According to Deloitte, the CIO has steadily become a business-savvy technologist focusing team resources on driving innovation that melds business priorities and the latest technologies. To better understand this shift, let’s first consider how IT organizations have changed, and then look at the impact these changes will have on businesses in the future.

Also see: 7 Digital Transformation Trends Shaping 2022

How Has IT Changed over the Last 5 years?

IT organizations have increasingly become change influencers focused on top-line business revenue rather than solely on business process automation and cost reduction. So as CIOs continue to watch costs, today they also pinpoint ways to generate business value. Over the last several years, CIOs have told me they will no longer execute cost-cutting measures without a tangible business outcome.

To ensure success, collaboration is needed between IT management and the rest of the business. No longer should IT be relegated to a silo isolated from the rest of the business. Today’s CIOs need a strategic seat at the table for business decisions intended to boost employee morale and enable the workforce of the future. They need input on the technology and tools empowering employee engagement.

This means they should commit fewer resources to the “factory” of IT. Because basic infrastructure and functions have been commoditized — and should increasingly be outsourced — IT efforts should instead focus on partnership and innovation of the business.

A great example is cloud adoption. As CTO Stephen diFilipo notes, “Traditional ROI does not apply to cloud solutions. The cloud ecosystem requires a nuanced approach to finances, revenue, and cost. A new model is required.” Today, IT organizations need to allow cloud vendors and other partners to do the heavy lifting unless it’s a task unique to the company.

Meanwhile, CIOs need to support and encourage distributed ownership for business-tool implementation. As companies focus more on revenue-generating and customer-facing tools such as CRM, ownership and implementation of these systems need to transfer to specialists in the business. CIO Paige Francis summarized this evolution: “The challenges faced by anyone failing to embrace this new paradigm would only confirm the urgency of a business partnership with IT.”

Also see: Top Digital Transformation Companies 

Do Organizations Need to Adjust their Expectations of IT?

Some organizations stubbornly retain their historical view of IT, but there’s optimism that the pace of digital disruption will dispel territorial attitudes.

Many of the same CIOs who found it difficult for their teams to integrate with the rest of the business were offered opportunities to prove their mettle during COVID-19 — but the seat-of-the-pants strategizing of the past two years is neither reasonable nor sustainable for the future. The increased recognition of the CIO’s role during unprecedented circumstances has been welcome, but organizations need to plan for a more integrated IT role for transformation once processes return to a normal pace.

At the same time, the business needs to fully recognize IT as a transformational partner that not only solves problems, but foresees and mitigates challenges before they arise. As former CIO Tim McBreen says regarding the COVID-19 crisis, “The external business has been ramping up their expectations of IT as it grows into a more competent delivery and service organization that can speak their language and move with them. For this reason, the business expects more today.”

Today’s CIO: Diplomacy and Tech Fluency

With this in mind, what should today’s CIO look like? Running an IT group requires diplomacy, an understanding of the overall business, and technological fluency — not just the ability to make sure the network trains run on time.

CIOs demonstrating business, finance, and leadership skills — as well as the companies hiring them — have thrived. The pace of digital disruption is just too fast to settle for a CIO whose skills lie in just the technology basket.

“Tech wizardry isn’t enough for today’s CIO,” says CIO Carrie Shumaker. “CIOs need to engage in strategy and focus beyond operations.”

Also see: Digital Transformation: Definition, Types & Strategies

Skills and Team Construction of IT team

Likewise, the IT team requires a skill set beyond understanding technology and completing projects — CIOs should hire people who can ideate and execute. DevOps is today’s mantra.

Additionally, the IT team requires soft skills. Of course, technical knowledge and coding experience will always to be important, but leadership, empathy, and critical thinking are critical, too. To embrace diverse hiring practices, IT needs to hire for potential and foster on-the-job training to fill any gaps. Hiring people without traditional IT backgrounds is possible today because there is less infrastructure to run and more low-code, business analysis to execute.

Put together, success today for organizations undergoing digital transformation requires more of the following:

• Contract and vendor management
• Product management
• Data analysis
• Digital marketing

This means the IT organization needs to become more proactive and less reactive, with skills focused on critical analysis more than simply the gathering of requirements.

The Next 5 Years?

CIOs believe IT organizations will be even more business-oriented than they are today. This transition will see smaller staffs but with a larger technology spend. Businesses supported by an IT focused on business analysis, integration, and analytics will be more agile, and IT will be fully distributed and demand little centralized IT oversight.

This smaller IT organization will:

• Be tightly coordinated with the business.
• Outsource most services and technology.
• Concentrate on working with the business to create unique mobile, analytics, and solutions capabilities.

CIOs like Francis have already formed future-oriented IT teams. “The team I built from scratch is small, valued and valuable, expert, and targeted — but able to work across all blurred lines,” she says. “Most important, they’re happy. We’re determined to make this new team a modern pillar of excellence.”

Parting Words

IT organizations of the past were truly responsible for the productivity gains that have occurred over the last 50 years. However, this is no longer an acceptable place for IT organizations. A successful CIO needs to be a business strategist first and – with their team – be able to ideate and drive forward the delivery of new business models.

Also see: Tech Predictions for 2022: Cloud, Data, Cybersecurity, AI and More 

The post CIOs and the Future of IT: Innovation, Not Operation appeared first on eWEEK.

A poorly managed initiative can miss critical deadlines, slow product development, and lead to staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams.” Since IT organizations typically lead in the move to Agile, what do CIOs think about this methodology? And where are they in the adoption? A recent CIOChat event addressed this topic.

Also see: Digital Transformation Guide: Definition, Examples & Strategy

Incorporating Agile Practices, Design Thinking, and Innovation

Based on comments on the CIOChat, CIOs have good news for Gardner and Crocker. They believe their organizations are well along the way to incorporating Agile.

For example, CIO Justin Bauer says, “our organization was aware of Agile when I arrived, but it has now fully embraced its core ideals. IT led projects are now all Agile. Management loves value being continuously deployed. On design, our company always has had a long-term outlook. Now our projects are aligned to achieve long-term objectives while we release 4-week sprint style updates that provide meaningful value.”

To achieve what Bauer suggests, former CIO Isaac Sacolick says, IT organizations need to “execute and plan in sprints. As important, design needs to understand customer value propositions and put that knowledge into planning. And finally, innovation should be balanced against safety and security concerns.”

Sacolick goes onto say that “if Agile is only used in IT to improve project execution, it’s really hard to drive business transformation. Digital requires iterative planning, execution, and feedback loops, which is why agile is so central to success at transformation. So Agile needs to be an IT and a business culture change.” Looking back, Sacolick says, “it is not surprising that IT’s project failure rate was like 80% before Agile changed things. Remember those long requirement documents and complex change procedures?”

Even CIOs at new organization should initiate agile immediately. CIO Paige Francis says that she is “just starting here but I am setting roadmaps with bursts of progress and the intention to celebrate each quick win. Each adds up to a whole design/big picture. If length is impeding progress or ramping up exhaustion, sure.”

In terms of business outcomes, former CIO Joanna Young says, “most recently I deployed Agile by iterating from legacy, unhealthy data to timely, healthier, helpful visualizations and ergo better, faster business decision making.” Analyst Dan Kirsch says that “underlying both agile and DevOps is culture and process transformation. Technology can only support these changes.”

Has Agile Required You to Transform IT and Overall Business Culture?

