blogs.starcio.comSocial, Agile, and Transformation

Top 100 Social CIO - I cover topics for technologists, CIO, CMO, and software developers. Agile, DevOps, Leadership, Business Intelligence, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Startups, Digital Marketing, Social networking, SaaS, content management, media, data science, enterprise 2.0, IoT, business strategy and culture change Labels agile planning AI big data cio citizen development DevOps digital transformation innovation organizational change How Hundred-Year-Old Enterprises Improve IT Ops using Data and AIOps What do three multibillion-dollar companies that have been around for over one hundred years have in common? There might be straightforward answers if they were in the same industry, but what if one is in media, another in financial services, and a third a food service distributor? IT leaders from Wiley, OneMain Financial, and US Foods presented at the recent BigPanda’s Resolve ‘21 and Pandapalooza event about how they’re modernizing their IT operations with AIOps. I’ve already shared insights from this event, including 3 AIOps secrets that boost quick business impact and seven lessons from IT leaders on operating at digital speeds with AIOps . This post explores how companies that must continually reinvent themselves use data and machine learning to deliver great IT service management experiences. continue reading "How Hundred-Year-Old Enterprises Improve IT Ops using Data and AIOps" Read more » Posted by Isaac Sacolick at Monday, April 19, 2021 0 comments Labels: AI , cio , cloud computing , DevOps , it management , site performance How to Empower Transformation and Create ROI with Intelligent Automation CIO and IT leaders have the greatest opportunities to modernize their enterprise platforms, change the culture, and deliver digital business transformations. The secret is out – while first-era digital transformations were driven by improving customer experiences and leading the organization to be more data-driven, all roads on the customer journey map lead to efficient, scalable, and intelligent digital process automation. continue reading "How to Empower Transformation and Create ROI with Intelligent Automation" Read more » Posted by Isaac Sacolick at Thursday, April 15, 2021 0 comments Labels: cio , citizen development , digital transformation , enterprise 2.0 , future of work 3 Emerging Ways IT Benefits from AIOps AIOps may be the most important emerging capability for IT Operations teams. For the first time, IT has scalable tools to manage complex infrastructure, applications, databases, and devices. What's driving the business need for AIOps? It's the many factors driving organizations to invest in technologies, including digital transformation, customer/employee experiences, remote/hybrid working, and data/analytics/ML/AI capabilities. continue reading "3 Emerging Ways IT Benefits from AIOps" Read more » Posted by Isaac Sacolick at Monday, April 12, 2021 0 comments Labels: AI , cio , cloud computing , DevOps , future of work 7 Lessons from IT Leaders on Operating at Digital Speeds with AIOps IT leaders have been managing a tremendous amount of change over the past several years and significantly more so over this last year because of COVID. On the one hand, are all the business-driven changes for improving customer experiences, enabling machine learning capabilities and improving workflow efficiencies with automation. The other hand is trying to accelerate IT skills, processes, and culture to support cloud migrations, DevOps automations, SRE functions, and AIOps to improve system reliability and performance. There was a lot to learn from BigPanda’s Resolve ‘21 and Pandapalooza event, and my first post on it covered 3 AIOps secrets that boost quick business impacts . This post shares where to find quick wins in automation, incident management, and growing business stakeholder involvement in IT operations. These leaders also shared many lessons as they’ve adjusted to digital speeds and leveraged AIOps. Here are some takeaways. 1. Technology is Changing the IT Operating Model Sean Mack, CIO/CISO at Wiley Publishing, kicks off his session, acknowledging that some of the past’s tied and true operating IT principles require reinvention. He states in his opening remarks, “Technology continues to evolve, and as leaders, we must too. If we don’t continue to evolve as leaders, we’re sure to stifle the progress of our teams and our businesses.” He shares examples such as how the shift from unique infrastructures to ephemeral and disposable cloud environments changes how IT manages and monitors environments. Most importantly, technology is now a core business capability, and Sean states that business and technology are inseparable. Understanding how to deliver small, incremental capability updates and become more customer-focused are table stakes for today’s IT organizations. 2. Digital Requires Driving Fast; Technical Debt is the Friction Nag Vaidyanathan is CTO of OneMain Financial, America’s largest personal installment loan company, with fifteen-hundred branches, six contact centers, and ninety-five hundred employees. Nag acknowledged that “Many people think that because we are an old company, it is very hard for us to make changes.” But he goes on to share many examples of how the bank needed to adapt their loan origination, call routing, pricing, and other practices to adjust to customer needs during COVID. He confesses, “When I reflect back, it looks like, how in the world did we do all these things?” Part of their success included automating CI/CD pipelines, building loosely-coupled business services, and migrating to cloud-native datastores. But Nag acknowledges, “You never realize the impact technical debt can have when you need to accelerate.” All race cars have to pit to fill the tank, change tires, and check the engine. Driving a fast digital engine requires IT leaders to make smart prioritizations on what areas of technical debt create the most friction and how IT should address them proactively. 3. Agile Practices and Culture Enable Digital’s Velocity IT leaders recognize that agile practices and culture must extend beyond application development teams into business functions and IT operations. Scott Johnson, SVP of Infrastructure as a Service at Equifax, shared many insights during his panel on becoming an analytics company. “We’ve moved to a full agile-driven engineering and operations organization and embraced a product mindset for our products that we deliver to the organization, such as our certified pipeline.” Scott’s colleague, Dan Grace, Global Technology Operations Leader at Equifax, acknowledged the transformation’s scope. “It’s a huge culture shift going from waterfall to an agile mindset at a one-hundred-year-old company with the people, technology, and the partners.” Sean Mack also disclosed how Wiley realigned to an agile organization. “We moved from rival teams to collaboration and teams of teams. The cross-functional delivery team includes developers and QA, but also SREs, and database reliability engineers.” Part of the realignment requires elevating how people in IT understand customers and products. Sean recommends that “People can be deeply skilled, but need a broad sense of the context of their work around the product and customer.” 4. The Impact of Speed and an Always-On IT Operations It’s probably time to retire IT Ops terms and practices like scheduled downtime, blackout periods, and manual failovers. If digital transformations didn’t change the IT operating model, then surely COVID has accelerated how important reliable, secure, and high-performance IT systems are to business operations. Dan Grace from Equifax shared some of the changes and impacts. They pushed the gas pedal and decreased the MTTR from the hour recoveries accepted a decade ago to minutes. It required getting more people certified on their public cloud technologies and shifting everyone’s mindset that environments are always on. Dan states...