How CIOs are learning from the COVID-19 pandemic to transform towards agile

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that you can never be too prepared for change – fast-moving, come-out-of-nowhere change that transforms the way we run our businesses, manage our people, and secure the stability of our enterprises. 

Disruptive events in business are nothing new. As leaders, we have long invested in planning and processes that enable our organizations to withstand many types of disruption, be it social upheaval, unfavorable market conditions, supply chain breakdowns, or environmental disaster.

COVID-19, however, was leagues beyond what even the most risk-aware organizations could fathom, let alone plan ahead for in a specific, actionable way. Now, emerging from the pandemic and moving forward into a work landscape that is perhaps more flexible and adaptable than ever before, the COVID-19 wake-up call must be heeded in a thoughtful, intentional manner that prioritizes digital transformation, so that organizations can be nimble and adaptive to the next major, fast-moving disruption. 

CIOs Are Leading the Digital Transformation Revolution 

Many CIOs are already in go-mode, leveraging the lessons of the pandemic to push for more agile organizations and business and technology scalability. In fact, a March 2021 SAPinsider survey reveals that 62% of executives and leaders have identified process efficiency as a top business priority for 2021. 

With the pandemic forcing business to incorporate unprecedented agility into nearly every facet of operations, it’s not surprising that many leaders now see a highly customized and difficult-to-change ERP system as a liability during times of unexpected change. One CIO who has been leading their organization’s digital transformation project for the past year described the challenges of innovating on an antiquated platform as limiting their ability to do new and innovative things with SAP – and that implementing new functionality, or doing anything new, requires significant effort and testing. Those limitations don’t lend themselves to supporting the level of innovation CIOs are looking for, driving them to build new digital platforms with SAP S/4HANA.

This CIO is certainly not alone in their push for proactive, strategic digital transformation. Right now, CIOs around the world are advocating more forcefully than ever to migrate systems to the cloud and to streamline digital operations by integrating disparate systems and data. The SAPInsider survey backs this up, noting that many CIOs are finding that their pushes toward digital transformation are meeting less resistance these days. With the pandemic proving the irrelevance of location for labor forces and technical infrastructure alike, the realization that the cloud is king has crystallized. The pandemic has ushered in a new era of accord: IT partners, and the technology and innovation they make possible, are not behind-the-scenes vendors, performing tactical functions. Instead, strategic technology partnerships are foundational to most organizations’ livelihoods.

Many leaders are taking note – and taking action. Over half of executives in the SAPinsider study identified SAP S/4HANA as their most strategic investment in the coming year – despite the fact that SAP’s deadline isn’t until 2027 – and many have already committed to the budgets (66%) and headcount (36%) required to make the transformation goal achievable. With proper planning, S/4HANA can be a game-changing break from the complex, disparate systems that built rigidity into the essential fabric of your business. Is the unsorted data you’ve inherited or accumulated serving your goals? Most likely, it’s weighing you down without pulling its weight in terms of delivering trustworthy analytics. Digital transformation on the whole, and S/4HANA more specifically, provide a golden opportunity to assess your current data landscape and develop a proactive plan that will set your organization up for increased resilience and strategic innovation.

If ever there were a moment to advocate for organizational resilience strategies, it’s today. The pandemic may be easing up in the U.S., but if the past year has taught us anything at all, it’s to expect the unexpected. Preparation and agility are not virtues we can afford to forget as the pandemic becomes a more distant memory. 

Author: Steele Arbeeny

Source: Dataversity

Leading your organization to success through Agile Data Governance

Laura Madsen wants to challenge your outdated ideas about Data Governance. “I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t use software that we used 20 years ago, but we’re still using Data Governance and Data Governance methodologies the same way we did 20 years ago.” And although she advocates for Agile, she’s not an Agile coach or a SCRUM master; rather she wants companies to consider agility in a broader sense as well. “Very briefly, when we think about Agile, essentially, we think about reducing process steps.” She paraphrases David Hussman’s belief that there is no inherent value in “process” — process exists in order to prove to other people that “we’re doing something.” To that end, most organizations create an enormous number of process steps she refers to as “flaming hoops,” showing that there was a lot of work put into activities such as status updates, but nothing that provided actual value.

