One would think that with all the investments in developing cloud-native applications and microservices – with all the steps IT has taken to modernize applications for the cloud – and with all the monitoring tools we’ve instrumented across our hybrid clouds – that IT Ops and incident managers would see fewer Priority 1 (P1) incidents and that their resolution times would be decreasing.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I love this time of year. Just being outside to see the leaves and feel the colder, thinner air. Enjoying the warmer days where I am satisfied with a harvest salad, and the colder nights when I can experiment with making a yummy soup. At StarCIO, some of our work with clients and speaking at conferences slow down, and it gives me time to lift my head and spirits.
We used to say "going digital" was about going from print to web, manual processes to more automation, or even from web interfaces to mobile to voice and now AR/VR.
Employee experiences were "back office" and there are many organizations with Windows thick client tools that connect to mainframes. Or maybe you have dozens of SaaS tools that aren't integrated and are just starting to work with low-code and no-code technologies.
Does your agile team practicing Scrum or Kanban need a business analyst? When do you know that your team is missing a business analyst, and what responsibilities do you assign them? What types of initiatives would benefit from adding a business analyst? Should business analysts be assigned to a single scrum team, or can they work across tribes or multiple teams?
These are some of the questions I get during StarCIO Agile Workshops and our Center of Excellence programs. It comes up as we discuss the roles of product owners, scrum masters, tech leads, and program managers - all roles that I have already blogged about extensively. It turns out that I've never written about business analysts, though I will tell you that the best teams that I've led had excellent ones.
It’s hard enough to explain what governance means to people that work in digital, technology, and data roles. But what do you say to the CEO, the Board, or other business executives on data governance, why it’s important, where investments are needed, and how they must get involved in sponsoring these programs.
So in this week’s episode of 5 Minutes with @NYIke, I provide my three ways to explain data governance. I focus on creating a data vocabulary, limiting risks, avoiding costs from repetitive manual data wrangling, and creating the “back office” for data democratization through citizen data science.
Before you read the rest of this post, I want you to think through your approach to change management.
You're rolling out new technology to a small department and considering how to gain adoption and guide people from old to the new process.
When are you starting the dialog with people in the department? What steps are you taking to get people on board and participate in the journey? How do you measure success, and what steps are you prepared to take when you hit speedbumps?
We all say digital transformation is a journey. We know it's not a project with an end date or a static outcome and more like a portfolio of initiatives and roadmaps that evolve over time.
So, one common question I get when keynoting about digital transformation is, "How do we define and measure the success of digital transformations?"
