The next-generation CIO is a jazz musician

Tomorrow's CIO will be a 'master of improv', says David Gee

http://www.cio.com.au/article/597577/next-generation-cio-jazz-musician/

In days gone by, a senior IT lead was like the conductor of an orchestra, working with a large team to deliver a symphony masterpiece.

But today, there are changes happening to the business at a speed and pace, which is causing many CIOs, as conductors of technology strategy, to lose their musical rhythm.

This means that tomorrow’s CIO will be a ‘master of improv’, not necessarily making things up as they go but using some sheet music that acts as a blueprint. The major difference is the interpretation.

Playing jazz

During a game of American NFL football, a coach will direct players to initiate planned, and at times, over-planned, plays. If these plays don't work, the team loses.

This is similar to strategies employed during the roll out of projects using waterfall methodologies.

Like a game of NFL football, the cost of misplanning is extremely high and in the IT world, many large waterfall projects are doomed to fail.


Conversely, basketball is more akin to jazz as the players have to adjust in real time to tactics and defence patterns that are being used.

A great example in basketball is what's called 'double teaming' – to pressure a player into a mistake. That pressure is to steal the ball from the opposing player, but for him that also means there is a team member free and unguarded.

There is an emerging thread that is pushing the CIO to seek out playing jazz. You have to also have your team in the orchestra pit, but it is better to entertain having some at the jazz club.

Jazz had its roots with the music of black American origin and emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It is characterised by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm.

What is powerful about jazz is that it incorporates improvisation; it is partly planned and also partly spontaneous.

The actual musicians perform a pre-determined tune and they can create their own interpretations within that tune in response to the other musicians’ performances. Plus whatever else may occur thereafter in the heat of moment.

Improv
We can’t plan everything and often need to make adjustments. I was recently speaking to a CMO from a large Australian enterprise who runs thousands of campaigns each week.

He said he can’t measure the effectiveness of each campaign due to the sheer number of them and as soon as one campaign is finished, he moves onto the next one. This particular CMO is improvising.

What was interesting was that he noted the IT department wasn’t playing from the same sheet music as marketing but it was still trying to operate as an orchestra.

I’ve always wondered about marketing people; they seem to operate without rules but it seems that there are some guidelines – they are just not as strict as IT has interpreted.

A world full of jazz

The current business environment is unpredictable and being disrupted by new players, or there are threats from cyber security hackers that can affect the reputation of the largest enterprises.

Thus, the ability of teams to work with what they have and react with the changing circumstances will be the key for success. We cannot assume that the customer will still be there at the end of the customer journey map if we haven’t done all the right things.

The modern world is full of jazz, it is all around us. If we go back in time to classical era, our old friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said: “Music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

More recently the jazz legend, Miles Davis said: “Music is the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”

As CIOs, we need to think about the notes that we don’t play.

 

Let’s remember that jazz musicians aren’t just thinking about their physical instruments while they’re playing – they are also thinking about and simply reacting to what’s going on around them.

They are improvising. Every CIO needs to start to think about getting their teams to operate in this fashion. In essence, jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but actually is different each time.

Unfortunately just moving into ‘rock and roll’ mode and increasing the tempo and playing louder won’t get you there. The CIO has to really look hard and how businesses are transforming to realise that this is a fundamental shift in the game.

Learning to play jazz is going to be required. If you are able to adapt and move from orchestral and rock band classics, then you will have a real chance to be one of the new breed of CIOs.

As George Gershwin stated: “Life is a lot like jazz, it’s best when you improvise.”

Why acting like a lean startup is worth it

Innovation occurs when things are ‘unknown’, when your organisation is in search mode looking for new opportunities

http://www.cio.com.au/article/597028/why-acting-like-lean-startup-worth-it/

The ‘lean startup’ methodology – where agile approaches are used to speed up the development and release of products and services – is a concept that every CIO needs to understand and embrace.
Venturetec recently arranged bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur, Brant Cooper, to discuss his own experience working at startups with an audience at Australian Fintech hub, Stone & Chalk.

He noted that this particular startup was acting like an enterprise and he wasn’t given the opportunity to chat with any of the organisation’s customers to get a feel for what they wanted.

