What is Corporate Hybrid Architecture?

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The balance requires tactics

Whatever the size of the business, building a successful new product and bringing it to market is about working to find the correct balance between three principal pillars

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Quite often, these three pillars can can exist as separate considerations within a corporation. They can be siloed and owned by different stakeholders who all have competing priorities and interests which pull the business in different directions. The key is to ensure that they are correctly balanced so as to ensure the best fit with your business goals.

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This can on occasion be easier said than done. It can on occasion be easier for a project lead within an established business to focus on, and by extension prioritise, their particular area of governance, leading to a skewed or ill-balanced approach which doesn’t sufficiently take into account the wider project requirements and the need to integrate with other stakeholders’ priorities and systems.

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When developing a new product or proposition within an existing business structure, you’re faced not only with the ‘simple’ challenge of defining the problem, the market and the solution; successful innovation within an established corporate structure will also by necessity need to take into account how this product or proposition will fit in with the wider business, both systemically and architecturally.

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When we work with innovation labs within mature companies we make sure to help them think holistically about what it is they are building. What software and data pipelines are required to deliver the product? What software and product make most sense with the available data? And what software layer creates the best bridge between data and product?

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The relationship between software and data is vital

Software creates data that can be monetised; once the data exists, you want to improve the efficiency of the software to improve its profitability. These are interlinked, symbiotic systems - which is why you need to think of them in hybrid fashion. Product, data and software are not islands.

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Of course, making this vision a reality is somewhat more complicated. In an ideal world, of course, anyone seeking to build and deploy innovation would have access to highly-competent talent across each of the three core areas, who would undertake close-knit, collaborative work to deliver against a shared vision…but there needs to be a vision. What is the final shape of this business? What is the commercial objective that we are working towards? And what is the best, most sensible way of arranging the three fundamental pillars of data, software and product to deliver against this vision in timely, cost-effective fashion?

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This is…not easy, and it won’t always look pretty - and it takes at least a bit of time. The temptation for all companies is to get straight on with building…but this isn’t always the best way. Sometimes - ok, in our experience ‘every time’ - it’s better to take a step back and work out the commercial best-case scenario for a business and then work back from that to determine how best to create the architectural underpinnings which will allow you to go on and build out your plan.

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This will take time - and the amount of time can extend significantly depending on the size and complexity of the organisation you’re working within. In our experience, moving from Proof of Concept to MVP is, at least, a three-stage process, factoring in testing, benchmarking and assessment - and we would expect each stage of the process to take a minimum of 8-12 weeks, if not more. It’s vital to bear this in mind when planning timelines and managing stakeholder expectations.

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How it’s been applied before

A case in point was our work with the innovation team at FNZ, who we worked with to develop Nature Alpha, a business which has now spun out as its own entity. Over the course of a 13 month period, we helped the innovation team develop the strategic and tactical roadmap for the creation of NatureAlpha, from the initial scientific proof-of-concept to the desired endpoint of NatureAlpha as a standalone, revenue-generating business.

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This was achieved through deploying a classic hybrid architecture model which enabled us to clearly define what was needed from all stakeholders within FNZ to develop a functional new product - and, eventually, business - in minimal time, with lowered development costs and reduced timescales.

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