Will Digital Transformation Ever End?

Three focus areas to help business navigate never-ending change

Technology is changing the world faster than ever before. As consumers and as business leaders, we now navigate each day with an expectation of change.  The digital transformation that is sweeping the economic landscape certainly makes for exciting experiences but also requires businesses to be more agile than ever before and quickly adapt to market needs.

So what should technology leaders do to help the business adapt?

1. Be part of strategic decision-making: Today’s technology leaders aren’t just focused on the network and systems. Modern technology strategy is crucial to innovation and should be focused on holistic business adaptability and helping their organization rapidly develop high-quality products and services to drive customer experience. Internal business partners must also leverage technology to accomplish their goals and seize opportunities.
2. Know the customer and provide an incredible experience: You don’t have to look far to see major consumer disruption examples, from the way people want to shop, bank and travel. The same is true for business customers. But too often, technology leaders become bogged down in the actual technology and lose track of their customers and what they need. Leaders should be talking to customer regularly to understand the problems they are solving. In fact, 62 percent say delivering an excellent customer experience defines success as a digital-first business. Check out IDG’s 2018 State of Business Transformation.
3. Be agile and be fast: Fast-moving change is one thing business leaders can all count on. With blockchain, IoT, big data, and mobile computing becoming mainstream topics, the never-ending “need for speed” will continue fueling transformation. Technology leaders are key players who must strategically guide organizations through disruption and provide the insights and expertise for decisive decision-making to move fast.

So will digital transformation at some point end? Yes and no. With the expectation of never-ending disruption ahead, what will come after the “digital” transformation — the AI transformation or the VR transformation? Whatever it is, change-ready technology leaders who are focused on strategy and embrace a customer-centric mindset will be well prepared to define business outcomes and set the pace to ensure business relevancy and success. And while the “digital” part will inevitably shift at some point, continuing transformation is a safe bet for the future.

Mark Egan

Digital Transformation – is it a “thing”? or is it everything?

Digital Transformation continues to be a theme this year as we see in a number of predictions blogs and articles. But what is it?  Is it a thing?  Or is it everything?

DX has been going on in some form long before we called it that. The buzz today serves to direct our attention to the spectacular — inventing new markets, changing society. But not all companies are going to do that, or even need to. But every CIO needs to be looking at how the delivery of IT services is fundamentally changing, and understand how rapidly changing technology and market opportunities continue to impact their business.

Some things today are making DX harder and riskier than it used to be.  And those same factors also make NOT thinking carefully about DX in your org equally risky.  Some of these intertwined topics include the following:

• Rate of change
• Proliferation of technology options
• Understanding/factoring in impact on IT organizations (and the rest of the enterprise)
• Separating the fundamentally sound tech from the shiny objects
• Delivering new services at the speed the market (internal and external) wants them, with the level of control and security also needed

Planning and managing technology transformations is more difficult now than it was in past years, and it’s difficult to know what to bet on. Change is changing faster than ever before.  With new tech coming out every year and the decisions being made having multi-year horizons, how do you plan and manage the tech roadmap in this world?

This is a topic we work on with our clients, and it’s one we think about deeply at The StrataFusion Group. We’ll share some of our thoughts on how we’re doing that next time…

Reed Kingston

Organization Structure and Digital Business

In the equation of people, process, and technology, getting the “people” part right has been a tough challenge for many companies.  As technology evolves, the roles and talents needed to drive that technology and utilize it to help keep the business competitive requires constant evolution; getting the organization structure right in support of this evolving landscape has been an area we value advising in at StrataFusion.

In an earlier blog we looked at organization structure and critical success factors; now it would be useful to give further detailed thought to organization structure guidelines that are important to both traditional and digital business. Because digital business is different from your traditional data center kicking off this discussion would be some of the most important structural guidelines to consider in assessing your organization:

• Align business facing technology functions to match the business organization, this expedites specification, understanding, and support of business requirements
• Align technical development organizations along development lines and logical technical groupings to maximize development activity efficiency
• Constantly reinforce the importance of key organizational and business dependencies. The goal is to create an environment where cooperation and team focused response become the normal team response
• Create a system of organizational checks and balances. This allows your organization to be self governing, and can highlight important issues
• Be consistent in your approach, limit exceptions
• Separate your delivery function from your development function. A key check and balance that can avoid a lot of pain

Each of these guidelines could support a blog of their own, but the incorporation of these thoughts into decisions concerning how your team is organized and structured can create interactions and behaviors that can be important long term in a digital business environment.

