There was no middle station
What is the physical structure of a project in a traditional IT enterprise? No matter how complex the project is, it can be divided into “front” and “back”.
What is the front desk?
First of all, “front” and “front” are not the same thing. The so-called foreground includes all kinds of interfaces that directly interact with users, such as Web pages and mobile apps; It also includes the business logic of the server that responds to user requests in real time, such as commodity query, order system, and so on.
What is backstage?
Background is not directly oriented to users, but for the operation of personnel configuration management system, such as commodity management, logistics management, settlement management. The background provides some simple configuration for the foreground.
The relationship between foreground, background and users can be simply shown in the following figure:
At the time, the project was relatively stable and did not require so much rapid iteration and trial and error, so there was nothing wrong with this structure.
With the rapid development of the Internet today, the competition among enterprises is becoming more and more fierce. Only by taking users as the center, quickly affecting the needs of users, continuous iteration and trial and error, can enterprises remain invincible in the competition.
However, in reality……
In the traditional front-and-back architecture, each project is relatively independent, and many projects are reinventing the same wheel, which makes the project itself more and more bloated, and also makes the development efficiency less and less.
In such cases, to improve development efficiency, it is necessary to integrate an intermediate organization that provides some common resources for all projects. And this middle organization is what people call the “middle platform”.
The frontrunner in the middle
SuperCell is a Finnish mobile game company. The name may sound unfamiliar, but here are some of the games you’ll be familiar with:
Tribal conflict
Island indiana Jones
The royal war
SuperCell has been a prolific game incubator, churning out more than 10 games in a few years, but most of the trial-and-error games have been halved in the development process, and the games that end up in front of users are the best of the best.
What makes SuperCell so efficient at trial and error and iteration? They rely on strong platform resources to support small teams of game developers.
Their games look very different, but they have a lot in common. In business, the common things are payment systems, user systems, etc. In technology, the common things are game engines, internal development tools, etc. And these common resources can be provided by a powerful “middle station” :
The architecture of the middle office changed not only the structure of the project, but also the organization of the R&D team. SuperCell calls this efficient form of organization “clans.”
Following closely behind, domestic Internet companies have also started their own china-Taiwan strategy.
Alibaba has put forward the strategy of “big middle platform, small front desk” :
In the picture, the common business of alibaba’s many product lines has been sunk to form various business centers in the Middle Platform, while Aliware is Alibaba’s technology middleware platform to provide technical support for the major business lines.
Huawei has put forward the strategy of “platform artillery fire supporting elite troops to fight” :
Huawei compares the combat team to the front desk project team, and compares Taiwan to the battlefield command. In this metaphor, the role of the center is to provide resource support: data to data, technology to technology.
The specific division of the middle platform
Business in China
As mentioned repeatedly in the previous article, the business platform is to sink the common business of each project and integrate it into a common service platform:
Technology of China
Technology platform, in order to prevent developers from reinventing the wheel, to provide a common underlying framework, engine, middleware for each project:
Data from China
Data center to collect and analyze all kinds of data for each project:
Algorithm of China
Algorithm center, which provides algorithmic capabilities for various projects, such as recommendation algorithms, search algorithms, image recognition, speech recognition, etc. :
Application scenario of the middle platform
From 0 to 1, there is no need to build a middle platform.
For a zero-to-one startup, the primary goal is to survive, build a product as quickly as possible, and prove its market value.
At this point, it is best to let the project grow wild. If you take your time to build the center, I’m afraid the center has not been built, the company would have starved to death.
The stage from 1 to N is suitable for building the middle platform.
When an enterprise has a certain scale and its products are recognized by the market, the primary purpose of the company is no longer to survive, but to live better.
At this time, while the complexity of the project is not particularly high, it can be considered to sink the general part of the project and build the middle platform, so as to facilitate the subsequent attempts of new projects and the iteration of old projects.
From N to N+1, it is imperative to build the middle platform.
Restructuring can be painful when an organization is already large and has a complex mix of products, services, and departments.
For the long-term development of the project, we need to adjust the architecture as soon as possible to achieve platformization, so as not to become more difficult to maintain in the future.
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