Former CIO Tim McBreen says, “Agile required staff to upgrade to be able to handle sprint culture and changing processes. Business culture was in shock to be moved from 12–18-month delivery to 12-week delivery cycles. They had to do their business-side process and training quicker. Marketing programs moved faster.”

In terms of business culture, Francis said the business stakeholders, “just needed to experience that quick win the first time, then it’s like the culture shift changes itself!” With this said, Young stressed that “Agile isn’t the driver. The drivers are hyper acceleration, customer, and employee centricity. These make Agile a better way to deliver what’s most important faster and better. CIO must influence key concepts including iterative, prioritized delivery in small increments versus long cycle times. This requires different roles and governance models. It requires delegation and the support of the Agile teams.”

Ensure Learnings are Captured Throughout the Process

CIOs are clear that agile requires a learning culture. Sacolick says that “Agile is a great name. Who doesn’t want to be agile? Better than trying to explain ITIL, DevOps, SRE, and other tech jargon to the CEO. But there’s depth to Agile practices needed to achieve transformation and culture change. Sprints and standups are just the very basics.”

Sacolick goes on to say, “Agile is a leadership responsibility. Leaders need to capture learning from retrospectives, feedback from customers and end-users, and data from operations. With this, they can decide what actions are needed.”

Francis agrees and says, “IT embraced a buzzword and made it seem trendy. I think successful businesses are more Agile than they think. They just do rather than hype.” Kirsch agrees with Francis and says, “Agile is about capturing lessons learned in a key to fail fast strategies. It’s not about failing – it’s about continually iterating and learning from mistakes.”

Steve Jones, Chief Data Architect, adds, “openness and documenting learnings are critical. Negative learnings are often the most valuable. Doing something wrong isn’t an issue. It’s being the second team to do it that’s the problem.”

In Agile, is It Easier to Stop a Failed Project?

Sacolick says, “Waterfall was far from perfect even in a slow-changing world. Waterfall project execution was abysmal. All it did was provide command/control jobs and promote this culture. Pivots, stops, and accelerating are all part of Agile when there are vision statements with success criteria upfront and honest feedback loops in place. It’s all about experimenting, but still not easy to work through the emotions tied to pivots and stops.”

Young sees that the advantages of Agile include “unwanted features and not-working technology are identified much earlier and are not as likely to find their way into production products. If prioritization is done correctly, failure risk is reduced as unwanted/not needed/bad stuff doesn’t make it into or out of sprints. Failed projects, also, don’t tend to occur if Agile is done correctly. In other words, there is effective prioritization, enough resources, and supportive teams.”

McBreen adds that “key things for me are constant and continued business focus changes. By using Agile approach, we move the focus quickly to other areas. It allows us to stop iterations when the business says we had done enough with must items. Agile is required as an organization and cultural approach to everything IT does, regardless of whether a development project or moving to a new service provider – and anything in between.”

Baurer adds, “it would seem stopping a failed project in Agile is easier than Waterfall since value is delivered at each iteration. Usually projects fail, though, because business focus changes.” But Jones adds something important: “Waterfall projects fail at the end; Agile projects can fail at an iteration. In Agile, there are more opportunities to realize it’s all gone horribly wrong and stop it.” For this reason, CIO Anthony McMahon says that “it’s definitely easier to redirect a project to avoid failure.”

Developing An Agile Mindset?

So how do you get the broader team into an Agile mindset? Young says that leaders should “start with 1-2 teams and good Agile coaches who will recognize the best structure and approach. Get those teams up on running and delivering. Once this has happened, scale approach to more teams. CIOs should apply Agile, and with great results, they should deploy more broadly.” Bauer agrees and says, “start small, train a few stakeholders and groups, then roll it out to a wider audience after you have a working concept.”

Sacolick adds that Agile organizations may need help with “DevOps automation – CI/CD, IaC, and especially continuous testing and AIOps to simplify change controls and rid themselves of the CAB. Working with stakeholders is often overlooked in Agile, especially on innovation programs. Product Management needs to listen to markets and customers and be guard-railed by stakeholders. Agile is not the aggregate of everyone’s wish list.” Jones concludes and says, “if done well, Agile stops organizations from being stakeholders and starts them being owners.”

Transforming IT

Agile is clearly about transforming IT organizations and the businesses IT serves. To succeed, CIOs need support from the entire business. This is critical to establishing a business that can transform. Otherwise, it is a much more difficult process and the organization risk the very disruption that K. Gardner and Alia Crocker describe.

The post CIOs Talk Agile: Failing Fast and Learning Faster appeared first on eWEEK.

Why might CIOs prefer a startup over a large established company? To be clear, only a small number of firms get the opportunity to transition from innovator to early adopter, and then early majority markets. In these transitions, according to Geoffrey Moore, features get filled in, creating what Theodore Levitt called a ‘whole product.’

So, what should VC be looking for in startups? What do startups need to succeed with CIOs? (To be clear, I am focused here upon seed funding to Series B or Series C.) CIOs say there are six qualities they look for in startups they work with. Let’s look at each.

Also see: Digital Transformation: Strategy and Examples

1) Fills a Gap

CIOs don’t often turn to a new startup to rip and replace something that they spent years building. They are looking early on for something that fills a gap in what they are doing today.

Healthcare CIO David Chou says, “I do like the startup agility, but they must fill the gap in understanding deeply how the industry operates with the details.”

2) Something Entirely New

CIOs are not going to spend time with a startup that simply rehashes an existing set of ideas. They want to see something new: something VCs say represents ‘a pain pill’ rather than a ‘nice to have’.

Higher Education CIO Milos Topic says, “there is no solid rule overall. However, we need something entirely new, something we haven’t seen before. Startup bootstrapping and grittiness can help a lot but without something unique, it isn’t enough.”

Financial Services CIO Pedro Martinez Puig adds, “I bet on start-ups on initiatives that goes to uncharted territory ideas that require combining three or more specialized teams. For example, you need to mix top UX, with algorithm design, development and hardware.”

3) Non-archaic perspective

CIOs these days have moved from back-office efficiency to front-office transformation. They look for organizations that solve business problems, and this means they bring new approaches to support business transformation.

For example, they reach new, often younger audiences. Foundation CIO Paige Francis says that she looks for startups “when the project is striving to engage a fresher crowd with a non-archaic perspective. Also, when the solution doesn’t require integration with a clunky, billion-year-old system/infrastructure.”

Clearly, many problems require integration. Where this is the case, the startup has the extra chore of figuring out how to integrate with system and infrastructure.

4) Enables Business Differentiation + Innovation

CIOs are without question on the front line of business transformation these days. This means that startups need to enable or support an organization’s ability to transform itself into a nimble digital competitor. An organization that can produce increasingly digital offerings and products.

Higher Education CIO Carrie Shumaker says she looks for a startup that enables her to deliver “a business process that is a differentiator or innovation, not a system of record process (think Gartner categorization).”

5) Low Risk

CIOs want startups that do not add to their business risk. Shumaker wants organizations “you can trust.” She would prefer if “they’re not about to get sold or go public.”

Former CIO Tim McBreen adds, it is important to “feel a sense of partnership and trust. It is important that a new vendor has enough clients and not be release 0/1 unless joint venture to build from scratch.” Meanwhile, CIO Cathleen Curley says that she is looking for “low risk and medium to high impact. Trust and strong product roadmap that you can help shape is important as well.”