The startup’s initial business results were poor, and Cooper was eventually able to speak to customers who he discovered weren’t using the startup’s latest product. Why? Because the organisation built a product that nobody wanted to use.

It was clear that the startup that everyone expected to be agile was behaving just like a large enterprise.

Cooper explained the concept of what is ‘known and unknown’, the simple genesis of a ‘lean entrepreneur’ that works on a simple principle.

As various parts of your business model become ‘known’, you move into execution mode. Innovation occurs when things are ‘unknown’, when your organisation is in search mode looking for new opportunities and then you start to make a shift from unknown to known.

Then you get big by executing the ‘known.’ This is all about the search for the next new business model. Did you get all that?

Being ‘in the know’ is both your strength and your weakness. Knowing the markets and customers you are targeting helps drive revenue but it also makes you inflexible and unable to adjust.

Lean startup is all about elimination of waste and measuring learning. Often, we don’t really know what value we are creating and don’t really know the customer. And unfortunately, we can’t learn this from surveys.

In this regard, innovation is actually all about embracing uncertainty rather than constantly striving to gain certainty or at least confidence in our plans. So we can struggle with the uncertainty that innovation requires.

Cooper explained that there are ‘three e’s of lean innovation', which are:

• Empathy: This helps us understand the customer’s needs.
• Experimentation: To translate insights into action.
• Evidence: To make decisions based on what we have learnt from customers.

I’m definitely seeing that these are applicable in enterprise IT. Unfortunately we haven’t demonstrated that we have that much empathy and that is just the starting point.

Rapid experiments
Cooper also explained that there are many examples of startups that have used rapid experiments as a mechanism to learn about real customer needs.

An example is a simple landing page. Create a fairly empty page with not that much content. This is all about testing customer behaviour, not what they say they will do but what they actually do.

 

Cooper shared examples of startups that were built from such simple and humble beginnings. It wasn’t fancy but this is all about having a hypothesis and then testing it. Focus on the metrics and measure the actual behaviour.
Cooper suggested a simple step-by-step approach to acting like a lean startup.

• Start by having empathy with the customer – to understand the pain points.
• Build a minimal viable product at the hypothesis stage.
• Find a market so people will buy.
• Find a way to scale the enterprise and sell to multiple segments to achieve the necessary scale.
• Develop profitability that also scales with the business.

Should you succeed in these 5 steps, then you may have a viable new startup. However let’s not assume that this is a cookie cutter approach and that introducing innovation into an enterprise is easy.

Enterprises make several common mistakes, Cooper said. These include not ensuring internal resources are dedicated to the task, battling against existing silos and internal fiefdoms, looking for a return on investment, and new initiatives going against current branding and compliance.

There is an overarching need to find like-minded people that are supporters of the change. Identifying these early adopters that ‘get it’ is the key to getting traction in an organisation.


The way forward
About every enterprise is looking to be more innovative and looking for a way forward. But be aware that enterprises have been built with ‘brakes’ and these are inherent in their DNA.

It is impossible to move the needle without radically challenging existing assumptions of how we operate. The way forward is to understand accelerators like lean startups. The approach is to re-engage with the customer and turn upside down what has been considered the norm.

There are lessons in this for every CIO.

What’s hot in enterprise IT? – Part 3

There are not going to be two areas of IT that will move faster and with greater dependency than IoT and cyber security

http://www.cio.com.au/article/596647/what-hot-enterprise-it-part-3/

During this article series, I have explored several rapidly growing areas in enterprise IT including productivity and virtual reality as well as cloud and big data technologies.

Now, I want to talk about the Internet of Things and cyber security. These two have been chosen as bedfellows as there will be an increasing crescendo of noise around each individually and also between the domains.

Cyber security and the Internet of Things (IoT)
The installed base for IoT devices is estimated to grow from around 10 billion connected devices today to as many as 30 billion devices by 2020.

We will be facing a world where there are objects, literally everywhere and we will start to realise this as this becomes more and more pervasive.

These objects will be telling us about the weather in this part of the city or where a particular bus or train is right now.

