Now that we’re well into 2021—and almost to 2022—we’re learning that businesses that thrived during the upheaval of the pandemic did so because they adapted their business processes, or accelerated improvements that were already underway. When I sat in on a CIO roundtable with tech leaders across IT, education, logistics, and the public sector, we discussed IT reinvention and the way it’s changing the role of IT.

First, I define reinvention as an organization shifting responsibilities from the traditional cost and complexity management to those capabilities that address the emerging needs of a business, ultimately enabling every company to become a tech-driven company while simultaneously running the business.

There is also a dual mandate to support both traditional product lines and new digital business units, the formalization of which of varies by industry sector. This has implications on the evolving role of the chief information officer (CIO) and the IT organization to drive the digital mandate or cede that role to a chief digital officer (CDO), which can also vary by organization. The journey is different for everyone. Here are some of the key takeaways from our discussion.

Leading new technology adoption

A global networking CIO is leading her company’s reinvention with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings “to become a different kind of operating company” and “customer experience organization.” She explained that she sometimes faces challenges moving the business off the status quo and asks whether leaders are being thoughtful about their business models, “not only in our products but across the business to solve the business challenges.”

“Once something is stable and people have moved on, it’s very hard to let them get them to let go of it and that keeps you bound in a certain set of resources which typically are not the resources you need for the future. It’s often difficult to change that mindset,” she adds.

Another roundtable member is CIO of a cross-threaded business model of U.S. geriatric practices and restaurants that span millions of square feet of real estate. He sees his team’s model as an “intersection between design thinking, lean agile, and visual collaboration…to make sure we understand what problem we’re trying to solve.” He goes on to explain that, “The how should be consistent and the what should always change.”

The CIO of a U.S.-based mining processing and logistics company said his company had been reinventing before the pandemic, but the pandemic shifted the timing and the prioritization of some projects. “I think the biggest thing for us…from an IT perspective [is] a change in mindset and starting to think more like products, as opposed to projects, and that’s really been good for us,” he shared. The company has also worked differently with its end customers, which include truck drivers who are always mobile, and a nationwide supply chain, to get app releases in their hands as quickly as possible.

Serving a remote workforce and community

The IT leader of large U.S. public library system serves 100,000 employees in 34 departments and millions of constituents across a county. The library dispatched staff home to work remotely with tablets and laptops, leveraging Office 365 and undertaking a county-wide risk management framework. “We were able to push all of our processes and operations basically from the scheduler and we’re remotely working pretty effectively,” she says. “I think we have to still continue to think outside the box when we’re pushing a technology to drive where we’re going and then allow the flexibility of it to create a roadmap.”

Capitalizing on success

The CIO of a U.S.-based private university system says reinvention is innately part of its strategy, and that technology itself is essential to literacy in the same way reading and writing are. “We are blurring the lines between CIO and approvals. We work together [and] partner [to] create degree programs and minors and those are initiated by IT. That’s one example of how we are shifting the strategy,” he explained. The organization is also incubating its IT work so it owns its intellectual property, folding customer centricity into its reinvention, and in the process more than tripled its Net Promoter Score.

According to the CIO of an engineering, construction, business consulting, and operational services firm, the pandemic presented an opportunity for organizations that were already delivering superior service to amplify what they do, position it as a potential revenue source, and “lift their game and really become part of the business rather than just the support organization.”

“Any company is going to have applications to the hundreds, and possibly, thousands. So, how do you take these solutions that you developed internally and try to sell [them]? There is a great opportunity here to monetize these services,” he shared.

Moving beyond device management

The CIO of a community college in the American Midwest manages device deployments across his campuses and so much more. “When you start talking about the strategic use of technology, we want to talk about processes and business functions, which I don’t think we talk about enough as technologists,” he explains.

“We really need to be paying much more attention to the process, the function…the business case that we are trying to either innovate or change. What we’re struggling with in terms of reinvention is the sort of tug of war between computing end user devices and cloud, which is, by nature, sort of very tactical. On the one hand, I need IT to support my iPads. On the other hand, I also need IT to automate my entire student recruiting admissions registration systems.”