Madsen is the author of Disrupting Data Governance, Chief Executive Guru at Via Gurus, and Mastermind at the Sisterhood of Technology Professionals (Sistech).

Resource Use

Historically, Data Governance has always been resource-intensive, and with Agile Data Governance in particular, she said, the most important resource is the individuals who do the work. The need for a data owner and a data steward for each domain, often with multiple stewards or owners covering the same data domain, etc., emerged as a system designed to serve data warehouses with hundreds of tables, and thousands of rows per table. “That’s a rather parochial idea in 2020, when we have petabytes of data blown through our data warehouses on any given day.”

One resource-heavy relic from the past is the standing committee, which always starts off with a lot of participation and enthusiasm, but over time people disengage and participation dwindles. Another historical shortcoming in Data Governance is the reliance on one or two individuals who hold the bulk of the institutional knowledge. With the amount of risk attached to Data Governance processes, the people who serve as the governance linchpin are under a lot of pressure to do more with less, so when they leave, the Data Governance program often collapses.

Instead, she recommends developing responsive and resilient capabilities by creating a dependency on multiple people with similar capabilities instead of one person who knows everything.

To make best use of time and resources, committees should be self-forming and project-based. Distinct functions must be created for participating resources: “And we should be laser clear about what people are doing.”

The Kitchen Sink

Still another legacy from the past is the tendency to take a “kitchen sink” approach, throwing compliance, risk, security, quality, and training all under the aegis of Data Governance, creating a lack of clarity in roles. “When you do everything, then you’re really doing nothing,” she said. Data stewards aren’t given formal roles or capabilities, and as such, they consider their governance duties as something they do on the side, “for fun.”

Madsen sees this as arising out of the very broad scope of the historical definition of Data Governance. Intersecting with so many different critical areas, Data Governance has become a catch-all. In truth, she said, instead of being wholly responsible for compliance, risk, security, protection, data usage, and quality, Data Governance lives in the small area where all of those domains overlap.

She considers this narrower focus as essential to survival in modern data environments, especially now, when there are entire departments devoted to these areas. Expecting a Data Governance person to be fully accountable for compliance, privacy, risk, security, protection, data quality, and data usage, “is a recipe for absolute disaster.” Today, she said, there is no excuse for being haphazard about what people are doing in those intersecting areas.

Four Aspects of Success

To succeed, companies must move away from the kitchen sink definition of Data Governance and focus on four aspects:

• Increased use of data
• Data Quality
• Data Management
• Data Protection

These categories will not need equal focus in every organization, and it’s expected that priorities will shift over time. Madsen showed a slide with some sample priorities that could be set with management input:

• Increased data use at 40% importance
• Quality at 25%
• Management at 25%
• Protection at 10%

From an Agile perspective, every sprint or increment can be measured against those values, creating “an enormous amount of transparency.” And although executives may not care about the specific tasks used to address those priorities, they will care that they are being tackled strategically, she said.

Increased Use of Data

If the work of Data Governance isn’t leading to greater use of data, she says, “What the heck are we doing?” Building data warehouses, creating dashboards, and delivering ad hoc analytics are only useful if they enable greater data use. All governance activity should be focused toward that end. The only way to get broad support for Data Governance is to increase the usage of the data.

Data Quality

Record counts and data profiling can show what’s in the data and whether or not the data is right, but analysis is not the same as data quality. “What we’re really driving towards here is the context of the data,” Madsen said, which leads to increased data use. The core of Data Quality Management is ensuring it has meaning, and the only way for the data to have meaning is to provide context.

Data Management

She talks specifically about the importance of lineage within the context of Data Management. Most end users only interact with their data at the front end when they’re entering something, and at the back end, when they see it on a report or a dashboard. Everything that happens in between those two points is a mystery to them, which creates anxiety or confusion about the accuracy or meaning of the end result. “Without lineage tools, without the capability of looking at and knowing exactly what happened from the source to the target, we lose our ability to support our end users.” For a long time those tools didn’t exist, but now they do, and those questions can be answered very quickly, she said.