The emerging problem is that most IoT device manufacturers and service providers are failing to implement common security measures in their products.

They are frankly focussed on being the object of choice and getting their product out to market. Our friendly hackers will be able to exploit these new devices to conduct data breaches, corporate or government espionage, and damage critical infrastructure like electrical grids.

The IoT

When it comes to IOT, it is clear to me that GE will be a major player. The company is investing across its respective divisions from aircraft engines to energy utility and healthcare.
Meanwhile, Phillips is partnering with Cisco on IOT and both companies are investing heavily in this space.

What’s going to be hot is when smart objects talk to other objects and provide insights and actions. A great example is objects gather data for predictive and preventative analysis.

Imagine street lights that use data to detect traffic jams and can automatically warn drivers and
The reality is that these larger scale IoT transformations are some time away. So let me calibrate our expectations. Here are a few useful IoT technologies that you may want to consider.

TrackR
This is simple but great little smartphone app that works on both iOS and Android platforms. It is all about finding that lost set of keys or an object that you want to be able to locate – like your pet dog.

A feature that I really like is Crowd GPS – when another user of the TrackR app comes within a 100ft range of your lost item, you will receive a GPS update of where your item is located.

SmartThings
These are sensors that they can be placed in their home, office, and car. SmartThings lets these sensors communicate with each other, and with others. There are many use cases and I’m not sure that these are necessarily smart, just perhaps useful.

You can turn off your lights, open and close your garage door, or check that the kids are on their way home. This solution is open source and that’s going to be mandatory as we will all be using multiple branded devices.

Jasper
Jasper is a pioneer in cloud-based IoT and has already had success making the ‘connected car’ a reality for companies like GM, Nissan, Ford and VW.
With some 3,500 enterprise businesses have standardised on the Jasper platform across 24 mobile operator groups worldwide, in more than 100 countries. The Jasper technology is also used in Amazon Kindles, the Sony Playstation, and across several smart metering projects.
Jasper started with US$205 million in funding and was acquired by Cisco just a few months ago.

Electric Imp
Electric Imp is a very interesting company that works on private and public clouds to connect devices securely. As both the device and cloud are managed services, this is an IoT offering with security built-in.

This platform has secure hardware modules that run impOS – a secure, managed operating system that hosts the customer app within the wireless chip itself.

 

On top of this is a security as a service that monitors, patches, and updates to ensure the ongoing security. Within the cloud itself, the managed Imp service hosts a VM for every connected device and there are out of the box integrations for AWS Kinesis, Keen.io, Salesforce, Pubnub, Wolfram, New Relic and Twilio. (Note that the last two were featured in What’s hot in enterprise IT – part 1.)

Let talk cyber security

One of the world’s highest valued cybersecurity organisations, Tanium, has raised more than $300 million. Venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is the company’s largest single investor with a $142 million stake.

Tanium is designed to detect hackers the minute they attack. What is behind this is to simplify control of networked computers into a single management package.

Every endpoint – computers, servers, printers, phones, tablets – is protected. The solution offers endpoint asset inventory, security vulnerability detection and remediation, software distribution, IT compliance reporting, patch management, software license management, security policy enforcement, and endpoint device power consumption management.

The company's claim is that you can update all endpoints within 15 seconds.

Llumio
Llumio provides a policy-driven security that helps lock down application visibility and connectivity to unauthorised users. The general idea is about protecting data even if a hacker breaks in.

It works with your current host-based firewalls and can be controlled with a centrally-managed policy. This is all about injecting more agility, without compromising security controls. It just makes administration practical and doable.

Centrify
Centrify is an identity platform that protects compromised credentials. It does this by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. This covers both hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises.


Centrify provides a sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring.

 

What this means is that you have a single password sign-on to access all your applications across all your enterprise technology. In essence, the unified single sign-on with mobile management is the secret sauce. The end result is policy enforcement is easier and there will be less help desk calls.

The company’s clients include Citi, Credit Suisse, Microsoft and GE Capital.


AlienVault
 If you want to know who was behind the Sony hack, then AlienVault will help. The company's provides a combination of five key security capabilities with expert threat intelligence, which is updated every 30 minutes with data that has been analysed and classified by the company's lab team.