Another CIO of a neighboring technical college threw out the formal strategic plan a few years ago and went for an IT brand statement instead—reinvent, rethink, and repurpose processes and technology so people can have content anywhere at any time on any device. “It’s not hard for my staff to remember. Everything we do touches that [statement] or we don’t do it. We’re in education, so we’re about enrollment, retention, and completion…and that’s what we work towards,” he says.

He adds that while many departments or divisions see IT as just a service provider for their devices, he wants them to look beyond that, and the pandemic created that opportunity. “It’s about people, processes, and technology. They’ve all got to work in harmony together,” he says.

Speed with purpose

Two of the group also addressed the issue of speed versus quality, something the technical college CIO refers to as “speed with purpose.” “It’s like a big puzzle, and you need to make sure that the pieces fit and they fit right,” explains the engineering, construction, and consulting firm CIO. “I don’t want to sacrifice speed if it’s not properly glued together because, yes, you may get a solution out of the door…but you’re going to spend tons of time trying to patch it and keep it working, which to me, that’s money, that’s time, and most importantly, that’s sometimes a bad user experience.”

While the roundtable represented different industry sectors and overarching business mandates, many of the underlying threads are common. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and it’s valuable for service providers to engage with customers across industries and sectors to listen to their concerns and goals, and tailor solutions accordingly, especially as the traditional notion of IT expands across the entire organization.

Originally published on CIO.

As companies continue to pivot and adapt in response to the pandemic, more of them have turned toward automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML)—the trifecta behind intelligent automation—to help them streamline their business processes and better prepare for future “what if” scenarios.

In its Automating with Intelligence study, Deloitte saw a significant uptick in the adoption of intelligent automation in 2020, with 73 percent starting their intelligent automation journey—a 15 percent increase over 2019. Of those, 37 percent are piloting (1–10 automations), 23 percent are implementing (11–50 automations), and 13 percent are scaling (51+ automations).

According to the study, companies deploying new intelligent automation initiatives expect a 15 percent revenue increase in the targeted areas and a 24 percent average cost reduction over the next three years. The number of organizations deploying at scale nearly doubled, and Deloitte expects a bigger return on investment versus the 2019 study. Among the companies surveyed, 38 percent have mature process definitions, standards, and management in place, and 37 percent have appropriate standards controlled by an intelligent automation center of excellence.

And Accenture found in its Fast Track to Future-Ready Performance report that the small-but-mighty seven percent of its respondents who have already evolved from predictive to future-ready technology like intelligent automation have boosted profitability 5.8 percentage points and achieved efficiency gains of 18.8 percent. On average, they were 2.8 times more profitable and 1.7 times more efficient than those at other levels.

The new wave of automation

In the race for digital transformation, and to keep pace with rapidly evolving market and competitive pressures, it’s no longer enough to simply automate certain functions. The latest automation technologies include a degree of cognition, analysis, and learning that can benefit the entire business.

Intelligent automation characterizes the whole journey from basic automation—automating actions with the least potential business impact—to fully autonomous, incorporating the power of AI and applying a set of methods and algorithms from which, with the right set of data, it can learn and adapt. While AI for operations (AIOps) tells you something happened and gives you a higher order, insights, and analysis, intelligent automation takes it a step further and explores what you can do as a result, with automated actions that are:

• Predictive—see failure coming
• Preventive—stop it from happening
• Prescriptive—tell you how to fix

Human intervention based on risk and other business-impacting scenarios can be interwoven with automation to approve actions when necessary, and it’s still an integral part of how, when, and where automation is implemented. An IDC Survey Spotlight, “Enhancing IT Operations with Automation Is a Priority in 2021,” noted that there’s still a significant need for upskilling to effectively leverage all that automation has to offer, as 20.1 percent of organizations surveyed say they don’t have the human expertise required to use automation effectively at enterprise-scale.

