they’re not bogged down with Agile religion; they embody moving quickly.
To achieve agility and low-impact deployments, they need to be independently deployable using cloud automation to facilitate a faster pace of change. Due to the fundamental principles guiding their structure, they enable teams to be scaled horizontally as new requirements are identified.
Because they microservices are smaller, they make it easier to adopt new technologies and encourage innovation with shorter refresh cycles because self-organized teams aren’t required to refactor an entire monolith to innovate.
Great examples of microservices in a healthcare environment are bots to shave seconds off of some action, push notifications for member-focused data insights, sentiment analysis for call center interactions, pharmacy/medical integrations, automated data & system audits to meet SOC 1/2 controls, and integrating security scans in to CI/CD workflows to continue shifting security “left.”
From the ground up, everything about microservices is built to run on auto-pilot with zero down-time and high-volume scalability. They were built for NoOps and empower teams to build and innovate quickly.
Cloud
Not directly related to microservices, but in my experience has definitely accelerated microservice development, is having a robust cloud strategy. AT CBG, we focus on automation in AWS, Azure and GCP. By doing so, that automation ensures consistency across environments and platforms. That same automation also is great control to ensure security & IT practices are consistently applied across teams and microservices.
Building successfully in the cloud helps teams focus on bringing ideas to the market faster — rather than managing infrastructure. It enables developers to innovate faster by building highly scalable applications without worrying about infrastructure. Deployed solutions, when architected correctly, are incredibly scalable, stable, & resilient.
To simplify architecting healthcare services for the cloud, adopt serverless, which enables high availability and automatic scaling. It provides scalability for application and software deployment without the cost of physical hardware. Serverless means less overhead of managing servers and infrastructure and paying only for what you use. For CBG, we found serverless to be an excellent path to reduce and maximize expenditure to cushion the effect of the pandemic.
Provide teams with self-service capability while still ensuring compliance with IT processes. Teams push their code into the cloud and the rest of the operation is done by the cloud provider. Team teams to be ASAP, meaning “as serverless as possible” or “serverless first.” When they can deliver a meaningful solution with acceptable effort, ALWAYS go serverless. Serverless has slapped a huge DEPRECATED stamp on managing containers.
APIs
The glue to building an environment of connecting separate data sources comes down to APIs. APIs aren’t a new concept, but most companies should take a new approach to them. APIs, or application programming interfaces, provide the mesh capabilities of the microservices and cloud services in the previous sections.
Loosely coupled API-first design allows for services to be worked on without affecting others or overall operation and without interfering with the user experience. They are extensible — with APIs built into every layer of our applications at CBG, it makes it easier to add new functionality and connect with new features, accelerating the launch of new and innovative value propositions.
APIs drive collaboration and reuse between teams — with an easy-to-use API, services or products are opened to the creativity of the people who want to use them across the business and our future IT partners.
Some key lessons our team at CBG has learned is that APIs need to allow for “plug-in” efforts when connecting new services. They need to built in such a way as to allow new data integrations from any source/destination. They need to remain secure and compliant.
At CBG, we excel at integrating data from complex, siloed, separate sources and providing unified APIs and services for our members to facilitate simple access to their data. Our latest APIs are flexible enough to integrate new care delivery models as they come and they accelerate our business by moving faster with unified API management (not centralized.) Several times a day, we publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale.
TL;DR
That wraps up Part 1 of “Which Key Digital Technology Enablers Should You Worry About for Future Strategy?” I’ve laid out three key enablers focused on technology that need to be in place to accelerate your forward trajectory. Enablers are important because they mean we’re more likely to build world-class, cloud-native healthcare services to provide meaningful, singular customer and member experiences. Stay tuned for Part 2 which will be focused on people and will be key to enacting any kind of digital evolution across an enterprise or startup.