CIO Jim Russell is candid, however, that “in some ways with all the VC money today even long-term vendors have uncertain futures. Startups are good still for low-risk new ventures. It can be good to start a long term relationship with graduated risk/reward. Bigger projects give me pause. The risks are higher and the reward margin lower. ERP, LMS, CMS, other tools currently need more risk mitigation and thoughtful adoption.”

6) Experienced Team

I remember many years ago, seasoned VC Jack Carsten told me that he would always bet on an A team with a B idea versus a B team with an A idea.

There are lots of reason for this. An A team knows when to pivot, but it also has to do with the business abilities. An experienced team knows how to enable an established organization to contract with their startup. Former CIO Theresa Rowe says it is important for startups to have “readiness and capabilities of their user community. This includes the ability to help with a security risk assessment or a data and identity integration assessment.”

Parting Words

There you have it: CIOs look for startups that fill a gap, offer fresh approaches, provide different perspectives, enable the business to win, are low risk, and have the experience to make it easy to work with.

Simple enough ideas, but clearly it takes work to make it through the VC gauntlet. I remember a VC telling me once that they read 100 executive summaries a week and invite 10 to come in for an hour meeting. One or two of those make it to a partner meeting after some initial due diligence. And then a few of those make it to funding. Clearly, the ones that meet the first four criteria should have an opportunity at funding.

The post Tech Buyers Choose: Innovative Startup vs. Experienced Large Vendor appeared first on eWEEK.

This should really matter to technology sellers. As I mention in my review of “The Qualified Sales Leader,” John McMahon says, “account executives need to slow down to go fast. They need to understand the magnitude of their customers’ pain and environment.”

Today’s technology sellers show how they solve their customer’s real pains. And sorry, this isn’t about your product or its features. It’s about business problems that create a sense of urgency to buy.

One Simple Question

A few weeks ago, I was with a savvy technology seller. I asked them about the customer’s problem. They came back with a series of problem statements that the customer had with their current technical approach. All of the statements proved valid in a meeting with the customer, but they were technical problem statements.

The problem for technology sellers is that CIOs, who is typically their buyer, have morphed over the last few years. The focus of CIOs, as they moved from reporting to the CFO to the CEO, is no longer about back-office business productivity and efficiency. CIOs today are focused upon front office effectiveness and business model transformation. This by necessity changes how they get measured.

As important, CIOs have been clear with me that they do not take out inefficient processes simply because they cost their firm too much money. There must be a business outcome for making any change. Savvy sellers realize this and make sure that what they propose attaches to the metrics CIOs measure their performance against.

What Metrics Do CIOs and IT Govern Themselves By?

So how do CIOs measure themselves? To a certain degree, the answer varies by industry.

When I was talking with the customer of the above-mentioned technology seller, their sense of urgency had to do with the move to value-based care and how quality of care determined reimbursement rates. This meant for this organization everyone needed to align key healthcare performance metrics.

Let’s now look at the answer by industry.

Financial Services

Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) handle many issues that matter greatly, from driving innovation, gaining market insight, and improving compliance. From my interactions with FSIs, the ability to build customer intimacy is critical to keeping customers and building new customer relationships.

CIO Dennis Klemenz says for these reasons, “projects get prioritized by customer impact first. Employee impact today is second. Experienced PMs set milestone dates and track timeline, budget, and quality. Most ROIs I’ve dealt with are just as arbitrary as deadlines are. If you meet a client’s needs, money flows.”

CIO Pedro Martinez Puig agrees and says, “for your CEO, IT should be measured by customer NPS; for your CFO, IT spend vs plan and CAPEX ROI; for the COO: Service Availability; for your CMO: customer acquisition cost; for your CSO: Carbon footprint; for all, Revenue Growth Rate.”

Former Banking CIO Wayne Sadin says, “focus on results as seen by the business. How much has IT done to raise the top line and decrease SBU + SG&A operating expenses.” Without question, business impact is what matters most.

Healthcare

As I implied earlier, healthcare is going through massive change in every area from improving patient care to how services are delivered and paid for.

For this reason, it came as no surprise that CIO David Chou said that “a big personal pet peeve is when a CIO starts measuring metrics like ticket resolution, time to close tickets, or just using tickets in general. I am still trying to change that culture. The only metric that matters is user, and customer (patient) satisfaction, all of the other metrics are useless if you do not measure the result.”

Technology

Technology companies are increasingly challenged especially those that deliver physical products to their customers. For them, business metrics are important.

Former Iron Mountain CIO Ken LeBlanc says,“define success criteria and qualitative and quantitative metrics before starting a project; define how to measure results; hold IT and business sponsors accountable to those expectations.”

Higher Education

CIO Carrie Shumaker said that because of the long term nature of goals like retention and graduation,  how IT should measure itself depends on the IT team. “For frontline teams, it should be customer satisfaction. For projects, it should be performance against business KPIs. In higher education, [the goals] may take years to manifest so we also should measure more immediate quality.”

CIO Milos Topic agrees with Shumaker and says “while we can’t measure everything, client experience comes to mind along with project delivery. Additionally, CIOs need to co-lead the innovation ecosystem across the university and produce new products or services that grow revenue or reduce expenses over time.”

CIO Bo Wandschneider adds that “satisfaction surveys play well in terms of laying a trust foundation. High scores signal fiduciary responsibility.”

Former CIO Joanna Young suggests that “IT should be measured overall by institutional goals (in other words, sales, profitability, new product delivery, customer delight, and enrollment). IT, also, needs to align technology goals related to quality, delivery, effectiveness, customer service, transparency, efficiency…And choose a few measures that are meaningful and understandable vs. boiling the ocean with a plethora of dashboards and reports.”

Parting Words

So if you didn’t get it before this post, CIOs are business people first and technology people second.

This means salespeople need to focus their discussions upon business problems that urgently need to be solved. CIOs across the above industries have the same types of metrics applied to them. These are around customer and business outcomes. Technology sellers that work at these can determine whether a sense of business urgency can be attached to an opportunity or not.

Simply put, smart technology sellers understand their customers’ problems and show how their products solve these problems—they are solution focused.

The post How CIOs Measure Themselves and Why it Matters appeared first on eWEEK.

However, after COVID-19, I think that many business leaders would all agree that resiliency is about more than service availability and optimization of system performance through prediction of future performance and capacity requirements. Today, resiliency is about people, then processes, and then systems.

So how have things changed because of the crisis? The following comments were part of a recent CIO Chat about this key business topic.

Has Defining IT Resiliency Changed as a Result of COVID-19?

CIO David Seidl starts this discussion by saying that “even though we knew better, we mostly thought about our systems, and perhaps do I have enough staff to cover things. Now we think about how our staff is doing mentally, emotionally, and physically in a way that we should have before.

“We also think about how to support multimodal access methods for almost everything. Hybrid meetings have become a default. For this reason, we adjust far more fluidly to changing circumstances. Meanwhile, our leadership team has leveraged IT more than before the crisis and has learned to use more of the tools that we provide. We operate a pair of video conferencing tools because we need the ability to operate even if one is down. Before, most folks didn’t know how to use one conference tool very well. COVID has been an all-hands-on-deck experience.”

CIO Martin Davis agrees with Seidl and says he has rethought “IT Resiliency as well as mental resiliency. It must also include resiliency over a longer term then we were expecting. It’s no longer about can we survive a short period of pain.”

Adding on, CIO Melissa Woo says, “the last 18 months have been grueling for IT professionals. And let’s add we are now seeing a resurgence in infections at a time we were all breathing a sigh of relief that the end of the pandemic was in sight. This second round really tested resiliency. There’s a recurring theme here – resiliency of our teams is a concern.”