The company’s ‘open threat exchange’ provides a crowd-sourced and collaborative forum that collects global threat intelligence from attacks, which improves your ability to detect threats and repeal hackers.

HackerOne

This is a SaaS platform that can provide you with an app to streamline communication between security researchers and your internal response team.

To unleash hackers for good is what HackerOne is all about. It includes a bug bounty program that has already paid US$6.5 million in bounties. These bounties can range from US$150 to as much as US$30,000 per bug.

There is a HackerOne Professional and a HackerOne Enterprise version and they include in their customer base Dropbox, Airbnb, and Adobe.

CrowdStrike

Here is another startup, this one founded by former McAfee executives. Like Tanium, CrowdStrike talks about speed and it endeavours to provide a ‘five-second visibility’ into a company’s security posture.

CrowdStrike uses a cloud-based approach that creates a threat graph model to analyse and correlate large volumes of events in real-time to identify anomalies, and behavioural patterns for both known and unknown threats. The product also has a ransomware blocking feature.

Watch this space

It is clear to me that these 30 billion connected things will be a massive opportunity and threat at the same time. These technologies need built-in security and we are starting to see the early stages of this being realised.

There are not going to be two areas of IT that will move faster and with greater dependency than IoT and cyber security. Simply, you can’t roll out IoT devices with considering the security implications and if you try, then IoT will be more of a threat than an opportunity.

What’s hot in enterprise IT? – Part 2

Big data and cloud technologies you need to look out for

http://www.cio.com.au/article/596254/what-hot-enterprise-it-part-2/

Big data and cloud computing technologies – which have made inroads in enterprises – are still yet to realise their full potential. So where should you focus your investments?
I'll discuss big data first.

Google DeepMind
Let’s start with a biggie – Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company. This offering will combine techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.

These ‘out of the box’ algorithms are expected to be capable of learning for themselves directly from raw experience or data.

As I write this article, Google DeepMind (Alpha Go) is winning Go match 3 of a 5 game series against a world master. This is a first and don’t expect this to be the last that you hear for DeepMind.

Trifacta
The reality is that with smaller data volumes, we discovered that enterprises struggled with data transformation. So it's not surprising that when the magnitude is increased, we still need such tools.
Data wrangling is what Trifacta does – it works with the various flavours of Hadoop such as Hortonworks, MapR, and Cloudera.

In short, Trifacta allows you to transform raw, complex data into clean and structured formats for analysis. This data wragglng can be up to 80 per cent of the effort required, so any help can only make the drive to insights faster.

Domo
Perhaps you don’t want to read about Domo, this is software-as-a-service that doesn’t need you. In essence, the service is designed to provide direct, real time access to business data without any IT involved.


Domo is already valued in the unicorn billion dollar range, so it is not going away quickly. Arguably, this is not big data, but creation of just another data store. My personal view is Domo is a slap in the face for IT for failing to tackle data management and integration in the past.


Segment

Here comes another slap for the right cheek. Segment is one place to collect customer data and send it to your tools for analytics, marketing automation, and raw data access with SQL.


Sound familiar? This is what you, as CIO, should have been doing in building a customer data vault over the last few years.


While Domo and Segment are hot – we as IT leaders have perhaps been guilty of being asleep at the wheel. But with DeepMind coming, perhaps the writing is on the wall.

 

Let’s move onto cloud technologies, which are still in the stage of growing maturity. Here’s a few solutions that help enterprises use the cloud in a more ‘grown-up’ fashion.

Chef
One hot product is Chef, an automation platform that will make DevOps work in your organisation.

Chef uses recipes to provide instructions on how components of infrastructure are to be deployed and configured. A recipe is stored on nodes and actually detail on how to configure databases, load balancers and web servers. These recipes work across on-premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructure models.

A really nice feature is that Chef can use compliance profiles with dependency management to ensure that changes to infrastructure and applications are propagated.

Spotinst

Perhaps due to the growing and unpredictable storage needs of big data, we have a need to bend and flex with demand and often at short notice.

