Increasing organizations are getting Chief Digital Officers or someone at CXO level to focus purely on digitization. The digital officers primarily focus on the adoption of digital technologies and transformation from the legacy ecosystem. The transformation involves two different aspects, one via behavioral/mindset and the other one on the technology ecosystem of the organization.
“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… If they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.” – JOHN CHAMBERS, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, CISCO SYSTEM
The tech modernization via CX modernization, tech upgrade, and automation would accelerate the transformation from a technology perspective and it is high on the checklist for the digital officers. The major dilemma with tech modernization is about:
- Rebuild from monolithic to microservices architecture or
- Build API services on a need basis within the existing ecosystem and build portals/mobile apps or
- Reorient the frontend alone for CX and integrate with the existing backend via API services
The answer to the above dilemma varies based on the context and current status of the enterprise technology stacks. The one common factor for the above three choice events is to pick a technology stack that will address the current challenges and also scale up to long term needs from a digitization perspective.
“In Today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.” — JEFF BEZOS, AMAZON FOUNDER
Amongst multiple tech stacks, Full Stack JavaScript (JS) has been the pick of flavor for many but again it is subject to the context. BTW, what is full-stack JavaScript? Below is a quick illustration of JS architecture:
Major rationale behind choosing JavaScript frameworks like NodeJS and Angular or React or VueJS
- Option to split the load between client and server-side that ensures high-performance applications
- Reduced lines of code due to enhanced reusability (libraries, templates and models) with the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) paradigm
- With patronage from Google/Facebook and others, the frameworks have excellent community backup and contribution and are growing aggressively
- The wide availability of resource pools with the excellent knowledge base
- Enhanced User Experience as it overcomes many technical limitations and restrictions with legacy platforms.
How full-stack framework helps in building web platforms for digital transformation:
Serving millennials and leveraging technology is the major driving force behind digital transformation and full-stack JS development has become an organization standard in many large enterprises.
1) Full-stack JS development allows the development of frontend and backend using JS tech stack with enhanced performance. PayPal has seen 2X increase in their application performance when they adopted JS tech stack.
“Historically, our engineering teams have been segmented into those who code for the browser (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and those who code for the application layer (using Java). Imagine an HTML developer who has to ask a Java developer to link together page “A” and “B”. That’s where we were. This model has fallen behind with the introduction of full-stack engineers, those capable of creating an awesome user interface and then building the application backing it. Call them unicorns, but that’s what we want and the primary blocker at PayPal has always been the artificial boundary we established between the browser and the server. Node.js helps us solve this by enabling both the browser and server applications to be written in JavaScript. It unifies our engineering specialties into one team which allows us to understand and react to our users’ needs at any level in the technology stack.”
– Jeff Harrell, Head of UI Engineering Architecture at Paypal
2) Build rich applications with excellent Customer Xperience
“We’ve been fascinated for a long time by end-to-end JavaScript, we wanted to create “a website that would be rich and dynamic… on devices that weren’t too powerful
– Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer, Walmart’s vice president for mobile architecture
3) Full-stack JS enables API based interactions that will help in building mobility solutions and accelerate seamless interactions within the technology ecosystem of the organization.
4) JS frameworks and microservices have become like Siamese twins and with inbuilt components that facilitate microservice architecture, NodeJS and Angular/ReactJS has been the pick of tech for many large enterprises like Uber, PayPal, eBay, Trello etc.
The Uber technical team has written a two-part article about their tech stack.
5) Automation and developer-friendly with rich pool resources available. JS frameworks can be deployed in any cloud infrastructure like AWS or Azure or GCP and the CI & CD can be automated with the DevOps process.
To summarize, no technology is inferior to the other but a stack is technically superior for a specific context and assumptions. With a volatile and agile environment, the CDO’s and digital heads are always in dilemma to choose the right tech stack with a long-term orientation. Though microservices make any services technically agnostic, the fundamental choice still revolves around standardization, and full-stack JS development can be a good fit for your digital transformation journey.