Once you’ve assessed your answers to these questions we also believe that creating an organizational focus around rallying cries or mantra is extremely important. The idea of a mantra gives great organizational concentration, and provides a consistent focal point for how your team should be thinking.

Mantras can be a tool to guide proper organizational response

In creative organizational focus, here are some possible mantras:

• User Ownership of Systems
• Empowerment of the Community
• Standards & Integration
• Make Use of Forward Looking Development Technologies
• Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management Systems
• Right Tool/Right Place
• Flexible Systems
• Global/Shared/Local

Creating a mantra allows your team to default back to a common base – set of values, practices, and knowledge that will help them respond to questions or situations arising that are new or undefined – this is especially so in today’s digital era.  For instance, a mantra of “empowerment of the community” can help instill in your team the concept of insuring their actions result in recognition of the fact they serve a community or business and that it is in their self-interest to empower and equip that community to solve their own problems.  You can have the concept of “travel in packs” – if for those of your teams that exist in a highly competitive situation where stress is high and demands are intense and daily, a mantra of “travel in packs”  reminds them that they can count of your team for backup – you’re more than one person, they’re not alone, so that when if (for example) a website that is up 99.9999 of the time but crashes for a few minutes – upsetting c level executives – you have emotional, structural, and organizational back up.

In thinking about “Global/Shared/Local”, the mantra leads with the idea that things that data can have different types of ownership, some are universal and shared by all but require consistent management; while some can have more than one owner.

That a mantra can create organizational focus also works with another interesting potential which I call the ‘Manufacturing Metaphor’.  In the transformation to digital business this can remind you of how your digital delivery of an information product is not unlike some traditional manufacturing concepts, and incorporating some of those proven concepts into your business could be useful.

New digital business environments can be optimized by incorporating the similar concepts, processes, and flows as exists within manufacturing – digital business hold the same counterparts. For example, concepts of development engineering product engineering in manufacturing can be re-formed into as software development and operations delivery concepts in digital business; the shipping function in manufacturing is the data center in digital business. The terminology changes but the functions are similar, and taking a similar approach could favorably impact your “product delivery” process. Understanding these parallels again provides a framework within which it become easier to understand how to optimally structure your organization – with people being your most essential asset towards success.

In our third and final on blog on this topic we will be discussing the importance of infrastructure readiness on digital business delivery.

John Dick

 

Leveraging Actionable Intelligence to Mitigate Risk Within Your Enterprise

I recently hosted a panel with leading CISOs from around the world. We delved into how “Leveraging Actionable Intelligence to Mitigate Risk Within Your Enterprise” can be approached from a set of common points and differences. We opened with an overview of ideas that led to each panelist posing their own comments and questions with initial answers. The comments and questions below recap our discussion flow, and provide a current base for understanding the breadth and context of mitigating cybersecurity risks.

Panel Opening Comments

• Security threats are increasing both in frequency and complexity
• Security leaders need to be proactive in this area and put programs in place (people, process, and technology) to protect critical assets
• We have assembled a panel of experts in this area and our goal is to provide recommendations that you can immediately use when you return to your office

Initial panelist comments

As predictive analytics matures, we may see significant improvement in the value of threat intelligence data.

• If you’re spending money on Threat Intelligence, you must have first solved a lot of common problems, such as patch management.
• Be realistic about what you expect to get from Threat Intelligence. Are you looking for Indicators of Compromise? Attribution? Predicting the next attack? Understand the limitations of the various types of Threat Intelligence data.

Second panelists comments

• How does the actionable intelligence change as you move “up the stack” or away from the stack (to human)?
• How is the IoT changing the “actionable” part of actionable intelligence?

Third panelist

Leveraging actionable intelligence is the process of gathering analytics based on the identification and collection of relevant threat information. Unfortunately, threat intelligence is an elusive concept for many companies. By 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices. There are not enough cyber specialists now to handle current security issues, so businesses need to leverage actionable intelligence and analytics for companies to protect themselves.

• Should threat intelligence be managed internally by companies?
• When threat intelligence is accumulated what is the important information for the c suite?
• What are the company’s concerns regarding their employees in leveraging actionable intelligence?
• How does actionable intelligence apply to regulatory compliance?

Fourth panelist

How do we deal with the increasing scale and frequency of attacks, and threat actors that far outstrip our budgets and resources? Traditional information security methods within the enterprise are not a match for any of the above seven events.

Threat intelligence provides a possible way to get ahead of these threat actors and threats — to have intelligence on the threats. But, threat intelligence is a new data source, another fire hose of information that requires analysis. And it has a different nature from traditional tools. We’ll only get value out of the threat intelligence information if we properly analyze it and make it actionable.