And that expertise can be the tipping point between success or failure. IDC estimates that through 2023, many IT automation initiatives will be delayed or will fail due to, “an underinvestment in creating IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools/skills.”

Automation and the Autonomous Digital Enterprise

Intelligent automation factors heavily into the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE), a future-state framework that envisions automated processes spanning every business function. Automation Everywhere is one of its tenets, guided by ML and informed by advanced analytics.

By using the power of AI and applying methods and algorithms that can learn and adapt from the right set of data, intelligent automation comes to life in integrated IT operations management (ITOM) and IT service management (ITSM) environments, as well as the emerging AI service management (AISM).

Previous efforts to automate piecemeal over time have increased complexity instead of enabling agility and innovation across the business. That complexity is likely to increase as more hybrid/multi-cloud workloads; Internet of Things (IoT)- and edge-created data; process automation; and decentralized application development are introduced.

Organizations will need to adopt intelligent automation and advanced enterprise automation and workload management solutions to stay ahead of digitally-enabled competitors and rising customer expectations. Intelligent service management solutions are a fast, accurate, and cost-effective way to do that.

Putting intelligent automation into practice in traditional, cloud-based, and hybrid enterprise service management solutions helps ensure real-time service availability and performance for internal and external customers, promotes problem-solving, and reduces redundancy, allowing employees to refocus their efforts on value-added tasks. Intelligent automation can also detect and remediate security vulnerabilities and compliance issues before they impact the business, saving costs, time, and manual intervention, at scale, while helping companies invest their budgets wisely on smarter solutions.

By applying a judicious blend of intelligent automation across development, operations, and business users—either fully automated or with a deliberate human intervention—organizations can achieve productivity gains, improve efficiency, and unlock new levels of innovation and business agility as they move toward becoming an ADE.

Originally published on CIO.

Over the last extraordinary year and a half, employment has been a hot topic—both for the rise in global unemployment and, for those fortunate enough to remain employed, the overhaul in how and where people work. For that latter group, and for people slowly returning to the workforce, matters of the employee experience (EX) are moving front of mind.

EX covers the gamut of the entire employee journey, from hiring to onboarding to being an active employee to departing the workplace. And more employers are starting to recognize and appreciate that the whole experience matters. It’s just one more way that organizations are evolving to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) and deliver a Transcendent Customer Experience not just to external customers, but employees, too.

According to isolved’s Transforming Employee Experience: A SWOT Analysis of 500 Human Resources Departments, 92 percent of HR leaders said that the employee experience is a top priority for them in 2021. Microsoft is betting big on EX, announcing the Viva platform to capitalize on what it calls a $300 billion market of disconnected and underutilized “services, infrastructure, and hundreds of tools.” Viva will lean into that gap with a solution that includes opportunities to collaborate, leverage actionable insights, pursue professional development, and tap into a crowdsourced knowledge library.

Upskilling

Once workers are fully employed and busy with their daily tasks, taking the time to learn new things is a luxury many can’t afford, but keeping existing skills sharp—and learning new ones—will help ensure they remain relevant in an ADE. It’s also good for business. In the World Economic Forum and PwC’s Upskilling for Shared Prosperity report, they point to the net benefits yielded from upskilling, including the potential to boost global GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030 if skills gaps are closed by 2028.

Future roles will evolve to require more soft skills such as creativity, innovation, and empathy, which are complementary to automation—a key component of an ADE. By automating repetitive and mundane manual tasks, employees will have more time to focus on higher-value learning and work. The study estimates that upskilling could create 5.3 million net new jobs by 2030, many of which will also support an organization’s ability to adopt new technologies.

Managing the day to day

Keeping employees engaged, and recognizing their talent and dedication, is integral to retaining them. Gallup research found that the number one reason people change jobs is for career growth opportunities, indicating that they’re not being considered for internal opportunities to the degree that they should, and only two in ten employees say that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Gallup advises considering employees as consumers of the workplace. If you wrap your head around that, the basics are clear—you want them to be happy with their experience; you want them to return every day; and you recognize that their satisfaction is integral to the success of your business. To that end, tools are now available to help build that engagement throughout the employee journey, just like you would for a customer journey.

