“CIOs today are caught in between a rock and a hard place. The rock is maintaining high availability while doing that as cheaply as possible. The hard place is enabling digital transformation and increasing business and developer velocity,” answered Assaf Resnick, CEO and Co-Founder of BigPanda, at the opening session of RESOLVE ’22.
Technology, digital, and data organizations focus on delivering business impacts by improving customer experiences, increasing deployment frequencies, developing machine learning models, and meeting service level objectives. It's a significant effort to align priorities, agree on methodologies, and deliver capabilities that meet customer and business stakeholder expectations.
"The first decision in decision making is when to make a decision," proclaimed Mike Hayes, the chief digital transformation officer of VMWare and former commanding officer for SEAL Team. I was attending Rev 3 last week (May/2022), a conference on ModelOps, and, more generally, a conference for data scientists to learn and network about their practices in experimenting and delivering machine learning models that drive business impact.
Want to have some fun? Gather several of your technology colleagues or outside collaborators and ask them to share their favorite technical debt horror stories. You'll hear about bad code, legacy platforms, and repetitive outages -- and you'll quickly realize that you're not alone in the uphill battle to avoid and reduce tech debt.
I tell many of my tech debt horror stories in my upcoming book, Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership. And I'm not shy in sharing some of the technical debts that I had a hand in creating.
One of my favorite scenes in Finding Nemo is when Nemo and friends successfully escape the dentist's office, land in the ocean in their plastic, water-filled bags, look around and consider their accomplishment, only to hear Bloat, the pufferfish, ask the perfect question, "Now what?"
Your team invests so much time just to get to this point, but they haven't planned, or in many cases, even thought about what comes next. Instead of being ready to move on to the next opportunities, they're sitting in the water, bobbing up and down, and breaking their flow to reorganize and plan their next steps.
I recently visited my alma mater, The University of Arizona, where I received my Master’s in electrical engineering and studied neural networks, computer vision, and medical imaging. It reminded me of the key lessons I learned in grad school; asking questions, reviewing research, developing hypotheses, collecting data, analyzing results, and repeating.
How should CIO and IT leaders improve employee experiences in 2022? What’s the next frontier to improve hybrid working by reducing toil, improving work quality, and enabling employees to focus on the most important aspects of their jobs?
CIOs and IT leaders should target transformation two steps beyond
single-platform automations and slapping together RPAs. It’s time to take a
ride up the elevator, look down at the technology landscape, and take steps
to modernize workflows and integrate systems.