Mark Egan

@markeegan

@StrataFusion

Owning All Clouds

By Doug Harr

As part of my career as an IT executive for the last dozen plus years, I’ve led several companies through a process of migrating their business application portfolio to the cloud.  At Portal Software, that meant deploying SuccessFactors for HR performance reviews, and OpenAir for Professional Services Automation.  At Ingres that meant deploying Intacct for Financials, Salesforce for CRM, and lots of other cloud solutions. The approach for me reached its zenith at Splunk, where we had a 100% cloud business application portfolio, and where 50% of our compute and store capacity was at Amazon. With so much functionality in the cloud the question of roles and responsibilities became a focus for the company. In this very cloud-friendly shop, what should IT’s focus be? What level of administration of these solutions could actually be owned and delivered by departmental owners, such as Sales Operations, Customer Support Operations or HR administration?

As one example, both at VMware, where I was program manager for their Salesforce implementation, and at Splunk, where I was the CIO, we had very strong sales operations teams, and fairly complex Salesforce environments. In those environments Sales Op’s began to take ownership of more functionality in the Salesforce suite. This included user administration, assignment of roles to users, territories to reps, and just about all reporting. This grew to include modifying page layouts, and other configuration capabilities normally owned and controlled by IT. In my view the idea of enabling the Sales Op’s team was attractive for several reasons: (1) they wanted the power to do these things (2) they were not waiting for IT on the things they felt were high priority (3) they were closer to the sales teams who actually worked inside the tool, and so they were good at interpreting issues and acting – as good certainly as an IT Business Analyst, or even someone with fairly good technical skills. In these scenarios it freed IT to work on deeper technical issues, level 3 incidents, environment management, integration, reliability, etc.

In another example, at Splunk we made wide use of Amazon EC2 for compute and storage capacity. In these cases, IT System Admins were not needed – environments were spun up and used directly by personnel in Engineering and Customer Support. This was an amazing success, and it freed IT to work on monitoring usage, working deals on cost, and managing the overall vendor relationship.

Not every department has a team or individual ready to own or take a major role in the management of a SaaS or IaaS platform. For every HR department that manages Workday, there’s a finance department that does not manage Netsuite. It depends on the tool, and the personnel. What I’ve found is it can also depend on the CFO and management of a business function – some execs are happy to have these resources placed in the business, some are more afraid of  “shadow IT spend” or they’re caught up suggesting that IT can’t deliver and granting this power is a cop-out. Actually, I had a moment like this at Splunk, where I had not adequately updated two peer execs on our intent to get more deep IT skills hired into Sales Op’s, and had to sort that one out, to make sure everyone understood this was not a shadow operation! So there can be bumps in the road, but in my view adopting this approach is inevitable really, as software platforms and micro apps are becoming widespread, and so is the ability and desire by departmental teams to be more involved in the direction of how those tools, platforms, and apps are rolled out and used.

All this speaks to the future role of IT, and I for one have lived that future, as least in part. It’s one where IT is more strategic, focused on vendor/portfolio management, integration and security. To be sure some functions that are broadly used across all departments, and some that are task specific, still accrue to IT in most cases, or to partners that offer elements of typical IT as a service (think Help Desk). But done well, each department owns more of its technology, feels more in charge of its future, its technology adoption, its responsible use, along with other benefits. And, IT focuses less on being everything to everybody, maintaining disparate queues of backlogged work, and more focused on higher level matters, transforming the business for the digital age, and accompanying delivery of more complex technical solutions.

Right where we should want to be.

@douglasharr

The New Crisis in Cybersecurity

By Mark Egan

There is a new crisis in Cybersecurity.  A recent article highlights the current lack of trained Information Security professionals and ties this lack to the digital revolution and other technology advances, leading to “mega-breaches on an unprecedented scale.” Stealing IP has become a billion dollar business; couple that with the fact that it is also much easier to break into a system than protect it.  All the criminal needs to do is to find one hole in your environment and they can slip in. Why there is a dearth in Cyber Security professionals and what can be done about it I have outlined briefly in a few key points here.

One of the biggest reasons why there are fewer trained security professionals is due to the fact that the Office of the CISO is still a relatively new organization, compared to that of the CIO, which role has been around for significantly longer.  CIO titles started in the 80’s when Information Technology became a critical component of daily business operations. The CISO title is more recent and in 2006 only 43% of large organizations had a CISO. This has changed over the past 10 years and now most larger organization now have a formal security function and overall leader.

