W03 - Digital Workflow

I've been working on the 2021 plan recently, and Jerry asked me how to measure everyone's ability to understand the business.

I thought of a few angles. From the results perspective, it could be the architecture's ability to support the business, the soundness of technical planning, or how many business problems were resolved from an engineering standpoint. From the process perspective, it could be how much time was invested in learning the business domain, whether participation in requirement or planning discussions was sufficient, or feedback from colleagues in other functions. Clearly, these dimensions are not SMART. It's indeed difficult to turn such an abstract capability into a measurable metric.

That led me to notice a rather ironic phenomenon. Although we work on digital transformation, our own level of digitization is insufficient. Without sufficient digitization, we cannot effectively abstract and standardize, and therefore cannot scale. We cannot extract and propagate the work experience of excellent employees, nor can we easily build capability models like business understanding.

From an organizational management perspective, currently we can only see data about how people allocate effort on requirements. We have virtually no digitization of how effort is spent on non-requirement work.

Take the requirements dimension as an example: each complete requirement goes through a long chain of actions, including requirement review, technical design, coding, integration testing, code review, self-testing, environment deployment, gray release, and monitoring online status. We have data for each part, but the data isn't granular enough: outcome data dominates, while process and behavior data are scarce. Moreover, data across nodes is mostly not connected. Take Ones as an example: the status of each requirement and task depends entirely on manual updates, and people inevitably forget or delay updates, so the data only gives a rough picture. Ideally, as users we shouldn't have to be aware of requirement management tools like Ones in most scenarios.

This made me think of Cloud IDEs. I didn't fully appreciate the value of cloud IDEs before, but from an organizational perspective they are transformative. I believe their greatest value is digitizing the workflow. RD work relies heavily on IDEs, yet this crucial tool is fragmented and varied across developers, and the behaviors and data generated are offline. If the IDE is cloud-based, it can serve as a platform and integrate with many upstream and downstream scenarios—for example, linking branches directly to requirements, one-click test submission, one-click deployment, etc. Basic data alone could automatically update Ones. It can also address efficiency and security issues, such as standardizing development environments and protecting source code by avoiding developer disks.

Imagine a future where design mockups are converted to editable code with intelligent code generation, imported into a Cloud IDE for further development and adjustment, then built and deployed with one click to run across platforms. All data and assets would be preserved on the platform, and each node could be optimized precisely using abundant data.