Data Protection

Although Data Governance has a part in mitigating risk and protecting data, again, these are areas where governance should not be fully responsible. Instead, governance should be creating what Madsen calls “happy alliances” with those departments directly responsible for data protection, and focusing on facilitating increased data usage. This is often reversed in many organizations: If data is locked down to the point where it’s considered “completely safe,” risk may be under control, but no one is using it.

Moving into the Future/Sweeping Away the Past—Fixing Committees

Committees, she said, are not responsive, they’re not Agile and they don’t contribute to a resilient Data Governance structure. Theoretically, they do create a communication path of sorts, because a standing meeting at least assumes participants are paying attention for a specific period of time — until they lose interest. 

What works better, she said, is self-forming Scrum teams or self-forming Agile teams that are on-demand or project-based, using a “backlog” (list of tasks) that becomes the working document for completing the company’s project list. “You come together, you work on the thing, and then you go your own separate ways.”

A sample self-forming Agile team might consist of a CDO, serving as a product owner, someone from

security, privacy, and IT, which creates regulatory and IT standards, and executives from business departments like finance, sales, or operations, who might also serve assubject matter experts.

The backlog serves as a centralized document where data issues are tracked, responsibilities are outlined and milestones on the way to completion are logged.

Traditional concepts like data ownership and data stewardship still have a part, but they are in service to a project or initiative rather than a fixed area or department. When the project is completed, the team disbands.

Named Data Stewards

Named data stewards serve as a resource for a particular project or area, such as the customer data domain. Named data stewards or owners for each area of responsibility should be published so that anyone can quickly and easily find the data steward for any particular domain.

On Demand Data Stewards

“Everyone’s a data steward, just like everyone’s in charge of sales.” Anyone who has a question about the data and wants to know more is, in that moment, a data steward, she said, whether they are trained for it or not. By taking ownership of a question and being willing to find an answer, the “on-demand” steward gains the ability to help the organization do a better job in that particular moment. “Ownership is so integral to successful deployment of any data function in an organization.”

Ensuring Success

To sum up, Madsen recommends starting a backlog, using it to consistently document exit criteria (your definition of “done”), and committing to actively managing it. Start thinking like a Data Governance product owner, keep communications open among intersecting areas — those “happy alliances” — and keep the ultimate goal of increased data use in mind. Focus on progress over perfection, she says, “And then just keep swimming, just keep swimming …”

Author: Amber Lee Dennis

Source: Dataversity

Recommendations for transitioning your business to a hybrid cloud environment successfully

Why move to the cloud, and if you do, how can you do so smoothly? BMC's Bill Talbot, VP for solutions marketing, shares some suggestions for making a successful transition.

From your perspective, what's driving enterprises to the cloud?

Bill Talbot: It's simple: efficiency. Enterprise customers are increasingly moving to the cloud because they want to be more agile, accelerate innovation faster, and most importantly to make operations run smoother in general. The cloud has reached the point where it's no longer an emerging category. Instead, it's now part of the mainstream. A recent report by 451 Research found a majority (90%) of organizations surveyed are using a cloud service of some sort. Pointing even further to growing adoption and cloud maturity, 69% of enterprises surveyed planned to work in multicloud and hybrid IT environments this year.

If the cloud is so beneficial, why should an enterprise not move everything to the cloud? Why should a CIO consider a hybrid environment instead?

When it comes to adopting the cloud, organizations shouldn't do a complete overhaul and move everything to the cloud. Instead, they should carefully consider their goals and choose specific areas where transitioning to the cloud makes business or technical sense. A hybrid cloud environment enables organizations to balance control and flexibility, meaning enterprises have the option to choose the IT resources they purchase based on what they think is best for the business.

For example, CIOs should consider the demand or transaction load an application requires. If demand is high and causes big, periodic spikes that require additional resources for short periods, developing a cloud app with auto-scaling services could be the best strategy. On the other hand, if the load is relatively consistent, it may be more cost effective to run it on on-premises resources and reserve operational budget for other needs.

What are the most important considerations for any CIO thinking about moving their company to a hybrid cloud environment?

Top considerations are speed to innovation, cost, security, and scale. They must influence the decision to invest in a cloud-based service. CIOs evaluating a potential transition to the cloud must look at it two ways: first, as a business decision and, second, as a technology decision.