CIO Sharon Pitt adds, “it turns out our systems could have been a bit more secure and robust. Also, our procedures and processes could have be tighter. The biggest concern, as time marches on, is the well-being of our teams. For my part, I think it’s a cross-university concern. Maybe even it is an across the nation concern. People are still suffering and many of our teams remain very, very lean.”

CIO Deb Gildersleeve agrees and says, “in the past we often thought about resiliency around a location, work, and data center, COVID-19 made us look at it from an employee perspective. As important, you can’t look at resiliency in a silo. You must consider resiliency alongside adaptability. So, organizations need to stay as resilient as possible and agile enough to adapt when disruption occurs.”

Does IT Resiliency Have a People Component?

Former CIO Ken LeBlanc started this conversation by saying it is “so important for CIOs to have strong partnerships with the HR function and 3rd party sources.”

But, Seidl says, “I think it always did. We had group 1, 2, and 3 picked out for emergencies. But COVID changed how we view preparing for an emergency. I think we’re better for it, but I’m also worried about the long-term impact on folks who have carried the resiliency burden for so long.

“If I asked folks the question how would you prepare for a multi-month, or yearlong emergency now, I wonder what our plans would look like. Our old plans were for an outage, or major event  that would be days, maybe weeks.”

Woo adds an important note: “none of the stuff matters without people to run it.” Davis agreed and said, “most things are people at their core. Even before you always relied upon the people working 24×7 to resolve a critical outage. That’s true even more so now.”

For CIO Jim Russell, the people component today “has received at least greater awareness. The flex in our organizations comes first in the people and if they are working from a trauma position, they often lose resiliency. So being and keeping folks fresh should always have been part of putting in place a healthy IT department.”

IT Strategy Officer Katie Rose, adds “we have to ensure that people can bring their best, and if they’re burnout, that won’t happen.”

Rob O’Donohue, Gartner CIO Analyst, said, “I look at this through many domains in IT. Culture, leadership, strategy, workforce models, and relationships all as important as technology. Interested to see if others are thinking the same. I have results coming out soon on this topic and the shift in technology resilience to more of the human jumps out. More needs to be done. Cultural resilience is key.”

Reconsidering Endpoint Devices and How They Connect

CIOs shared with me over the last couple months that many workers were issued laptops for the first time as they left their offices. So how should strategy work going forward?

Seidl said, “in many cases, we sent desktops home that were never expected to move. We benefitted, fortunately, from a purposeful effort to make services available wherever people are over the past few years. Our administrative assistants were surprised when the leadership team took over mail duties during the pandemic. I think we learned some good lessons about leveraging location too.”

For Russell, “COVID-19 accelerated the work from anywhere movement. This change has meant rethinking security and training but just sped up one aspect of digital transformation. And some of the resiliency of IT occurs in the clients or customers.”

Adding on, Davis says that “this time has changed the thinking of many. It’s no longer about locations for resiliency or security it’s more about individual objects, e.g. a device, or a database, or an app.”

Given this, Gildersleeve says the question that every CIO is asking is “what can we do as a company to make sure everyone can do their best work from wherever they are located in a secure way.”

Part of this starts by doing what Pitt suggests, “redefining technology standards, allowing teams to work from anywhere. In our cases, significantly change was required to our HR policies. Fortunately, we did not need to redefine how our teams connected to our systems…although we expanded and tightened that capability. But certainly the availability of broadband was a significant concern for some.”

CTO Anthony McMahon added an international perspective by saying, “in New Zealand, our issue was a return to normal too quickly. Leaders didn’t have time to note the impact of security in home networks before everyone moved back to the office. Endpoints have been tightened, but risks remain. Especially as we are now back working from home.”

CIO Carrie Shumaker adds, “her organization will now have laptops for most if not all and a soft phone-first strategy. Many departments had been deploying laptops for years, but this pushed the stragglers forward.”

Where Systems Needed Help

Seidl says that his organization’s “infrastructure is a decent-sized small city, which means our approach has to include stuff that just plain won’t flex that way now, or even easily in the future. I look at this through many domains in IT. Culture, leadership, strategy, workforce models, and relationships all as important as technology.”

Gildersleeve similarly argues for considering the people and process stuff first. She says, “getting tech to new hires became a whole new process. Previously, we were able to bring people into an office and walk them through their setup and then they were good to work from anywhere…

“Now, we have to get ahead of ordering and building out new systems because we have to factor in shipping time and getting folks what they need before they start”. She adds that “as we continue to work in a hybrid-remote workforce where people are working all over… Resiliency is as much equipment and systems as it is making sure employees are safely accessing data and information in a way that keeps the company secure but doesn’t compromise productivity.”

To make this happen, Russell says several technology decisions needed to be made. This includes the following: “Communications, Video Collaboration, Files Storage, and a host of exploration and training just on better use of resilient aspects of existing tools.” CIO Carrie Shumaker notes, “we need soft phones by default and for business texting.”

Parting Words

Without question, CIOs think about resiliency through a whole new lens because of COVID-19. As well, the crisis is going to force the ripping off of “human band-aids” to systems.

CIOs need to make employees resilient wherever they work. Shumaker puts it this way. “For me, I grew up in IT running payroll, which required all-nighters on a regular basis, and we staffed; accordingly, tired people make poor decisions. Those were typically marathons of greater than 48 hours. COVID-19 has added a whole new dimension.”

Businesses today without question need to be concerned first about resiliency from the people dimension.

The post Understanding IT Resilience: The Human Component appeared first on eWEEK.

Bean is clear that Big Data captured corporate imaginations unlike prior data movements, including ‘business intelligence.’

Being Data Driven Matters

Bean starts by asserting something that is becoming axiomatic: Data is in its ascendancy. And in this process, data has moved for the arcane to the mainstream.

Historically, Bean argues, data initiatives were primarily about market research, statistical analysis, and actuarial science (topics that were hard to talk about at cocktail parties.) During this time, specialists worked with small amounts of data to develop insights of limited business importance. In those days, data science was defined by statistics, probability, and operations research.

Today, the world races to become data-driven. However, being data-driven, as I’ve found in the #CIOChat, is about more than tooling. Success requires leadership and vision, not to mention a CEO that really groks data (as I’ve asserted in prior articles). Future firms with the ‘right to win’ will either be born with data in their DNA or realize their success depends on getting really good at data.

For large companies, this means capitalizing on breadth and depth of data. Jeanne Ross of MIT-CISR has suggested that the way legacy firms win against start-ups is by putting together their multi domains of data to solve bigger problems than startups can. For those that do this well, data delivers innovation and greater business agility. In this way, Bean argues, data acts like a market accelerant.

Big Data in the Trough of Disillusionment?

Bean claims Big Data became common around 2011. Bean echoes Judith Hurwitz (“Big Data for Dummies”) when he writes that Big Data refers to “extensive sources and repositories of data of many different forms and varieties.”

Such volume presents challenges. Bean quotes Michael Stonebraker, who said, “Big Data is less about managing the volume of data and much more about integrating the wide variety of data sources that are available—which can include data from legacy transactional systems, behavioral data sources, structured, and unstructured data and all sizes of data.”

Bean argues that Big Data captured the imagination of the C-Suites and boards unlike previous data initiatives. And while many organizations are clearly running into what analysts call the ‘trough of disillusionment’ (when a topic starts to receive less press and board attention), Bean argues that Big Data is still a big focus, as organizations are achieving Big Data benefits with no end in sight.

