>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, talking about a pretty interesting topic. You probably haven't heard of it, but you're going to know a lot of the attributes and it's going to sound very familiar. And that's BizOps, the concept of BizOps. We've heard about DevOps and DevSecOps and a whole bunch of ops, but BizOps is really a new twist and a new way to think about this. And we're excited to have the woman who actually wrote the book on the topic. She's Laureen Knudsen. She's a Chief Transformation Officer from Broadcom. She's also the co-author of the "Modern Business Management: Creating a Built-to-Change Organization", and a founding member of the BizOps Coalition. Laureen, great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely. For people that aren't familiar with BizOps, give us kind of the quick high level. What is BizOps? >> BizOps is a new way of doing business. Just like Agile changed engineering and DevOps changed how we put things into production, BizOps is changing from soup to nuts. So from concept to cash or strategy to execution, right. There's a lot of... This has been talked about for a few years now, but this is formalizing that structure. So what do you need to do to truly have your strategy linked to your customer base? And so it's creating that umbrella over all of these other ops processes that brings it all together to tie the top to the bottom. >> Right. So, DevOps, right, fundamentally changed, the way the software gets developed. There used to be waterfall, it used to be data market's development document and then a product requirements document, then you put together a plan and you code it for six months or nine months, threw it over the Wall operations, and then hopefully they delivered. That doesn't happen anymore. And that was really set forth about 20 years ago when this kind of revolution happened on the software side. So what's been happening on the business side, and why now do they need their own ops to be pulled into this process? >> Well, sort of in the same way that things happened in the late 1990s, where certain organizations started to realize that that wasn't the most efficient way to create software and came together and created the Agile Manifesto. We've realized that there's certain things in doing business that make us much more effective and efficient. Things like bringing a data stream from the top to the bottom so every level of the organization has the data they need to run their business. Having that trust run throughout the organization, having that communication and that transparency from the strategy to the execution. You know, the global economy is just in dire straits right now, and the world is moving faster than ever. And so being able to respond to that change is vital at all levels of the organization. >> So you wrote the book years ago, I'm sure you've speaking to ton of business leaders, you know, as an author of the book, what were the biggest inhibitors to kind of the adoption of these ops and there must have been something, because why then did you found this coalition? What was the, you know, kind of the founding principle behind the coalition? >> Well, a bunch of industry leaders have come together to realize that in the same way that development needed to change in the early 2000s, really business needs to change today. And to your point, we've been talking about this for a while. Different companies are doing it better than others. And the ones that are doing this well are really heads and tails succeeding above the others. So, it's not easy though. It's not easy to change an entire organization and to change the way you do business. So, the coalition is bringing together some principles and values. We've come together to talk about how we're doing business differently and what actually works. And the main things you need to focus on in order to ensure success. >> Right. But you did it loud and proud with this declarative manifesto and then an event, actually, later this month that you're going to have to really unveil the manifesto, October 15th. I think it's 9:00, or excuse me, >> 11: 00 AM Eastern, 8:00 AM Pacific. Manifesto, right? Just the word manifesto, elicits all types of, kind of emotional response and really strong declarative statement of purpose and mission. So, why the manifesto and what's really the key pieces of the manifesto? >> You know, you need the principles that go along to help you change people, process and technology. And a lot of folks are focusing only on the technology and the data that comes from that technology and all that is key and vital to the way that you run your business differently. It's not the only piece. And so we need to focus on how do we get to bring the people along with us, how do we change our processes to be more efficient and effective. And the four values and the principles that we've created as this coalition, really help companies to do that more easily and to know they're on the right track, in the same way that the Agile principles and the values that brought out in the Agile Manifesto did. >> Right. So, I have a preview version here of the values. And I think it is really important for people to stay kind of fundamental values. 'Cause then everything builds from that and if there's ever a question, you can go back to the values as of a reference point. But just to read a few of, you know, business outcomes over individual projects, trust and collaboration over siloed teams and organizations, data-driven decisions over opinions and judgment calls, and finally, learn responded pivot over following a documented plan. And that seems so, right, so simple and so foundational and so fundamental to the way business works today. But the fact that you have to put this coalition together, and the fact that you're publishing this manifesto, tells me that the adoption really isn't where it should be. And this is really a new way to try to drive the adoption of these values. >> Absolutely. I mean, everybody seems to understand that they need to focus on their customers and that they need to focus on outcomes, but you can't just take something, you know, once you have work in progress and say, well, what's the value of this one piece of work. You have to have started at the beginning to come with the right outcome you're trying to meet, and then ensure that you're doing that all along the path to creating that and to bringing that to your customer base. It's focusing on your customers and creating the trust with your customers as well as through your organization. The data is really vital. Being able to run our businesses on real data and know the reality of the situation rather than at status reports that were created by people saying, yeah, I'm done, but there's no definition of done, right? It's fundamentally changing how we do business, which sounds easy. But as we know because of the Agile transformations that we've done and DevOps transformations that we've done, it's not as easy as it sounds. >> Right. So, why not just try to include more of the business people in the DevOps process? Why the strategy to have BizOps as kind of a standalone activity and again, to have the coalition and manifesto, that means it's super important. Can't the business people participate in the DevOps, or why has that not really been effective? >> It's really a different part of the business. And BizOps is a framework that pulls together all of these other operational pieces. So, security, operations, you know, how do you get something from engineering out to your customers, really were DevOps focuses, right? So, that's great. But running your business includes a lot more than your IT organization or your engineering teams. So this really expands out and brings in all of the rest of the business for how you sell software, how you plan, how you fund your teams, how you look at the work from that high strategic level and ensuring that you create that solid pipeline of data so that you truly know the status of any strategy in your organization. I was working with one group who had really good strategies and they had really good execution and they found that they spent over $100 million annually rolling up that data to try and understand the true status of their strategies. So companies are spending and are being very inefficient in, you know, they're spending millions of dollars on trying to do this link where if you just fundamentally change the way you do business a little bit, day to day, you can have that as a natural outcome of your processes. >> Right. 