Before committing to the technology, CIOs need to clearly outline their business objectives, implementation plan, timeline, and costs to ensure it's the best option. Beyond this, CIOs need to consider regulatory and compliance guidelines and ensure the cloud services adhere to these requirements. Security is a growing challenge for CIOs as they transfer applications and infrastructure to the public cloud. It's important to understand that as a cloud buyer, you're responsible for securing the cloud services you purchase.

How does the cloud affect speed to innovation?

Cloud service providers offer resources and technology services that can take significant time to build or acquire in the data center, such as machine learning algorithms. Cloud services are also more easily accessible, supporting and accelerating agile development processes and digital services to keep businesses innovating at a faster rate. In this time of mass digital transformation, organizations find themselves challenged with growing requests that IT operations simply cannot keep up with in a sustainable, long-term way. With seemingly on-demand cloud services now available, organizations are empowered to accelerate innovation and offer new products and services to customers faster.

Costs are often touted as a big advantage for moving to the cloud, everything from lower upfront capital expenditures to staff savings. What else should a CIO think about when it comes to costs?

CIOs now have a choice between spending operational or capital budget and need to consider which is best for their business. Managing operational budgets for cloud services requires new tools and discipline. CIOs should embrace predictive analytics and machine learning tools to forecast and manage their cloud spend and budget. By embracing these technologies, cloud ops teams can anticipate what typical cloud usage and spend will be, and even get alerted if they're tracking beyond their allocated resources.

CIOs can also leverage these tools to rank cloud projects based on cost, from highest to lowest, which helps them easily identify resources that should be consolidated, or possibly eliminated, to keep costs on target.

How is scale relevant here? Isn't scale only an important consideration for the largest enterprises?

Scale is important to any enterprise and on multiple levels. At the macro level, there is the scale or large number and variety of infrastructure resources needed to support the many business services of a large enterprise. On a more micro level, scale also applies to the volume of data collected and processed or analyzed, as well as to growing or erratic changes in demand for a specific application or business service.

Cloud services can address all of these scenarios. Scalability is also pushing organizations to acquire the right cloud management tools to predict changes that require scale and to understand the costs associated.

Author: James E. Powell

Source: TDWI

What does Agile mean to your organization?

Today it is almost 'bon ton' to talk about being 'Agile'. It is as if the word is written on billboards along every road you take: if you want innovations, be Agile; if you want to understand your clients, be Agile; if you want to manage your personnel, you seem to have no other choice.

And the market responds. Your bank is introducing a new Agile team to react to clients’ demands. A software company you approach to make a webshop proudly describes its Agile processes.

In reality, these are different Agiles and you may be prepared that businesses in different industries have quite different approaches.

Agile organization

In a broad sense, the one that you usually come across when speaking about the organization of a business as a whole, 'Agile' refers to the type of organization that incorporates small independent teams of people who have many or most of the skills the team needs to carry out its mission. Such teams are usually focused and dedicated groups of specialists created to work on a specific project that typically requires communication with customers and prompt decisions.

What characterizes such groups?

• Small size: Fun fact: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos contends that a team is too big when it needs more than two pizza pies for lunch.
• Multidisciplinarity: Rather than having technology-based departments, required experts are embedded into a group of versatile specialists capable of performing the full cycle of work on a project on their own.
• Empowerment:Critically, Agile teams should have the authority and the resources to carry out projects without first seeking corporate approval and internal support, such as funding, planning and human resources.
• Accountability:despite greater independence allowing teams to make day-to-day, small stakes decisions, the decisions that could have significant consequences or that can only be made effectively with input and sign-off from multiple parts of the organization should be escalated to higher management.
• Individual significance: in small multidisciplinary teams, everyone matters, and selecting strong performers becomes an utmost priority.
• Clear goals: Agile teams should have the full picture of the project, clear vision of its objectives, stages and tasks, and the available resources.

Most importantly, independent teams should be created in meaningful areas, such as processes and capabilities that directly affect the customer experience where their multidisciplinary perspective, quick reaction and first-hand communication with clients can add the maximum value.

Agile methodology

When you hear about Agile processes in IT, you should think of a narrower sense of this word related to Agile methodology which is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. In its essence, the Agile approach suggests that high-quality, adaptive software can be developed by small teams using the principles of continuous design improvement and testing based on rapid feedback and change.

