Platform Team vs. Shared Service

It has become fashionable to refer to just about any team in the Infrastructure & Operations organization as a Platform Team, never mind if there's no real software platform (home grown or COTS) under the hood.

Ideally, the test is that of self-serviceability. It is not a platform if it isn't self-serviceable by users. But that might be too high a bar.

Therefore, I advise my enterprise clients to think of it in terms of how much manual effort is required to service a request. As shown in the illustration, a classic ticket-queue-based shared service fulfills requests with considerable manual effort per request. On the other hand, a platform team spends its time building a software platform that is as close to being self-serviceable as possible. Considerably less manual effort is expended for servicing individual requests.

Teams in the bottom-left quadrant aren't automatic candidates for the transition to a platform team. Even where it makes sense, the transition is not easy. The skills required to service requests manually are not the same as what is required to build a platform. I have advised companies in this area. Please get in touch if you need help.