Interview 001: Paul McCarthy, CEO, Snapfix

Paul McCarthy is the CEO and has been immersed in the integration of Snapfix into hotels and other businesses using the service. Paul has managed the adoption of Snapfix into (beta) hotels and has spearheaded the effort to make the Snapfix service align with the needs of target customer verticals. Paul described the changes that occur when a new business adopts Snapfix and the evolution of the Snapfix user experience which changed several times in response to customer demands. The interview highlighted the close mirroring that occurs within the businesses when Snapfix is introduced and was broadly supportive of the Mirroring Hypothesis. This was in contrast to the other industry leader interviewed.

Interview 002: (Anonymous), Senior VP, Global financial services firm.

The firm is a global leader in financial services. They experienced struggles in the transition from a traditional enterprise IT structure to a cloud native structure. For the first two years following the strategic decision to transition to a cloud native organization, they attempted to morph existing business units such as IT into a cloud first mindset but didn’t make significant progress. Their solution was to create an independent cloud services business unit which is currently expanding as new cloud services are adopted while (presumably) the enterprise IT function is reduced. There is a drive to eventually adopt a SOA style organizational structure and use Kubernetes and (presumably) Docker containers (SOA/microservices centric frameworks) to build their internal cloud services. At the moment they are in an experimental and entrepreneurial mode whereby teams are using PaaS and IaaS AWS services to quickly ramp up to a cloud native mode. There is medium to low support for mirroring within the current configuration of the teams being managed by the Senior VP, but with a strategy in place to better mirror services to individual teams which would be in-line with the drive towards a Service Oriented Architecture. On balance, I would conclude that the financial organization is not well mirrored to the cloud services they are attempting to integrate. In contrast to our Snapfix system, this organization is vast and it’s to be anticipated that large global organizations will require significant effort to change long held team structures and technical architectures.