Spotinst is a marketplace to allow cloud customers to bid on unused public cloud computing capacity.
Taking advantage of spot prices will enable enterprise cloud to be optimised. This can presently be deployed on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.


New Relic

New Relic has been around a number of years and as it is an application performance management APM tool for the cloud era – it’s yet to peak.

The product monitors web and mobile applications (Ruby, Java, .NET, Python, PHP) in real-time that run on cloud or on-premise. Just the sort of utility tool that you need as digitisation across the enterprise progresses.

Cloudflare

Here is another great example of the growing maturity of the cloud. Cloudflare provides several handy tools to assist web performance and security management.

One feature distributes content around the world to speed up websites in particular to assist mobiles access. CloudFlare security works to protect those same cloud sites cyber threats including DDOS, spam, SQL injections.

Growing up
When I reflect on big data and cloud, my sense is that we now dealing with the technology industry’s equivalent of teenagers on the cusp of maturity.

They are not quite adults and fully functioning but are maturing and have a growing need for different tools and utilities.

The question is no longer should we use big data or the cloud, but how do we use these technologies effectively? These tools certainly go a long way towards achieving that objective.

​What’s hot in enterprise IT? - Part 1

Productivity tools and new virtual reality toys that are worth considering

http://www.cio.com.au/article/595907/what-hot-enterprise-it-part-1/

Every CIO has to deal with the stark reality that there is limited bandwidth to play with new things. At the same time, there is daily pressure from your peers and manager to make progress on the change agenda.

The key is to ensure that your own team is focused where it really counts and can make a difference.

I’ve also learnt that over the years, there are always hot technology topics that get a disproportionate amount of attention.

So what are the hot pieces of enterprise technology you should invest in when your team has spare capacity?

Let’s start with productivity and virtual reality. An amusing choice of buddies, with one a potential toy to waste time cycles and the other aimed at pure efficiency.

Internal and customer facing productivity
Every organisation has cost cutting drives. The most direct way to achieve cost cutting is to do more with less, starting with getting our staff and contractors more productive.
Here are some tools that will boost your team’s productivity.

Slack

  We have all used various tools to help with office productivity and usually without achieving this very goal. Can I suggest that you give Slack a trial?

Slack is a team communication application for the Mac, PC, iOS, and Android platforms which provides real-time messaging, archiving and search services.

The interactions can be one-on-one, private groups, persistent chat rooms, and direct messaging as well as group chats organised by topic.

Now, you may be cynical about the tool’s benefits when you start using it but what makes it special is the integration with third-party tools Google Docs, Skype, Dropbox, Heroku, Crashlytics, GitHub, and Zendesk.

Rapporr
For a local Australian company, you should also check out Rapporr. Again, this is a product that you have to stop yourself from dismissing. In effect, this productivity tool is aimed at the class of users that are never at a PC.

It’s about branch staff solving immediate challenges - having rosters and relevant updates and training etc. Powerful examples for the use of Rapporr are seen in remote workforces in retail and distribution. For instance, thousands of workers at Salmat distribution don't have effective or secure access to information. 

These staff can now do their deliveries, have a record this and submit their ‘proof of work’ using smartphones. Challenges are resolved quicker through the greater context rapporr offers.


Twillo

As we all strive to tackle improved customer experience, we have to address being able to easily interact and engage. Newer products like Twilio are aimed at making communications more contextual by embedding voice, video, messaging and authentication directly into applications.


This is a developer platform that works by merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. A number of leading enterprises like Uber, Box, DocuSign, Nordstrom, Coca-Cola, Walmart and Home Depot are using Twillo.


Freshdesk


A company that hails from the San Francisco Bay area provides a customer support solution with multi-channel support through Facebook, e-mail, phone, forums, and Twitter.


When you push the customer support button on Uber’s app, it provides a list of support topics in static text. In contrast, Freshdesk is able to provide an in-app, real-time messaging service more akin to We Chat.

The company’s customers include 3M, Honda, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania and Unicef.

 

Trello

Another product that I’ve used is Trello, which is a free app that makes working on group projects feel like dragging sticky notes on a whiteboard. 


The product's intuitive drag-and-drop interface and visual way of organising a team will get you up and running quickly. The app can be used on smartphones, tablets, and desktops.