Hence, Agile processes encourage frequent inspection and adaptation; they promote teamwork, self-organization and accountability, as well as engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.

Agile development refers to any development process that is aligned with the concepts of the Agile Manifesto, developed by fourteen leading figures in the software industry and listing the key values and principles of Agile development as opposed to traditional approaches.

The Agile approach comes in different flavors, or frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, XP, or Extreme Programming, and Lean to name the most popular.

Scrum is a management framework used to organize work into small, manageable pieces that can be completed within a prescribed time period, called a sprint (2-4 weeks). In planning, organization and process management Scrum relies on at least three prescribed roles: a product owner (responsible for initial planning, prioritizing, and communication with the rest of the company), a Scrum master (responsible for overseeing the process during each sprint), and team members. Another common tool is the Scrum board :  a visual representation of the workflow, broken down into manageable chunks called 'stories', with each story moved along the board from the 'backlog' (the to-do list), into work-in-progress (WIP), and on to completion. Probably, if you have been talking about Agile, you have heard the word Scrum: it has grown in popularity tremendously because it is rather simple and has a proven productivity boost.

Kanban is used to manage the project’s creation with an emphasis on the continued delivery and not overburdening the development team. Unlike Scrum, it does not have fixed periods of time to deliver results, but it rather relies on continuous work flowing from task to task. The method promotes continued collaboration by the client and team and encourages ongoing learning and improvements to provide the best possible workflow. Its main principles include visualization of work, limiting the number of simultaneous tasks and enhancing the workflow.

Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the most popular and at the same time controversial Agile methodologies. In its core, it is a highly disciplined method of continually delivering high-quality software faster. The customer is actively involved with the team in continued planning, testing and rapid feedback to deliver working software frequently. The software is supposed to be delivered in intervals of one to three weeks.

Lean software development is a value-based iteration methodology originally developed by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. It focuses on giving the customer an efficient 'value stream' mechanism that delivers the value to the project. By choosing only the features that have real value for the system, prioritizing and delivering them in small batches eliminates waste. Instead, the lean methodology emphasizes on speed and efficiency; relying on rapid, reliable feedback between customers and programmers. This methodology focuses on the efficiencies of its team’s resources, ensuring everyone is as productive as possible.

If you know how to use it, the Agile approach can deliver results faster and in a more controlled way. This article is only the beginning of a long journey, but it gives some understanding of what to expect from a software developing company that boasts about their agility, know how it differs from agility in banks and who the hell a Scrum master is.

Source: Datafloq

Why agile IT will help organizations to overcome challenges

Chief information officers’ focus should move to promoting a culture of agile thinking within IT and putting the priority on product-oriented projects.

Speed and agility are key components of two central business challenges organizations face today: change and innovation.

Meanwhile, there is an intensifying need to deliver continuous value, which has led to more and more pressure for overhauling IT for speed and agility. By responding quickly to these changes, chief information officers will be better able to adapt, with technology serving as a core element of the adaptation process.

Ultimately, streamlining has the potential to improve employee performance by removing barriers and allowing teams to self-serve both within and outside IT with focus on outcomes. This means CIOs need to embrace Agile methodologies and bring everyone on board as a first step, which requires upscaling IT teams and engaging the business.

Once the formal and informal mechanisms supporting those Agile practices are deployed, CIOs can start thinking about additional elements to streamline the delivery process.

Deploying Agile Methodologies

“Today, traditional IT project delivery is not fit for purpose,” says Antonio Vázquez, CIO at Bizagi. “These delivery models are far from new, Agile methodologies deployed through product-based delivery models.”

He explains that these new delivery models are based on the minimum viable product (MVP) concept, which changes the whole concept of software development and relationships with business stakeholders.

Vázquez adds that business requirements are gathered in a completely different way, initial deliverables are soon released, and the final product can be improved overtime. “That brings massive speed and agility to IT and the business through smaller functional pieces, faster testing and correction cycles and shorter deployments, among other benefits,” he says.

For example, the cloud is one of the key enablers for fast and scalable deployments as is the use of low-code platforms and citizen developer programs which can improve communication with stakeholders and delivery speed.