However, companies show a trend of being focused on hiring very experienced security staff externally, as opposed to developing and training individuals internally.  It would be more effective to take existing staff and train them, or hire in trained entry level professionals who you can develop.

Going Forward

The solution to Information Security is that companies have to develop their existing staff and then cultivate a mindset where everybody is “mindful” – like a Neighborhood Watch, where everyone is involved in the program. Most attacks still originate from phishing email – someone clicks on an email, and that email comprises that machine. And once they compromise that machine, they move laterally within the environment to elevate to a privileged level of access.  So if you have Neighborhood Watch, everybody is on alert. When they see the suspicious email, they notify someone, and through this behavior you can build and grow and perpetuate a more “security aware” program.

Ultimately security is a people issue. To this effect we created the Merritt College Information Security program as a fully accredited A.S. degree with majors in Applications and Infrastructure Security. The program has been two years in the making and serves the San Francisco Bay Area East Bay School districts, which include students from less advantaged backgrounds. It results from the partnership with the CISE CIO organization, Merritt College, and CIO’s / CISO’s from leading San Francisco Bay Area companies. The program provides trained, entry level security professionals from which an organization can then expand on and develop other existing staff internally.

They are currently for hire; please contact me for more info.

Organization Structure to Support Digital Business – What to Consider

By John Dick

Central to the changing landscape of IT and business is the proliferation of devices and Internet of Things; by 2020, more than seven billion people and businesses, and at least 30 billion devices, will be connected to the Internet. This interaction leads to the evolution of digital business, and with that evolution is the need for companies to think about how to organize their most important asset – people – in a way that best supports the delivery of their products and services in this new digital business structure.

We have been giving advice to companies on how to thoroughly think about the role of people and organization structure within this evolving and complex equation of people, process, and technology. I have captured some of our leading points around structural questions to consider and critical success factors related to the organization of a company’s technology engineering and delivery groups below. In turn, this blog will lead to a future post outlining digital business organization structure, and guidelines around your company’s infrastructure readiness.

First, there are some questions to consider in thinking about digital business, technical engineering and delivery organization structure.

The first deals with how your company is organized, because it is probably organized the way it is for a reason, such as to most optimally support effective product sales and delivery.  Also, that structure is the eco-system in which you will need to co-exist.

Important Company Structural Questions and Considerations

• What is your company’s approach to centralization vs. decentralization of responsibilities and structure?
• Does your company impose structure through traditional functions, product, process functions, or technical expertise?
• How does your company think about direct line vs. dotted line reporting and to whom?
• Do you fit the technology organization to the business requirements or to the people?
• How do you handle regional | international units?

Understanding the relationship of your organization within its larger context is critical to how you organize your group. For example, if your company is decentralized, it will probably be important to understand why your organization is also decentralized. What are the key reasons your business is decentralized? How will you provide digital support to the decentralized units in a meaningful, personal manner? How will you understand unique customer regional requirements? What if it has aspects of both? A carefully crafted hybrid solution may then become necessary.

From here, we offer key initial points to consider toward optimizing your organization structure for success.

Once you’ve thought through and understand how your company is organized for success around its products and services, you’ll want to transition to what are the critical success factors for your technology associated group. That, once aligned with the rest of the company structure, will assist in developing success criteria.

Critical Success Factors

• Aligning organization with business strategy and function
• Allowing organization to keep pace with company growth and changing business dynamics
• Providing effective decision support and related performance | scorecard tracking
• Integrate organization approaches within company culture

While the first three points are a common theme and well accepted, I believe the last point is often overlooked. All companies have some aspect of company culture in their environments. If your organization is not organized or motivated within that context, success could be difficult. A good way to support this is to subtly develop success criteria that is natural to your environment.

With new roles other supporting or catalyst roles will emerge, and CXOs will need to develop digital leadership capabilities in order to execute an effective digital strategy.

In the next post I will delve further into what this means and how to think about your company’s infrastructure readiness to complete the picture.

Information Security Training: Merritt College Enters Its Third Year

 

Merritt College in Oakland, CA will start its third year of classes this Friday, August 26.

We’re excited to be entering the third year of this program, having graduated our first set of students this past June 2016. The Merritt College Applications and Infrastructure Security program (as a reminder) is a fully accredited A.S. degree with majors in Applications and Infrastructure Security.