Apigee
As we enter the digital era, being able to quickly take information out of core systems and expose them with APIs is mandatory. Apigee has been used to simplify the delivery, management and analysis of APIs both from legacy systems and also from Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this regard, developers have been using Apigee to expose AWS through this tool.

The Royal Dutch Touring Club, eBay and Walgreens are amongst its list of customers.

Enough work now, let’s talk virtual reality

We have all seen and tried the Samsung Gear, HTC and Occulus Rift virtual reality products.
While we all can start to experience being in the front row at a concert or ringside at a World Heavyweight Championship title fight, there is also early adoption across industries such as health care, real estate, retail, travel gaming, and education.


Forcite
A local startup in Australia is Forcite Helmet Systems. The company offer a helmet that has a 4k camera, communication system and battery all packed into one unit.

Once you wear the helmet you basically take others with you. I’m writing this article from the ski slopes of Japan. Just imagine being able to share a 360-degree view of your experience in a hands free situation.

Actually for my experience, you will see all my embarrassing falls and bloopers. But, when this is worn by your favourite NHL ice hockey player, you are in the game and can see what he sees.

Magic Leap
This US startup – already valued at US$4.5 billion with Alibaba leading the most recent investment round – is creating a head-mounted virtual retinal display which superimposes 3D images over real world objects. It does this by projecting a digital lights into the user’s eye.
Its Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal technology generates images that are indistinguishable.

Work or play?
The once separate worlds of work and play are slowly coming together. I won’t be surprised when virtual reality becomes a productivity tool. VR devices are going to be too compelling not to bring into the office.

How DBS is building an engine of innovation

"Innovation has nothing to do with technology – this is about people and behaviour.” - DBS Bank's Neal Cross

 

DBS Bank's chief innovation officer Neal Cross

Which banks are successfully creating a culture of innovation? One strong candidate is Singapore’s DBS Bank.

I had a chat with Neal Cross, chief innovation manager at DBS, who told me that he is now responsible for 5 per cent of the innovation targets set by DBS’ CEO, Piyush Gupta.

DBS has built a culture of innovation and is now looking at placing some ‘hard revenue’ targets against innovative projects.

What this means is that every managing director across the bank who reports into the c-suite – including the CEO – has taken on an innovation target. They are asked to either complete a ‘customer journey roadmap’ or take their teams through one.

As Neal, says proudly, “I am a salesman and we wanted to build a culture of innovation. We looked around what others were doing and we did the complete opposite. Innovation has nothing to do with technology – this is about people and behaviour.”

 

DBS’ innovation team
Neal’s team has grown from 3 to 20 people and he now has S$20 million to set up a new innovation centre. His philosophy around how he established the team –based around seven rules – is perhaps contrary to the way many other innovation groups have been constructed.

His seven rules are:

• Don’t hire technical people
• Utilise ecosystems
• Make it a safe place to fail
• Always be in partnership
• Make the impossible, possible
• Turn passion into action
• Don’t invent.

 

Neal says that organisations essentially have three options when innovating. They can ‘build’ on existing infrastructure, which essentially means 'putting lipstick on a pig' by digitising what they already have. They can ‘buy’ products that have been rebranded or invest in startups, or they can bite the bullet and evolve the culture.

Piyush Gupta describes DBS as the ‘Goldilocks’ bank – not too big, not too small. This means the bank can more easily innovate than the bigger players in financial services. In fact, the bank worked with 200 startups in 2015, Neal says.

Fintech partnering
Neal admits that in the US$4 trillion global financial services market, new ‘fintech’ organisations are simply innovating faster than banks. There is US$25 billion available to attract talent into this space, he says.

 

To address this challenge, DBS has what Neal describes as a ‘deep and wide’ program to innovate and engage fintechs.

The company runs a ‘digital mindset hackathon’ that involves senior managers inside its HR, finance, wealth and corporate banking divisions, as well as at branch offices. These executives are asked to set up fintech startups using 52 different teams across four countries.

Each idea is sold to the CEO, chief innovation officer, venture capital firms and HR executives. Already, 8 new products have been created and gone into production as a result of this program.