Employee surveys and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) help leaders keep a finger on the pulse of their employee satisfaction while internal communities open the lines of communications across matrixed organizations, empower employee recognition, and create opportunities for employees to feel included and part of the larger company. Incentivizing hiring through employee referrals is also a great way to build brand awareness, recognition, and equity in your business.

The new models of working

Before 2020, remote working was still a relatively niche activity, relegated to few roles and even fewer companies. Since the pandemic began, remote working has hit its stride (whether voluntarily or forced) for a significant portion of the workforce, so much so that big tech companies that once thrived on enticing employees into office complexes that were a mix of theme parks and collaborative workspaces have now recognized and accepted that their employees can work just fine sight unseen. Those same companies are also extending their remote work options through 2021 and beyond. Salesforce made news when it announced that the vast majority of its employees can work wherever, whenever, and however they choose—forever.

Sending employees home to keep business moving happened overnight, but the acclimation took some time, dependent on how far along companies were in their digital transformation. From outfitting staff with the right hardware and software to employees figuring out connectivity at home—and managing household and family commitments in tandem—there were growing pains to be overcome. We’re almost two years into that routine, and employers have expanded the ways they can help ensure a positive EX.

Considerations now don’t just include whether the right tech is in the hands of employees—that’s of course the primary concern—but they’re also recognizing the importance of overall employee wellness, through outreach with mental health resources, flexible scheduling for workers juggling family priorities and their day jobs, and retraining leaders in how to manage remote teams. In isolved’s aforementioned study, almost a third of the HR leaders surveyed said the remote work environment was a key determinant pushing EX to the top of their priority list.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

Another big change has been the recognition that there’s still much work to be done around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). And an organization’s DEI initiatives are increasingly factoring into where and how people work. BetterUp’s survey, The value of belonging at work: New frontiers for inclusion, says that employees who feel like they belong are 167 percent more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work. The report also cites concrete business benefits to fostering an inclusive EX in the workplace. According to its benchmarks, if all workers at a 10,000-employee company felt a strong sense of belonging, it would:

• Save $10 million annually in turnover costs
• Yield a productivity gain of nearly $2.5 million per year from over 2,800 fewer sick days

Ensuring a Transcendent Customer Experience for employees is just as important as ensuring that external customers are satisfied. Happy employees deliver better experiences to customers and better business outcomes. It’s a cycle worth perpetuating, and integral to helping your business on its journey to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Originally published on CIO.

We’re living in a time when data is generated in enormous numbers—by us, our devices, and the networks that transport it. Think of everyday interactions. Checked your e-mail? Data. Entered your PIN somewhere? Data. Drove your networked car somewhere? Data. Every revolution of a wind turbine? Data. Every phone call through a cell tower? Data. Then flip it to the business side—every time one of those actions was performed, a data center somewhere was collecting, collating, analyzing, and generating insights from it.

According to The 2020 Data Attack Surface Report from Arcserve, total global data storage is expected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025—with half of it stored in the cloud. And the number of devices in play is also massive, with the estimated 31 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices currently in use expected to grow to 75 billion by that same year. The report also suggests that by the end of this decade, 7.5 billion people, or 90 percent of the world’s population over six years old, will be online and generating data.

It’s a data-driven world, and as such, the Data-Driven Business is sure to follow. That’s one of the tenets of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, where manual effort is minimized to capitalize on human creativity, skills, and intellect across the enterprise and businesses learn to continuously examine customer and partner relationships to intelligently create new value.

With data such an integral part of the business—and a primary business driver—it’s vitally important to get a handle on and yield value from it now so we’re ready five and ten years out when it increases exponentially. So, how do we do that? What if we could apply agile engineering and DevOps best practices to the field of data management and rapidly turn new insights into actionable deliverables? We can with data operations (DataOps).

