Revamping Engineering Vision
In this rapidly changing times of AI, it is essential that leaders of the company have the responsibility to revamp the engineering vision and implementation strategies of the company. It is not about changing your company’s vision statement, which might remain the same, but implementing or revamping it using better tools and strategies. Here are some of the guidelines that you could follow if you get a chance to work on the same for a tech company.
Know Your Company & Products
You need to have deep understanding of your company’s core products and unique solutions that it offers. You could use this check-list to arrive of some of the important aspects that you should consider. Here I am considering a fictional SAS company that offers Industry Compliance Verification and Audit Services focusing on Chemical plants.
- What is the unique proposals from your company and what problems it is trying to solve? (eg: Products that target Industry Compilance against various stanards)
- What sector(s) your soltution/products are targeting? (eg: Chemical industry)
- What are unique services that your company is providing? (eg: Compliance Audit, Compilance implementation tools for chemical plants)
- What gegraphical region you are targeting? (USA, EU etc)
- What are the ways you are offering solutions to your clients? (eg: API Integration, SAS Products, LowCode products)
- What unique industry dadasets are currently being used used by your company? (You might want o consolicate them for better management and reusability)
- What kind of data migration automation is present for the current products? (this will include data migration from differeent sources to analytics domain)
Engineering Vision
This could be on the similar lines of your company vision, but with more clarity on the technical services. This is not for the customers, but for the internal teams of the company.
Key Focus Areas
Once you have created an outline and thinking on the various aspects mentioned in the above section and thinking along your products and solutions, you will get more clarity on the key pillars that you have to focus on. The following could be some of the common pillars in any technology company.
Data
- Data Catalog: Do you have a data catalog of all the data storages that you are using? Is it accessible to the required personas with desired permission levels?
- Data Models: Do you have guidelines for choosing the right data storage mechanism? Do you have guidelines and tools for creating the right schema and rules around each data storage mechanism? Do you have any approval mechanism for a change request?
- Data Management: Do you have proper automated data backup and restoration mechanism in place? Also do you have archiving mechanism in place for your transactional data?
Development
- Templates: Do you have templates for developing applications that automate best practices and guidelines for the ones that can’t be automated?
- The above rules are applicable for different development works like API, UI, Lowcode development, Reports etc.
Integration
- What kind of data integration you are doing? Are you making the best use of your data thru proper caching?
- Do you have proper data ingestion and data migration for analytics in place?
Infrastrcuture
- IaC (Infra as Code): Do you have automated infra creation using the availabe tools in the market?
- How do you ensure scalability and availability of your infra?
- What monitoring, alerting and logging mechanisms are present for your Infra?
Security
- Have you defined security stategy and standards for each part of your application like API, UI, Data (rest and moving) etc. Do you have robust authentication and authorization mechanism for each one?
- Have you automated secure coding practices?
- Do you have alerting emchanisms and mitigation plans in place for different kind of possible security breaches?
- Do you have audit and compliance practices in place for your applications?
Productivity
- Do you have best-in-class ai-enabled tools availble for the teams?
- How to you get the teams updated and upgraded from time-to-time?
- Do you have plans for recording/quickly responding to issues customer might face while using your apps?
The above answers will get you a very good idea on where you stand and where you should target in the future. Next you can focus on implementing those plans and making your teams more organised, dynamic and responsive.
Happy Revamping!!