Neal realised that he could not have done this with his team of 20 staff so he has tapped more than 50 DBS graduates to come up with ideas and take minimum viable products into production.

 

DBS has also run 22 ‘imaginariums’, themed events that focus on a particular area. For instance, the company ran a workshop on “cracking bitcoin.” Neal’s team also tried ‘crowd sourcing’ ideas, but as expected, they ended up with too many ideas to actually implement.

Another program named ‘Sparkies’, was used to infiltrate the team further. Neal wanted existing DBS staff members to commit one day a month to work on innovative projects.

Finally, DBS is also experimenting with artificial intelligence and robots, which bring the promise of automation and efficiency.

It is clear that the bank is not relying on one strategy to move its business into an innovation mindset. There are multiple points of engagement with management and the staff.

The comprehensive nature of the transition is a beautiful thing but success will be measured in outcomes and there are hard targets that Neal and his colleagues all share.

 

6 questions that a CIO doesn’t want to be asked

David Gee lists his top six all too common questions that CIOs don't like being asked.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/594276/6-questions-cio-doesn-t-want-asked/

As a CIO, you’re fielding questions from your boss, peers and customers every day, and there are some that you get asked with surprising regularity. Over time, you’re often asked the same question over and over again, which is highly frustrating.

Here’s my top six all too common questions that CIOs don’t want to be asked.

1. Why should the BI team sit inside IT?
“We can do business intelligence (BI) without IT – we can simply buy a BI toolset with a credit card and get going.” Sound familiar?

The truth is that most organisations are not that well advanced with their journey to information management, let alone big data or analytics. My view is that there is a clear maturity that needs to be reached with enterprises. This will mean we have to get established data warehouses with robust data glossaries and metadata.

Once this is in place and properly governed, BI will sit comfortably outside IT. The problem is when you haven’t addressed the fundamentals, splintering will only make your data more fragmented.


2. Can’t we just test and release software faster?

This is a common frustration for the CMO and product managers. CIOs and their teams can never test and release products faster enough to keep these guys happy.

There’s a way to get around this. Defend yourself by talking about the progress your team is making using Agile to draw up more accurate business requirements and speed up the software development process.

Explain that you are also coming to grips with DevOps. There has to be an investment in test management and automation, and this is usually a large number.

Once this is fully operational, it is possible to accelerate the process.

 

3. Why can’t just we plug this into the architecture?
This is an old favourite. These days, everyone is a ‘digital expert’ and they see boundless opportunities to digitise every process. To tackle this, you need to create an architecture blueprint and strategy that is approved by management.

Once you have a concrete agreement on the directions, then these questions become easier to handle. Yes, we can plug it in but unless this is truly business critical and fits into this blueprint, then it will be dealt with later.

4. Could I pay for this out of the IT budget?

The IT budget is a bottomless pit and the problem is that once you set such as precedent, this never stops. What is important is that you establish IT principles around what is IT spend and business spend.

I recall once having close to $1 million spent by one division on laser printer toner cartridges. While you want to get the benefits of centralised purchasing, it was clear that this facility was being somewhat abused.

It is never a popular job being CIO, but someone has to pay.

5. Why aren’t all the compliance and audit items completed?

 My experience is that when audit items occur, the CIO is the proxy for the enterprise, even when the action has been assigned to a business contract. For some reason we have wide shoulders and take on these ‘extra’ curricular activities.

Unfortunately, the CIO is the one that usually fronts the audit committee to explain, even when it isn’t his or her accountability.

6. When will the new system be stable?
You have to avoid thinking, how long is a piece of string? When you are a CIO and there have been system outages or issues associated with a new implementation, it can be the case that you can feel ‘punch drunk’.

There is no place to duck and you have to face the music. What’s a good retort? Well, whatever you say can be misinterpreted, so tread carefully.

What I would demonstrate is that there is 100 per cent commitment to working the issues and that the team is fully engaged and wants to provide a solution.

Prioritise where you focus and ask for some space to fix the issue and the underlying problem. Tell the user you’re working hard on it.

If all else fails, just tell them you have to run to a meeting.