His book spotlights such organizations. Bean tells the stories of leading companies that have reported significant strides in achieving business outcomes, including American Family Insurance, Capital One, Charles Schwab, Cigna, Munich Re, Nationwide Insurance, and Travelers Insurance.  For these organizations, Bean argues that Big Data has empowered their data users to experiment, fail and learn quickly from their mistakes so that they may move forward with speed, agility, and confidence.

Sabotaging the Success of Big Data

Recently, talk of data pipelines and supermarkets has grown popular. Many stress the importance of a ‘data pipeline’, which “gathers, inputs, cleans, integrates, processes, and safeguards data in a systematic, sustainable, and scalable way” (Iansanti, M. and Lakhani, K. Competing in AI). The goal is to create a data supermarket. Yet pipelines and supermarkets overlook the reality for most businesses. And while Bean acknowledges the importance of making data accessible and cataloged, he suggests that most companies are still striving to leverage data as a business asset and forge data culture.

This takes time. A big problem in terms of treating data as a strategic asset is that legacy firms have difficulty justifying initiatives that are long-term and strategic. For this reason, Bean suggests data initiatives often become siloed, or overly compliance- or cost-focused. This of courses makes data and analytics more about the back office than the front office.

Unfortunately, a short-term view undercuts a business’s long-term interests. Bean stresses that acceptance of change starts with people. We have talked regularly in the #CIOChat that, when it comes to catalyzing change, it is always people, process, and then technology — regardless of how big the technology issues are. Clearly, Drucker and Bean are right when they stress that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Not surprisingly, the “Big Data and AI Executive Survey for 2021,” run by Bean’s firm, found that “cultural factors were cited by 92% as the principal issue that organizations face in becoming data centric.” Other issues include forest-versus-trees thinking or being stuck in the weeds. Clearly, we need more data-driven executives like Target’s Brian Cornell. Data-driven CEOs, CDOs and CIOs can secure the executive commitments needed. With these in hand, it is critical that data leaders establish realistic commitment from a supportive executive team.

For the above reasons, it came as no surprise that only 39.3% are managing data as an asset according to this survey. The big-picture problem, Bean argues, is that a legacy data environment, business processes, skill sets, and traditional cultures are reluctant to change, and they get in the way.

However, Bean stresses, “it is not enough for companies to embrace modern digital architectures, agile methodologies, and integrated data initiatives… when less than a quarter of executives report their organizations have successfully forged a data culture.”

Practices for Companies Winning at Data

Once organizations solve cultural issues among people, Bean says that companies must alter or update their data practices, which are often steeped in outdated business approaches. Updated thinking at minimum should include the following:

• Data is a shared asset
• Data must be governed
• Data is consumed by many
• Data ownership is a shared responsibility
• Data success requires partnership
• Data forces us to think differently

Doing this right requires a data strategy, data governance, data management, change management, and business adoption.

Chief Data Officers

As Big Data became mainstream, Bean argues, many organizations concluded they needed a a data czar. And this always turned out to be the company’s CIO. Early CDOs focused upon data quality, data accuracy, transparency, privacy, and reporting. They were, to use Tom Davenport’s nomenclature, focused upon data defense.

The CDO role continues to evolve. Bean claims today CDOs are established — but not yet on firm ground. Part of the reason for this is there isn’t yet a uniform definition for what a CDO does. With that said, the good news is that CDOs are increasingly moving onto data offense. Whereas defense is often focused on compliance, offense focuses on business impact and data monetization. Indeed, 70% of leaders in 2021 are focused on revenue generating activities, according to the Executive survey.

This is good news, yet in truth, data management still remains nascent at most firms. An inability to forge a data-driven culture looms as a large impediment to success. Research from MIT-CISR finds that 51% of legacy organizations are still in silos and 21% in duct tape. For these organizations, Bean says data challenges will only grow as their volume and variety of data increases.

Successful CDOs and CIOs need not only speak about data and analytics in the language of business but relentlessly communicate on the value of data projects delivered. Mastery of outreach and communication is essential, regardless of who is the data leader.

Connection from Data to Digital Transformation

A majority of business transformations start with data, Bean asserts. He quotes Stonebreaker, who says “The future on data management lies in data curation which is being aimed at the hundreds or thousands of data silos not captured within the traditional data warehouse, and which can only be captured and integrated at scale by applying automation and machine learning based on statistical patterns. Data curation relies upon machine learning systems that use statistical techniques to learn and build knowledge over time.”

For Bean, the opportunity of transformation is largely about optimizing operational processes. Iansanti and Lakhani, similarly say “AI is becoming a universal engine of execution.” But they go further, saying digital transformation “transforms the very nature of companies and how they compete.” For Iansanti and Lakhani, data and AI enable what they call digital scale, digital scope, and digital learning. This means rethinking, not just a firm’s operating model, but also its business model.

According to Jeanne Ross, Cynthia Beath, and Martin Mocker in “Designed for Digital”, there are 5 digital technologies relevant to digital transformation: social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and the Internet of Things.

In the digital world, you have ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity, and massive processing power, Ross and company point out. “In this world, ubiquitous data means you don’t guess what customers want, or who they are, or whether they are loyal.” They go on to suggest that a digital value proposition is a ‘digital offering’. Digital offerings allow for maximum experimentation by combining data, business logic, and infrastructure to solve specific customer problems.

Digital Transformation

Bean’s book is worth the read for anyone concerned about data or digital transformation. Some of the case studies are great fodder for organizations started or embarked on their data journeys.

Clearly, people and culture really matter. And Bean’s suggestions on what things to tackle when offer a roadmap for leaders focused on achieving a data culture alongside their digital transformation.

The post Fail Fast, Learn Faster: The Story of Big Data appeared first on eWEEK.

A few years ago, before COVID 19 and after the Paradise Fire in Northern California, I traveled to Germany. I was at, of all things, an enterprise architecture event. By happenstance, I sat at a table of executives from Germany’s largest public utility companies. I asked the table a simple question: Why is it that the electric lines in my neighborhood are buried but the lines delivering electricity to my area are all above ground?

I had heard previously that buried lines corrode easily and have other technical issues resulting from ground moisture. The executives looked at me dumbfounded and said in Germany we have buried lines for years.

So, with this said, I asked them one more question. How efficient is your Grid? In the US, our grid is around 33% efficient. This means that only 33% of the energy put on the wire actually reaches the customer. Most of the power created is lost!

They again looked at me again dumbfounded. Our power loss numbers are much better and proudly told me about how they are taking electricity generated from wind turbines located in the North Sea to Munich over direct current with 95% efficiency. Only a 5% loss.

Deciding to Invest

In the wake of the Dixie Fire, PG&E hastily announced that it is going to bury 10,000 miles of lines in high wind areas. After the Paradise Fire, PG&E initially jumped on a less expensive solution based upon Internet of Things technology and smart sensors. This involved sensing a wind event and then turning off power to everywhere thought to have a wind risk. Clearly, the less expensive solution did not pan out.

Earlier this year, I asked a former US power executive about this. He said, “Myles, it is all about dollars and cents. And burying power lines is going to cost billions of dollars. And it is still hard to justify making the capital investment, even after Paradise.”

Unfortunately, electric power is not the only area where organizations poorly judge technology risk and fail to invest in needed enabling infrastructure. Several years ago, after the Target breach, I asked CIOs why had the breach occurred. At the time, the fixes were known.