This program results from partnership with the CISE CIO Organization, Merritt College, and CIO’s/CISO’s from leading San Francisco Bay Area companies. These groups have given their time and expertise toward building up this program from its inception. Donations from the CISE CIO group now amount to $130K, and with this amount, we have developed the current curriculum and put a new cybersecurity lab in place.

This program and its impact couldn’t be more timely, given that one of the biggest threats to companies is a lack of trained cybersecurity professionals.

You can find an overview of program here.

We are also looking to place our recent first class of June graduates into Information Security roles with leading companies and organizations. Please contact Mark Egan you are interested in hiring our students to improve your Information Security programs.

StratraFusion – Values

 

The pace and evolution of enterprise technology more than ever calls for strategic advice on how best to use this technology to optimize your business.

We formed The StrataFusion Group as a unique technology and business consulting practice based on knowledge gleaned from practitioners and their years of in-house “hands on” leadership and experience. Our Partners have driven technology and business strategies in disruptive Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing enterprises and firms, and they bring years of practical knowledge into solving each opportunity in its complexities and challenges.

We advise and assist our clients on how to leverage their technology investments to increase revenue, and improve customer satisfaction while reducing risk and cost.

We originally conceptualized and founded The StrataFusion Group to provide expertise ”for CIO and CTOs, by CIOs and CTOs.” The practice has, unlike many other technology consultancies, continued to emphasize the personal operational experience of our Partners. This expertise is then applied directly to your problems and issues by our Partners — not inexperienced stand-ins. You receive our personal attention and commitment to efficient and effective engagement management.

Our passion is to empower companies to be business innovators by combining leading-edge insights with significant experience-based knowledge of markets, technologies and industries. We focus on adding client value, delivering ultimate professionalism, applying team cohesion to expand experience and focus success, with respect for individual values and goals. We truly seek to earn the “Trusted Advisor” status. When you have a serious technology problem we want you to think of StrataFusion, not Ghostbusters!

We offer proven solutions for the most difficult business challenges, focusing on these practice areas:

StrataFusion Practice Areas

• CIO / CTO Advisory
• Information Security
• Digital Transformation
• Big Data / Cloud Analytics

As we go forward and continue to build on our consulting practice areas, how we were formed, our foundation and core values continue to drive how we approach each company with their unique set of of challenges. Underlying all of our work is our set of guiding principles:

StrataFusion Guiding Principles

• We challenge and reinvent the vision
• We create through teamwork
• We nurture the independent, entrepreneurial spirit
• Our personal and operational competence and professionalism is clear and at our clients’ disposal

We look forward to working with you.

John Dick, Partner and Co-Founder, StrataFusion

The Cloud – All In

By Doug Harr

This post will be the first of several outlining my passion for moving IT software and services to the cloud, articulating the exponential value this move provides.

My journey began in early 2000’s when I was VP of IT at Portal Software; there, we moved the function of doing performance reviews out of our data center and into the SaaS / cloud service, Successfactors. This change cut costs in half; this kind of savings we saw almost every time we moved another software package or custom written application off site and into the cloud. Success with this model led me to take the helm at two other high tech companies (most recently at Splunk) where we ran virtually all of our business software and half of our infrastructure in the cloud, via services like Netsuite (financials), Salesforce (CRM), and Amazon EC2 (servers, storage).

These experiences were so positive and influential on my outlook that I’ve been espousing the “all cloud” IT sourcing strategy for some time now. Finally, and most recently, both Microsoft and Google have made it possible to go “the last mile,” to move your corporate domain, which houses the identity of all your employees, along with their organizations and access rights, into the cloud. This positions new companies and more aggressive existing companies to get to the point where you’ll find two fat pipes to the internet as the only technology installed at the company’s offices. The pipes terminate in a set of wireless access points, which themselves can now be managed via a cloud service!

Why is this all nirvana to me?  What does it mean for IT?  It means a lot. In almost every case I’ve seen service improve, both in terms of the time it takes to get things done, and the ability to focus on higher-level concerns, while more control accrues to the business. The focus of the CIO and IT Management team then changes – setting up a strategy, sourcing these cloud services, managing the vendor relationships, monitoring the services, integrating and securing them. We get to the ultimate goal of IT – maximizing the effective use of these systems, and harnessing the information that can be extracted and analyzed from those services. Not too shabby, right?  Sounds like a busy and more enabling, productive IT department, even if the roles have changed.

In future posts, we’ll address how the move to the cloud changes the nature of what resources each department needs to hire in order to effectively run the cloud applications. With sales operations, customer support operations, HR operations, etc., there is the ability for internal corporate employees to be more directly involved in optimizing, running and supporting the applications they use.

More to come.