Moreover, automation can replace manual processes and free up resources, the use of DevSecOps allows infrastructure and security to be included in the product delivery by design, and open innovation platforms can facilitate the innovation process.

Pressure to Streamline Building Externally, and Internally

“Streamlining IT for agility is critical to business, and there’s not only external pressure to do so, but also internal pressure,” says Stanley Huang, co-founder and CTO at Moxo. “This is because streamlining IT plays a strategic role in the overall business operations from C-level executives to every employee's daily efforts.”

He says that the streamlining of business processes is the best and most efficient way to reflect business status and driving power for each departmental planning.

From an external standpoint, there is pressure to streamline IT because it also impacts the customer experience. “A connected and fully aligned cross-team interface is essential to serve the customer and make a consistent end user experience,” he adds.

For business opportunities pertaining to task allocation and tracking, streamlining IT can help align internal departments into one overall business picture and enable employees to perform their jobs at a higher level.

“When the IT system owns the source of data for business opportunities and every team’s involvement, cross team alignment can be streamlined and made without back-and-forth communications,” Huang says. “This creates full transparency on progress, overdue items, customer status, etc. so that teams can adjust resources and plan in real time.”

Steve Watt, CIO at Hyland, says that for a CIO to streamline IT they first need to ensure their business stakeholders are up to speed on how their execution in that framework will function and where they will fit into that process.

“This way, CIOs can have more accurate budget planning to have a full understanding of the costs involved in the situation and avoid wasted time and effort ensuring alignment with leaders,” he says.

He explains that in the past, IT was often seen as the beginning and the end of digital initiatives, responsible for the selection, implementation, and ongoing support of all technology platforms. “That won’t scale today and stifles business; increasingly, a large population of employees that are technologists are embedded in the business,” he says.

In turn, shifting to product-based delivery will help guide and coach the business in their use of technology and empower them to be able to drive their own processes without IT being the bottleneck to the speed at which they need to do business.

Multiple Challenges to Streamlining IT

From Huang’s perspective, there are two main challenges experienced as they relate to streamlining IT for agility. One is understanding every aspect of the business lifecycle in-depth from analyzing patterns to identifying bottlenecks. “From there, it’s necessary to choose a vendor and services, which can be overwhelming due to the vast number of technologies available in the market,” Huang says.

Another challenge is defining the business’s own IT strategy based on target goals. “It’s necessary to be creative and foresee how your business can be digitized and transformed, as well as planning ahead accordingly and understanding the impact of streamlining IT operations on your business,” he says.

Vázquez notes that additional challenges include the funding of traditional projects, which needs to be adapted to Agile delivery, while timing, schedules and resource allocation need to be adjusted and communicated across the organization

“The concept of success is different in a traditional project and an Agile project with an MVP,” he says. “Project teams need to be resized and upscaled, and priorities must be addressed in a different way, as well as business requirements mapping, which requires a large amount of transparency.”

Vázquez called these all “deep changes” that must be addressed, refined, communicated, and rewarded across the organization.

Trying New Vendors, Maintaining Engagement Levels

Huang advises that a deep analysis of the business’ current situation from multiple perspectives, including how streamlining IT efforts will impact the service model, team structure, execution capabilities and customer retention situation.

From there, it’s critical to analyze which strategy for streamlining IT is best suited for business needs.

“Be open to some new vendors, which may just recently be available in the market,” he suggests.

He notes that the past several years has been the most active time for IT vendors to evolve, and many revolutionary solutions are just recently available to fit the latest business environment. “Being open to newer players in the space can present your business the chance to find some new ideas from them,” he says.

Hyland’s Watt notes that it's important that all parties are on the same page of what needs to be done to create a better process for everyone.

In product-aligned, Agile teams in IT, the product manager or owner roles can and should come from knowledgeable SMEs in the business units that align and support the “product” of each team. He says this level of engagement might come naturally to some departments within and organization and for others they may need extra coaching.

“Ensuring this level of engagement provides clarity to the business and the product team on what is most important,” he says. “This way, IT teams can focus their efforts on high-value outcomes and waste less time prioritizing or rationalizing the work that needs to be done.”

Author: Nathan Eddy

Source: InformationWeek