One CIO said to me, exasperated, “the CIO and other IT leaders were not stupid. The fact is it is harder to justify investment in cybersecurity to company CEOs and boards than marketing investment that will drive top line revenues.”

And cybersecurity isn’t the only infrastructural investment that CIOs have had difficulty making the business case. CIOs have told me repeatedly that it is a hard sell to investment in eliminating the tech debt that limits business agility and the ability to respond to digital disruption.

A New Way of Accounting for Business Risk Needed?

Businesses have all kinds of business risks. The fact is probabilistic hurdle rates may just be failing the enterprises that use them.

Or maybe it is our use of probability to calculating the potential for a risk event. According to branding expert, David Aaker, a businesses’ brand has a clear impact upon a business’s financial results. And to be clear, negative events can negatively impact a company’s brand equity and thereby its revenues.

As important as brand is, the life of public companies has become shorter and shorter. This fact makes the need to respond to digital disruption more and more critical. This should bring building agile digital business to the forefront of the business agenda. Hopefully, things have changed after COVID-19. CIO Deb Gildersleeve says, “most organizations need to really take a step back. This process should start by prioritizing enterprise agility, resiliency, and continuity.”

This means as well planning for future business risks. Doing this requires moving from what Russell Ackoff calls reactive or inactive planning to a planning that is interactive, participative, and future oriented. One expert says that he worries that for too many organizations are, “as suggested by Marshall McLuhan, looking at the present through a rear-view mirror.” Hopefully, COVID-19 has modified how organizations consider business technology risk and make investment decisions.

CIO Martin Davis claims that “COVID-19 has helped companies I know realize they were very dependent on technology to work wherever people are and the importance of properly planning for risk, and the real cost if you are not prepared for a crisis.” CIO Paige Francis, agrees and says “COVID 19 taught our organizations what many CIO already knew, technology is everything. As well, it showed that IT risk is not your standard business risk. And it’s a top priority now.”

Parting thoughts

If one thing is clear from the multiple tragedies of the last several years, we need new models for calibrating and thinking about business and technology risks – I call this a re-accounting of business risk.

We need leaders that can see beyond the immediate dollars and cents of a decision. We need leaders that can consider the impact of risk and consider when a risk is just unacceptable.

CIO Melissa Woo puts it this way, “I’m not sure the COVID-19 crisis has changed how the IT organization views risk, but hopefully it has changed how our overall organization views risk instead.”

The post Do We Need a New Approach to Accounting for Business Risk? appeared first on eWEEK.

They were candid that Big Data doesn’t represent a single technology and instead, was a heterogeneous set of data management technologies with their roots in several previous technology transformations.

The question now is: Where is Big Data today? And what is needed to mature its application?

To be fair, recent analyst surveys have found that big data has not yet led to big business outcomes. Despite all the hype, most corporate employees still do not have easy access to the information to get their jobs done. The problem continues to center around getting the right information to the right people at the right time as the number of information sources, uses, and users grows.

Data Warehouses vs. Data Lakes vs. Data Fabric

To house all this data, storage and management systems have sprung up, like the data warehouse, data lake, and data fabric, “organizations will need some form of all three of these,” says former CIO Tim McBreen.  “But a Data Fabric will be required as an umbrella for all data integration, management, and governance across the enterprise at the solution and platform levels. Cohesion across enterprises is a must.”

“It is often not feasible to centralize data,” adds CIO Carrie Schumaker. “Or, the analysis is prototyped using services to access disparate data sources, and then if it proves fruitful and business needs dictate it. The centralization is done later.”

Hurwitz Analyst Dan Kirsch sees a connection between the data decentralization trend and data fabric. “We’ve seen a data fabric approach growing in popularity because it’s not realistic to have one central repository where all of your data can be up to date, governed, and clean,” he shares. “For this reason, data fabrics need to allow for heterogeneous data locations. I think a data fabric approach helps with the challenge of shared responsibility — each team is responsible for their own data and then connects it versus dumping data into a data lake. AWS may say a Data Lake is the only path for analytics success. And of course, they want organizations to dump all their data into the AWS cloud.”

Former VP for Data and Analytics at Gartner, Nick Heudecker, agrees and argues that all of these trends are important. “Each concept serves different users and use cases,” he points out. “Data warehouses for high performance, repeatable analytics. Data Lakes for question development/experimentation. Data mesh for consumption of distributed data with governance oversight.” So there is no confusion, Gartner considers data fabrics and data meshes to be equivalent concepts.

Centralizing Your Big Data Strategy Around One Platform

The experts leverage dual strategies but stick to a single platform. Former CIO McBreen says that he likes to have “two strategies. One strategy is for productions, and one is for analytics. Each has their own core hub platform and support for multiple data repositories. Then there is an ETL platform (real, near, batch) between the 2 core hubs.”

But which vendor provides the bulk of these services? “I haven’t seen any yet that I thought were good enough on their own to be the complete platform,” McBreen laments.

Shumaker concurs when she jokes, “does multiple data repositories often include a few spreadsheets?” For this reason, CIO Deb Gildersleeve says, “in a lot of ways it’s less about centralizing data and more about integrating it. How can you get all your data integrated so you can visualize it and connect it to your other systems (whether that be on premises or cloud)?”

“Centralizing all your data creates cost, governance and security headaches,” Kirsch shares. “Data is locked into line-of-business applications, on premises and within cloud ecosystems. Connecting to data where it resides helps to eliminate risk and increase speed to insights.”

“I don’t think this is a single vendor solution story,” Heudecker agrees. “Some provide query capabilities, but the governance story hasn’t been fleshed out by anyone yet. The ‘big’ in big data makes moving things around a challenge. Multiple platforms is the norm. If you’re lucky, you can normalize around tooling and skills.”

A data fabric, therefore, is a data management concept for attaining flexible, reusable and augmented data integration pipelines, services and semantics, in support of various operational and analytics use cases delivered across multiple deployments and orchestration platforms.

Ensuring Adherence to Data Governance and Data Privacy Rules

To govern data effectively, businesses must have a clear grasp of what data they have.Organizations need to “understand what types of data is in their data lake or data fabric,” says Kirsch. “If PII is involved in a specific app or new endeavor, businesses need to assign an executive to oversee the appropriate use of personal data. The executive can also help address the question of what’s possible with data versus what’s appropriate.”

Stewards play a vital governance role. So it comes as no surprise that McBreen says it is important to define “stewards whose whole job is to access and manage corrections to information at its initial source. They rotate out of business teams and KPI’s are in place. We review monthly and adjust as needed.”

”It’s important to define stewards up front and know how to check in with them along the way,” Gildersleeve states.” Getting stewards’ feedback on UX design is also important. Shumaker adds that she likes to have “data stewards sign off on the high-level design. Depending on the data type there is mandatory training on access and compliance to get access to any data set, and for more specialized data sets there may be additional training.”

Impact of Cloud on Big Data Strategy?

“Cloud is becoming another form of compute and storage rather than a separate environment,” Kirsch insists. “Cloud Management and visibility is important. Assuming the cloud is a quick way to blow a budget. In many cases there’s no reason to move some apps to the cloud. Being able to do proofs of concepts and experimentation instantly on the cloud is huge. Grabbing GPUs for example on the cloud versus purchasing physical infrastructure.

Gildersleeve agrees, saying “cloud allows organizations to try new things as well as add and remove compute power as needed without having to wait for physical work to be done.”

Where Are Data Processes Maturing?