'Cause you've talked about on some of this stuff about using it as a way to do prioritization and to make sure you're not spending money places that you shouldn't. Another thing that strikes me as I go through the principles are, again, things that in 2020 should not be new information, you know, frequent changes, which was not part of the old paradigm. Trust and transparency. And I think you even tied it back into one of the articles I saw, tying trust and transparency really back to employee engagement, which then drives profitability and productivity. So I wonder if you can talk about the role of trust and in your conversations with people, as you've been kind of developing this idea over the years since the book, getting leaders to, you know, to trust their people, to do what that needs to be done rather than managing tasks, you know, manage the outcome, not manage tasks. >> Right. This is really important. Having trust in your organizations, especially today when everyone's remote, right? And in almost every company in the globe right now, most of their employees are working from their houses. You can't really do command and control well when no one is sitting in your building with you. So being able to have that trust to truly trust in your employees, you know, we spend a lot of money on all of these technical folks that we hire, and then we put people in place to try and direct them what to do on a daily basis. And so having... Building that trust within your organization, and it goes both ways, right? Employees need to trust the leadership, leadership needs to trust the employees, but it's not just from the top level to the end level, right? To the team level. It's actually every level in the middle. So this is truly pulling the pieces of work that we've done over the past few years through the entire organization. It's getting rid of what we call that frozen middle, of middle management and making sure that trust is aligned in there as well. And that the communication and transparency is working through that part of the organization. >> Right. Another principle I want to highlight is talking about the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Clearly, we all know, right, data's exploding, et cetera, et cetera, and we want to get the data driven decisions. But what this really calls out is that there's probably more data, both in terms of frequency and complexity, than people can really sift through, in terms of finding what they should be working on and what's important and what's not, you know, the classic separating the signal from the noise. I wonder if you can speak to a little bit about the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as an enhancer to productivity in this BizOps world versus a threat to people's jobs. >> Absolutely. I mean, like I said already that there's some companies spending $100 million rolling up data on things that computers can do today, even without machine learning and an AI. But when we put that into place, it really doesn't replace people any more than DevOps removed people from the organization. We automated a lot in testing yet we still have test organizations. It's just a different focus and a way of doing business. And this is no different. I'm seeing a lot of companies though start to try and throw all of their data together. And I've recently started saying that they're creating data land fields when they're attempting to create data lakes. And so you really need to understand your data that you're collecting and why you're collecting it and what outcomes you're trying to get from that data so that you can understand your business and you're not just creating, to your point, more noise. >> Right. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the event that's coming up on the 15th, about, you know, kind of, what is the role of the coalition? How should people get involved, what's membership all about, and then what can they expect to happen on the 15th? >> We have 10 industry leaders that have come together to author the BizOps Manifesto. And it's everyone from influencers, transformation experts, CEOs of a lot of companies or of organizations. We have people like Evan Leybourn of the Business Agility Institute and Sally Elatta from AgilityHealth, who have come to help author this and are really transformational leaders across the globe. And to get involved, you can go to bizopsmanifesto.org. and you can sign the manifesto. You can align to that if, you know, if you want to bring this into your own organization, we're happy to help work with that as well. So it's a group of industry leaders who are here to help the globe get more efficient and effective in how they do business. >> It's really interesting, right. It's not really an open source project, but it is kind of a co-opetition in terms of, you know, you're reaching out to lots of different companies and lots of different leaders to participate. They may or may not be competitive, but really this is more kind of an industry, kind of productivity thing, if you will, to bring all these people together at the coalition. Would that be accurate? >> It is accurate, but we're also looking to have competitors. I mean, we've... Competitors is an interesting thing today because there's no company just uses one company software, for example, to automate all of their pieces, right? There's all of these products that have to come together and share data today in the same way that we needed to share, you know, access to software. In the past, integrations were really difficult and now, you know, everyone's got open APIs. It's a very similar thing with data today. And so we are working with our competitors and we're working with, you know, like you said, industry leaders. We have Mik Kersten from Tasktop as part of this as well. We're looking at how we can benefit the companies of the world today, much more efficiently and effectively than we have in the past. So it is a group of people who compete with each other, maybe on a daily basis, but also have the same customers and have the need to help companies today, especially in this economy with the pandemic, right. There's a lot of companies in dire straits right now and we all need to come together as business leaders to help those companies get through this time. And anything that we can do to do that is going to benefit us all in the long run. >> Right. You know, it is really interesting co-opetition, is like you say, most companies have everybody's, you know, a lot of different products and people compete as well as having API connections and having all kinds of interesting relationships. So the lines are not so clean, like they used to be. And as we've seen with DevOps, you know, significant delta in the productivity and the responsiveness and the way software is delivered. So, sounds super exciting. We'll look forward to the event on the 15th. I give you the last word. What are you looking most forward to for the big launch in a couple of weeks? >> I'm really excited for people to give us their feedback on what they think and how this benefits them. And I'm excited to help our customers and help the, you know, the big companies of the world get through these next 18 months. I think we're all in for a bit more of a struggled time, you know, at a difficult time, and anything that we can all do to work together. So I'm looking forward to working with other industry leaders on this as well, and to the benefit of, you know, the global economy. >> Right. Well, great. Well, Laureen, thank you for giving us the one on one on BizOps. Really appreciate it. And best of luck to you and good luck to you and the team on the 15th. >> Thanks so much. >> Alrighty. Thank you. All right, she's Laureen, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music begins)