Choose Enablement Over Simplistic Solutions

Technology is complex, and frameworks (content management systems, commerce platforms, etc.) even more so. This leads to much lamentation on the challenge of finding and retaining talent to work on these frameworks. There is often a gap between the skillset of your IT team and what is necessary to implement, optimize and maintain a solution on a proprietary framework. As with any gap, it can be closed by pulling either side toward the other. We can try to tear down the complexity of a framework to meet the level of the engineers, or we can build up the team to take on the complexity of the framework.

Tearing down the complexity of the framework sounds like a convenient, one-step cure-all. Building up the team, on the other hand, sounds like a lot of time and money. It is no wonder that software vendors and buyers alike have been leaning heavily toward tearing down complexity, often claiming how recent iterations of their platform require less (or even no) proprietary knowledge. It is an amazing message for sellers, but if that is true then what are you actually buying? If you are buying a fighter jet and where the vendor reduced the cockpit complexity to that of a common Cessna so that it required less training to pilot, are you still buying a fighter jet, or are you just paying for one?

Here are three reasons it is critical to seek enablement for your IT teams over trying to purchase simplistic software solutions for them.

Proprietary Approaches Enable the Value

Why does the market bear dozens of CMS platforms, headless Commerce platforms, databases, etc.? They obviously cannot all be the same. What ultimately sold you on a platform was almost certainly its proprietary features. I chuckle a bit when framework vendors sell their product as not requiring proprietary knowledge to enable and maintain it, because if that were true it would mean their framework provides no proprietary features (i.e., no proprietary value). It may be true that their framework uses common code-level approaches and technologies, but that is not where the complexity of a framework lies in the first place. Enablement on a framework is required to attain the value.

Simple Solutions are often a Myth

Demos are always shiny, performant, and functional because they are purpose built, serve minimal traffic, have minute data sets, and perform no in-depth functionality. We have all witnessed what a 2-day hackathon can produce in terms of “working software” and scratch our head over why it normally takes 3-6 months to produce similar results on our projects. That is because real-world solutions always add complexity. A Cessna can demonstrate gliding through the air similar to a fighter jet. But when you need that Cessna to take off vertically from a stand-still, or do a barrel roll, you are going to have re-add all that complexity that you hoped to avoid. And with complexity always added back to the equation, so too is the required enablement.

Enablement Leads to Satisfaction

It has been widely acknowledged that a challenge of factory work is its simplistic, repetitive nature that leads to low employee engagement and personal fulfillment. Yet when we push to remove the complexity of proprietary frameworks, we are trying to turn engineering into this type of work. Few gifted engineers are excited by working on a simplistic system doing general tasks with generic skills. Yes, it takes time and investment to build up an engineer’s expertise in a platform, but that time and investment gives those individuals personal growth, differentiation, and job satisfaction. It is fundamentally untrue to say that engineers do not want to work in complex proprietary platforms – many engineers have dedicated full careers to these very platforms. What is true is that engineers don’t want to work in these complex proprietary platforms without proper enablement, so give them that enablement, and do so in a way that does not behold yourself to a single guru that you are worried may leave someday.

Understanding that enablement is ultimately required to get the most from your teams and your technology frameworks, how should you go about it? Not only can formal training be a large investment of time and money, but the success of such training can be dubious. A proven method of enablement in technology is on-the-job training, with proper patterns and guardrails established to aid the developer to learn as they produce business value. Leaning into this mentality, framework enablement is a simple process – 1) bring in an expert team to establish a foundation based on enablement methodologies, 2) introduce your IT to work alongside the experts for a period of time, and 3) watch your team fly on their own.