Think Big, Start Small, Test Quickly, Scale Fast. It seems to fit every business, every market – and works for a carve-out new business idea right down to a small IT innovation release program. Find out more about how these concepts connect with deployment automation

1. How deployment
automation
needs to think
big

2. How deployment automation needs to think big 1
I first met Chunka Mui in Boston back in 1999 at a TTi Vanguard
conference surrounded by some of the world’s most respected thought
leaders in IT. Up jumps Chunka onto the stage and talks about
Unleashing the Killer App. But then he delivers the ultimate business
plan in just a few words.
Think Big, Start Small, Test Quickly, Scale Fast. It seems to fit every
business, every market – and works for a carve-out new business idea
right down to a small IT innovation release program.
Jump forward more than a decade and I’ve noticed a small but
important change in Chunka’s business mantra. Just one word changes
– he turns test quickly into fail quickly – and a step-change in
organisational strategy emerges.
1. Think Big
2. Start Small
3. Fail Quickly
4. Scale Fast
Innovation is about experimenting. But all too often the experiments
take place in isolation from the rest of the environment and the
organisation’s micro and macro eco-system.
CIO, CMO, or CEO dollars piled into R&D is one important part of the
strategy. Couple this with the Smarts in the company being given space
and time to ‘Think Big’ and the right resources deployed to start small
to create small incremental innovation and many corporates have a
chance of driving growth.
But industry continues to fail to deliver innovation.
The trouble for companies starts when you hit bullet point three. Many
companies are still not geared up to encourage fast failure – that is
physically in operations terms and emotionally in human resources
terms: When grads are still being taught to ‘align with success’ what
hope is there for extraordinary growth through innovation?
But there is a momentum building in companies where fail fast/quickly
is emerging not only as an innovation strategy but also an operations
strategy.
Application release automation technology allows companies to
innovate in real-time and fail as often as they want.
Software tools have now made it possible to replicate or mirror entire
system environments, on premise or in the cloud, so that new releases
of IT updates, innovations and functionality deployments can be

3. Survey Results: What’s Stopping Businesses Automating? 2
2
developed and tested in real-time before automating release to the live
environment. It’s built in fail quickly.
But the smart part about the new tools, is that if your release fails, you
can roll back with a fully auditable trail – so risk is all but eliminated.
Innovation release without risk. Now that’s a mouth-watering strategy
for business growth