The current problem

In the present data arena, data and analytics transformation, whether it’s the older, traditional, siloed data or the more the advanced artificial intelligence-based analytics, is that it hasn’t delivered on its promised value. There can be a number of reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons is that the insights generated by the data are not translated quickly enough. It takes so long to process and analyze it that when the insights are finally in hand, it’s often too late to act upon them.

Speed things up with DataOps

DataOps can help change that—streamlining processes so that data moves along the pipeline much more quickly, continuously yielding actionable insights and demonstrable value to the business. As more companies recognize that they are in fact a data-driven business, they must also realize they need to change their current, disconnected data processes to leverage it. By implementing DataOps processes and infrastructures, and creating teams that include dedicated data engineers and data scientists, organizations will not only be able to yield insights that drive current and future decision making in near real-time; they’ll also be better prepared to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Originally published on CIO.

Have you heard about BMC’s perspective on the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, and, if so, have you started to think about how your organization can reach this vision? With the current economic climate forcing change on virtually all of us, perhaps you’ve recognized parts of your business that are prime for consideration in terms of their ability to deliver a transcendent customer experience or monetize value from data as an asset.

While all the technology tenets of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise are key to successfully navigating ongoing social, technological, and market changes, Enterprise DevOps has the ability to keep your organization ahead of competitors in terms of pure operational speed and efficiency—opening the door to innovation. With BMC’s acquisition of BMC AMI DevX, it’s a great time to talk about how the principles of software DevOps, with their focus on autonomy and agility, can make a huge impact across every facet of your business. And why making the mainframe a part of your overall development strategy is critical in making Enterprise DevOps successful.

What is Enterprise DevOps?

While the term Enterprise DevOps has mutated to embody a rather diverse set of definitions across technology and business environments, two common definitions have emerged:

1. The ability to run agile teams that scale across the entire business and technology portfolio of an enterprise. This definition applies the principles of Agile and software DevOps process models, with an automation mindset. It allows (mainly digital) products and processes to optimize their velocity, consistency, and efficiency—and respond rapidly to change (e.g., market needs).
2. The extension of DevOps principles to all related processes touching and surrounding the DevOps pipeline. This model pushes the principles of agile development of software DevOps (e.g., “DevOps”) to the surrounding processes (e.g., release planning, change management, product operations). It optimizes the objectives of the core software DevOps pipeline (i.e., rapid and continuous delivery of software applications and services).

From an Autonomous Digital Enterprise perspective, we’re strictly talking about the second definition and how organizations address the challenges to realize this holistic objective.

Why DevOps and the Mainframe?

Organizations that run a mainframe are well aware of its importance to conducting business at scale. BMC’s mainframe software runs in nine of the top 10 global financial institutions and nine of the top 10 U.S. financial institutions. Most of the financial and flight booking transactions you run likely are processed by a mainframe.

If your business runs a mainframe, then it must be treated like your cloud or distributed systems and made a part of your DevOps processes. Mainframe modernization efforts have made it easier to work with mainframe-based systems and enable non-COBOL programmers to still interface with mainframe systems and the data they contain.

Not including the mainframe in the DevOps process will slow development efforts and impede your ability to quickly and efficiently deliver new features and services to your customers.

Why BMC and Compuware?

As my colleague John McKenny observes, the addition of BMC AMI DevX marries the self-analyzing, self-healing, and self-optimizing power of the BMC AMI suite of products – increasing mainframe availability, efficiency, and security – with the Compuware Topaz suite, to fully empower the next generation of developers to build, analyze, test, deploy, and manage apps and services across the platform at scale – continuing to modernize the mainframe as a viable platform for development.

For those of you that know the value of the mainframe for your organization, now is the perfect time to make sure it’s part of your Enterprise DevOps effort. The payoff could be immense.