Processes require a foundation of clearly defined terms. For Gildersleeve, “starting in the transactional systems is critical. If the data starts out wrong, a lot of time is spent scrubbing and enhancing that data. Shumaker agrees and says that “it’s not sexy but organizations need to agree upon data definitions that are shared and maintained.”

For this reason, Kirsch suggests that it is time to “change data processes by adopting processes like DataOps. These will become important for data-driven organizations. It won’t be overnight. Businesses are still struggling with DevOps. Data Literacy is critical to delivering success as well. Business school students shouldn’t get their MBA without some understanding of data.”

Heudecker doesn’t disagree when he says, “most maturity is needed in areas that facilitate sharing context around data, so things like data literacy. DataOps can help with resiliency, but it’s still an overwhelmingly technical practice.”

Parting Words

Clearly, Big Data lies in what analysts call the “Trough of Disillusionment.” While data-driven companies will be long term winners, there is work to do.

Winners need to put in the data governance needed to make data sufficient to task and protected. They also need to improve their data processes. Together DataOps and Data Governance can help. To do this, data winners will create what Jeanne Ross and Martin Mocker call “Operational and Digital Backbones.”

The post How is Big Data Evolving? appeared first on eWEEK.

This was the question that I posed recently to the #CIOChat.

Biggest Management Challenges with Multicloud

CIOs suggest the challenges come in the following order:

1) the complexity of management

2) knowing where data and work loads are

3) cross platform vendor integration

4) acquiring security, privacy, and performance visibility from sub providers

5) reduced overall vendor leverage

Data, without question, is a major issue for CIOs to solve with Multicloud. Former CIO Tim McBreen says, “data has always been my biggest issue. Especially data that is needed across cloud platforms and requires constant synch. The same is true with cloud data warehouses and analytic data. Both require effort to make sure they work and are delivered at their contracted cost per unit of data moved and stored. This goes back to knowing what you are doing and maintaining and evolving your catalog, architecture, and strategy.”

Clearly, organizations should make a conscious choice about the data that should or should not be migrated into a cloud data warehouse. CIO David Seidl said in response to McBreen, “I wonder how many are doing much deep cross-vendor platform integration? Or if they’re running mostly distinct services based on underlying capabilities or requirements and then doing some higher level or API integration.”

Analyst Dan Kirsch said for this reason “everything needs to start by understanding where your data and workloads are. Multicloud, in most cases, was started by developers and business units. You now need to manage everything like a single platform — except it spans to multiple environments. Nevertheless, figuring out whose responsibility it is for managing IT assets is often a problem.

“For example, who owns data lakes in terms of data quality, security, etc. Meanwhile, some of an organizations most valuable data can remained locked in enterprise and SaaS applications plus of course on-premises databases.”

At the same time, CIO Martin Davis suggests that a “fragmented situation creates complexity and requires additional management and integrations. Good enterprise architecture is a must to avoid this.”

The worries of former CIO Ken LeBlanc go beyond data issues. He says, “there is the complexity of managing and viewing utilization and associated invoicing. All of this reduces buying power leverage.” Former CIO Joanna Young says “the management of multiple vendors and related contracts remains a difficult process. This includes the fitting the often-changing needs of a portfolio of components from different vendors.”

Clearly, CIO leadership is essential. For this reason, CIO Pedro Martinez Puig says, “CIOs need to set a clear choice path, so the decisions are consistent with all organizational stakeholders. It is important to keep a dual or multi provider during negotiations, plus not rely 100% on external expertise to monitor, plan and execute the projects and ongoing business. We can outsource everything but accountability.”

Is a Service Catalog Needed to Keep Track of Applications?

CIOs are amazingly candid about the current state of knowing where things are located. CIOs, nevertheless, believe strong central control is required to knowing all the places the organization has applications and infrastructure.

McBreen claims for example, “CIO should not be surprised at an outage to find out things aren’t working. They might uncover a nuance or something that was changed and not evolved. I go down to each cloud provider. I do not track their sub service providers outside of contractually making sure every provider including sub providers prove they meet certain security, privacy, and functionality requirements. We perform yearly audits as well.”

Seidl, however, was a bit hesitant to declare a service catalog is needed. “You need a way to keep track of what you’re running, what it’s costing, if it’s being used, if it’s scaled right, and if it’s being tested, reviewed, monitored, and managed. This is more – in my opinion – than a service catalog. And even if you do responsible cloud assessments for multicloud, how many layers deep do you go? What is the service provider’s service provider? Is there that does show up in your design or dependency map?” CIOs need to have:

• High level designs
• Real architecture diagrams and documentation
• Software/code defined structures for what is deploying in IaaS
• A mature deployment pipeline and process
• Useful monitoring, tracking, reporting, and alerting

Puig asserts for these reasons, “a catalog is needed including a model SaaS/PaaS/IaaS for each cloud contract, renegotiation points, when to choose what. And this requires a quite different skills to manage vendors and catalog effectively. You need a way to keep track of what you’re running, what it’s costing you, if it’s being used, if it’s scaled right, and if it’s being tested, reviewed, monitored, and managed.”

CIO Deb Gildersleeve agrees with Seidl and Puig when she says,“it is a really useful piece of information when you are assessing systems and tech debt.” And former CIO Joanna Young suggests that “configuration and asset management apply no matter where applications or workloads are located. CIOs must know where stuff is.”

Clearly, the need for a service catalog is essential to success, but it needs to be an automated tool as opposed to just a spreadsheet. Kirsch adds,“old best practices, like service catalogs and service-oriented architecture are critical in the cloud. Lifting and shifting poor practices will just move your problems to the cloud.”

Do Cloud Aggregators Make Management Easier?

Seidl claims, “cloud aggregators and multicloud platforms can help with data management. Cloud costs, however, are another story. Each cloud platform is architected differently. To decrease spend you need to be able to optimize workloads and data for the architecture.”

Young agrees and says that “it is situational. I would look at aggregators to see if effectiveness or efficiency advantages are being achieved for customers. Either way, you must know what services you need. Don’t underestimate the vendor/contract/services management whether aggregate or not.”

Meanwhile, Seidl suggests “what I am looking forward to is portable infrastructure that can land in the most cost-effective cloud based on a smart management engine while not causing disruptions. I don’t think we’re there in clean way yet.”

However, Puig claims “If your size does not permit to dedicate internal talent to manage it, aggregators can be a safe bet. But once you reach a critical size, you’d better keep a strong cloud management expertise internally to ensure you achieve desired cost savings.”

Challenges Multicloud Creates for Data Architecture

Young asserts that “data architecture represents a different kind of complexity. In fairness a lot of organizations with all or most of the computing on premises do not have this well-organized either. Ideally, IT organizations need to get this sorted before making a move to multicloud. The key message is whatever is a mess on-premises will be a mess in multi-cloud. Clean it up before or as part of switching and moving. Cloud in and of itself is not a cleansing agent instead it’s a different business model.”

Puig adds to Young’s remarks, “compliance risks multiply if you are working in the international arena.” For this reason, Seidl says that identity integration is great, but what about the data and business logic layer.” He goes onto say that “service duplication is a real challenge in SaaS. Everybody, for example, has a workflow engine.”

Kirsch concludes by saying “getting value from data in a multicloud environment is why business are looking at data virtualization and data fabric solutions. Having a consistent data management layer is essential. With this, you can connect to data wherever it resides including enterprise apps, SaaS, etc. versus moving data.”

Making Multicloud Easier to Manage

Young believes that “pragmatic and transparent services and related tools are needed that deliver upon the promises of simplification and efficiency. This way enterprises can focus their talent on differentiated technology.” Seidl adds that “with the small handful of major incumbents, this reminds me of other segments where up and comers have built compatible interfaces to allow easy adoption. Or built an abstraction layer to slice pennies out by doing things more transparently.”

Kirsch adds from the analyst corner that he is looking for “emerging technology to help with multicloud:

• Applying AI to Ops – AIOps
• Cloud Management across multiple cloud infrastructures to give visibility into costs, security and enforce governance rules
• Data fabric to analyze data no matter where it resides. Normalizing data from each cloud vendors proprietary management tools is a challenge to achieve across clouds.

I’ve seen businesses create their own multicloud management solutions using Hadoop. The problem is they need a team just to manage the system. I have seen businesses create their own multicloud management solutions using Hadoop. The problem is that they need a team just to manage the system.”

Gildersleeve agrees and suggests, “the big areas where process and technology can make multicloud easier is enhancing overall visibility and making data more accessible. Data in a silo is not helpful, so making it accessible is critical.”

Parting Words

Without question, CIOs have entered a multicloud era regardless of whether they planned for it. This means there is a need to make it easier to operate within the multicloud. At the same time, there is a huge need for data transparency and management. And this includes transparency around data compliance. The well governed are clearly going forward going to be the winners in the multicloud.

The post Execs Talk About Managing Multicloud: Complexity, Data, Vendors appeared first on eWEEK.

After joining my new employer, I attended their Sales Boot Camp, and shared the article with my sales-training leaders. To my surprise, they agreed completely with the article and suggested that I read a new book, “The Qualified Sales Leader” by John McMahon. McMahon has been CRO at 5 public software companies.

CIOs Want What McMahon is Preaching

After reading the book, I was surprised by how closely McMahon’s ideas conformed to what CIOs told me during the #CIOChat, which was the basis for the Datamation article. Given this, I want to share here McMahon’s key ideas in comparison to what CIOs had to say.

Account Executives Must Sell Beyond Features and Functions

McMahon says that selling features and functions leads to two things:

1. Smaller deals
2. Selling lower in the organization

To be fair, this is often the dividing line between Series A and B companies, which sell on product features, and Series C and D companies, which sell on value, solution, and differentiators.

Series C and D companies win their next rounds by appealing to a higher-level buyer. From the CIO’s perspective, too many salespeople are playing a numbers game. CIOs want account executives to move beyond talking product features and function. And when account executives speak to the CIO, he or she just wants clarity, honesty, and brevity.

“I tell sales folks that they get one slide about their company in the deck,” says CIO David Seidl. “I do not need to know your founders, how you got there, etc. We are talking about a solution. We can talk more if we are interested! And one more thing, it wastes a lot of my staff members time when you do the long version of your presentation. If we go further, part of my risk management process is making sure you’re a stable company [and] that you won’t disappear on me” (emphasis added).

Effective Sellers Do their Homework

McMahon says that effective sellers do their homework. This means effective sellers:

• Act as business partners
• Align to their customers job performance measures
• Most important: speak in business terms

Salespeople would be wise to avoid too much ‘techno-babble’, as those who favor techy speech over plain business language alienate their audience. CIOs have told me that, if a rep comes in speaking the language of technology, they will automatically push the rep down in the organization. CIOs typically have a businessperson in the room, and they have been retraining their teams to speak the language of business. Be warned! If you are ‘speaking technology’, do not be shocked when an opportunity or a relationship is lost.

To avoid this problem, McMahon says that account executives need to slow down to go fast. They need to understand the customer’s pain and environment. To earn their trust, CIOs say vendors need to listen, hear their pains, and point them in the right direction with digital assets.

“I like my vendors to have a person dedicated to us,” says CIO Paige Francis. “I like them to offer complementary annual/biannual tune-ups, assessing current setup/configuration/performance against best practice. If I am paying 5, 6, or 7 figures for your solution, you should want to keep me.”

A Pain Pill Versus a Nice to Have?

When I raised VC money, there were two common questions that VCs always asked:

1. “Does this proposed company solve a real pain for a customer?” (EG, does the customer want the pain to go away in the same way that someone stranded in the desert wants water? Are you offering just a ‘nice-to-have’?)
2. “Is this proposed company building a product or a feature within someone else’s product?”

McMahon says that pain points cluster around topics like regulation, competition, security, business productivity, cost control, and reputation. CIOs want these to be expressed as business problems. With this knowledge, McMahon says account executives need to know: Why is a pain point important?

Salespeople should also be able to connect pain points and problems to corporate initiatives. Part of doing this is understanding: How does the CIO customer do things today? And what are the expectations for desired business outcomes?

To be fair, defining and quantifying a mission-critical business pain cannot be done without deliberate effort. According to McMahon, it requires questioning, listening, confirming, and more listening.

Moving from POC to Proof of Value

McMahon says vendors should not jump the gun with Proofs of Concept, which he calls a waste of time. Sellers’ POCs should be focused on the customers’ problems. This means that they cannot be effective until the discovery process is complete.

Proofs of Value require a detailed understanding of the customers’ pain points. CIOs say the goal should be to demonstrate a realistic pathway to implementation and business value. CIOs want real POVs that truly prove functionality and usability for their internal audience. For this, sales needs to help quantify the business value and the negative consequences of not doing something.

Putting on the Customer’s Shoes?

McMahon suggests that effective salespeople have several qualities. These include intelligence, persistence, heart and desire; coachability and adaptability; integrity; character; and execution experience.

Empathy is vital. Effective salespeople make themselves trusted business partners that live selflessly in the customer’s shoes. This requires account executives that are also authentic and curious, which is not surprising, as CIOs say they want greater transparency and honesty.

A long-term vision is also important. CIOs want salespeople that focus on the longer-term relationships and not just completing their quarterly quota. It is important, they say, that salespeople express a simple understanding of what is important to me and my business. For this reason, McMahon says sales is about educating and not selling.

Great Sales Organizations are Supported by Great Marketing Organizations

McMahon says it is critical that marketing helps sales identify an ideal customer. This means fleshing out the customer pains and use cases, as well as the personas owning the use cases, and the companies and industries where they dwell.

Not surprisingly, CIOs say they want content tailored to how the solution will benefit their organization. They stress that the content should not be focused on why your solution is better than a competitor’s.

“I’d like not to feel like simply visiting your website is going to get me a half dozen lead calls and emails,” says CIO David Seidl “I would like to be able to read useful materials without providing my contact information. Simply wanting information is not a cause to spam me. I would like to see clear information. What the product does, differentiating features, some real examples, and a pricing model would be nice, even if it is a broad ballpark.”

“I try not to waste my time or my staff’s time,” Seidl explains. “Fielding those who visited your site with calls and emails or not letting them see what your product does and has as differentiators creates barriers and represents a time sink.” Turns out, CIOs want great transparency and honesty in their marketing materials as well as in their salespeople.

Parting Words

In reading McMahon’s book, I was surprised to learn that the attitudes of CIOs aligned so well with what members of the #CIOChat were telling me. CIOs clearly want what McMahon is peddling.

If I were a CRO or Marketing Leader, I would clearly want to align my selling process with McMahon’s and to sell value rather than product features. The former dwells on the what; the latter translates that what into why… and conveys the true meaning of a product by connecting it to a CIO’s actual challenges. The time is now to transform the sales leaders to be CXO relevant.

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