‘Tis the season for predictions for the new year ahead. As we get ready to flip the calendar to 2020, I sat down with BMC CMO Saar Shwartz to chat about what’s to come in enterprise technology in the new year.

Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation:

Saar: Let’s start with edge computing and IoT: What do they mean for enterprise customers?

Ram: I believe strongly in the convergence of IT and [operational technology] data. It opens up a whole realm of possibilities in terms of what you can do with the data. Suddenly you have a massive explosion in the data that enterprises have access to and the technology to be able to do something with it. What is important here is that we need to realize that this is not going to be a one-stop shop in terms of solutions that are provided. It’s rather going to be on the basis of an ecosystem of really integrated solutions that can harness this data and look at this data in meaningful ways, translate this information into insights, and those insights then translate into actions that you can take to optimize the use of your IoT assets.

Saar: How would IT practitioners take advantage of that and do it in ways that are different than what we’ve seen in the past?

Ram: Let me talk about this in terms of the convergence of operations management, service management, and the natural adjacent seas with the security and all of these things. What you want to do is at a minimum, you need to be able to look at this information and be able to kind of flag when an IoT asset fails, much like we do today in the traditional monitoring world where we can basically say, “Hey, this IT asset/service has failed.” That’s the notion of traditional monitoring, which says, “What has failed?” Beyond that what you need to be able to do is – there’s an industry buzzword now that’s being used called observability, which is about it’s not just what has failed, it’s about why it has failed. That is more the insights that are available as to the root cause, and additional insights in terms of what the heck happened to cause this failure? But there is a notion, beyond that also, that really interests me and that’s the heart of what we aspire to do. That is the notion called actionability, which is beyond what failed and why it failed. The notion of actionability leads us to, “What can I do about it,” either when it happens, or even more importantly, by way of these advanced insights that I can get ahead of time. What preemptive action can I take to prevent this failure? And, what can I do to remediate? That’s really at the heart of it.

Saar: And I like the term actionability because it’s not just remediation. The remediation could be automatic remediation, could be one sort of action that’s taken, but in some cases, we will need to route the issue elsewhere or get humans involved.

Ram: That’s why that service management puzzle piece comes into play. With that kind of integrated suite of solutions, what you can do is not only can you auto-create the incident, but you can also tag it to the service owners to do the impact analysis to their service and provide you that higher-order human thinking and decision making that can then help you optimize that remediation at the appropriate point in time.

Saar: We mentioned the people involved in solving these problems, but in some cases, you’ll need the help of artificial intelligence.

Ram: Yes, AI is a game changer. We’re really looking at harnessing the power of AIOps to get to that place. Now, that leads me to an extended perspective, which is this notion that we’ve been floating around, which is the autonomous digital enterprise. Much like an autonomous vehicle or a self-driven car, an autonomous digital enterprise is a self-reliant enterprise that basically looks for a huge degree of automation – hyper automation in this case.

And what this is based on is this: the notion that every company today is being disrupted by technology and that’s fundamentally changing their business model. So, the notion of every company being a technology company means that every company is going to have software go from being the system of record to the system of action, the system of insights, the system of engagement.

The winners are going to be the ones that actually become that much closer and in fact become autonomous digital enterprises. And the key to that is hyper automation. The natural next question is, “What is hyper automation?” Hyper automation is this notion where you basically take a salad bowl and it has three ingredients. One is the digitalization, which we’ve seen the last couple of years. Second, is this pervasive connectivity. Now, with 5G and beyond, it’s going to be even greater connectivity in new forms. The third is what we just talked about here, AI. You take all of these, put them in a salad bowl, and mix them up. That’s the catalyst for hyper automation.

What that basically means is you’re going to use automation for physical processes also. Examples of those would be robotic surgery, where robots do surgery as supposed to actual physical doctors. Or even assembly line and car manufacturers where there are robots that basically do the assembly rather than humans in an assembly line. That is the notion of hyper automation and that can pretty much become the norm across every industry where there is a physical process in place.

Watch the whole video for more insights on what’s to come in 2020.