(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the BizOps Manifesto Power panel talking about, "Embracing Agility Across the Business." I'm Lisa Martin, there are three guests here with me today, to break down this topic. Pierre Viljoen, CTO at Global Head of Enterprise Technology and Governance at HTL Enterprise Studio. Hey Pierre, welcome. >> Thank you >> Lisa: Dave West is also here, the CEO of Scrum.org. Hey Dave, good to have you with us. >> Hi Lisa, hi everybody. >> Lisa: And Serge Lucio is here as well, the general manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Hey Serge, good to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about the people and the process and technology requirements that businesses need to adopt to be able to embrace agility across the business. We're going to also be talking a lot about this inaugural BizOps industry research survey, on the state of digital business. A lot of very interesting findings that we're going to go through in the next 20 minutes or so. So the first question guys is, the BizOps survey found that over 519 individuals over five countries business and technology executives. This survey found, most organizations still expect this year to be as challenging as last year. I want you to kind of walk us through why that is, and how is that going to impact digital transformation initiatives? Pierre, we'll start with you, then Dave, then Serge. >> Sure, thank you Lisa. So, I think these days, disruption is no longer an exception. It's kind of become the norm or the rule, in terms of how we operate. And as executives in companies have learned over the last year, with everything that's happened is that, you can only modernize to a point, and then you need to do a little bit more. And what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we're actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way, in a more fluent way, from an organizational perspective. And I think our current midterm goal, probably, is that we're capable of remodeling how we can remove roadblocks. These kinds of roadblocks in the future, and get us in a better position where we are. I don't expect things to change dramatically over the next year. More in line with us making sure that we're more future proof in the way in which we're working. >> We still have remote workers, global uncertainty, the vaccine. Dave, what are your thoughts on the impact of this year on digital transformation initiatives? >> Yeah, it's funny. When I think of, sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill, but unfortunately it's literally like rolling down a hill, these chaos and complexity. It's getting faster and faster and harder and harder. We're talking about the new norm, right? What is the new normal? We just don't know. And I think the reality is that most organizations were surprised by the impact of COVID-19 and because of that, they responded very quickly. Many of them, people were working at home, they're looking at their supply chain, looking at localization, all sorts of really important things happen, but very quickly, not very strategically. I think the next few years we're going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world. We've sort of entered the digital age, Lisa, this next age of innovation, we have moved out of mass production and the age of oil, into something very, very different. And I think those organizations, every organization out there is going to have to get a handle on that and COVID was the wake up, right? And I think the next five years are going to be very interesting. >> I agree with you that that accelerant was, I didn't think of it before as a big ball rolling downhill. And now I don't think I'm going to be able to get that out of my head. But Serge, talk to us about your thoughts, the impacts to digital transformation initiatives. >> Yeah, I think back to what Dave was describing. The big challenge is the uncertainty. Many organizations are faced with, currently, a lot of unknowns about, if and when things will go back to, quote unquote, some kind of normality. And with that kind of uncertainty, there's a lot of challenges to the planning from an investment point of view. So, Dave was talking about a short-term versus long-term Like, a lot of these organizations are basically focused on just getting by over the next 12 months and trying to figure out what needs to happen over the next 12 months. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges with respect to readiness and uncertainty. And so, in that context, you got kind of this tension between, "How much do I invest short term "on basically tactical initiatives, "How do I care about teams? "How do I enable these teams "to deliver in weeks as opposed to months? "And then at the same time, "how do I continue to invest "to fundamentally change my operating model?" And that tension is very real. Within many of the organizations we serve. >> One of the things that the survey found was that most of the respondents were very willing to embrace being more agile in order to be able to better respond to rapidly changing market conditions. But I want to get your opinion on what that actually really means, that willingness to embrace being agile. What does it really mean? And what do organize organizations have to do differently? Pierre, I'll start with you. >> Sure, I think we had a discussion a while back and Dave actually got into something interesting where he said, without quoting a famous sneaker brand, just go out and do it. I think that's probably the most important part of this. Most organizations are struggling to figure out, "How should we embrace Agile? "Should we jump in at full scale now? "Should we be looking Scrum? "Should we be doing Scrum-Falls? "Should we be falling over our own feet?" Nobody knows exactly, what might be the right sector? I think the most important part is to pick up a pair of solid principles that you're going to embrace, start executing on them, start learning as you go, and basically improve as you move forward. Over the last year, we've embraced digital product management quite a lot on our side. And it's had tremendous benefits without us, per se, aiming for those benefits at the end of the day. And these are things that you learn as you go. And if you're going to wait around, analysis paralysis is going to be the killer of Agile at the end of day >> "Just do it," I like that. Good advice. Dave, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I think that what's really interesting is, Agile has been around for 20 years. The manifesto was signed 20 years ago. Scrum came into the world 25 years ago. All of these sort of Agile approaches, but they were predominantly focused on technology. And I think that one thing that I've noticed, over and over again, is that the realization by C-level executives, level sevens, or whatever they're called, they've realized that it's not about technology. (chuckles) It's great, the technologies. I guess the technology's always worked in this complex world because customers never knew what they wanted. We didn't know how are we going to do it. We'd never worked together before. We didn't know how much it was going to cost. So, because of that (chuckles) we had to work in an agile way in technology. But ultimately, I think, one of the big differences going forward, is going to be that, there I say that intersection of business and technology, that BizOps kind of model that we talked about in the manifesto, and what the survey was really trying to tease out. I think that's really, really going to be interesting. And I don't know what that actually means, in terms of the execution. I hope it means that we're going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes. I hope it means that we're going to actually allow those teams that are actually know what they're approaching to make decisions. I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we're going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do. I hope it means all of these things. But we will wait and see, because experience would indicate that after a big disaster, lots of people tend to go back to exactly how they worked before, with that sort of emus kind of mentality or ostrich or whatever things sticks its head in the ground. I don't know. >> Sometimes we just want to go back to when things were safe and normal. But in terms of kind of following on, Dave, what you said, 94%, in this survey, 94% of respondents said we should adopt BizOps to increase competitiveness. So, that willingness is there in a vast majority of the respondents. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on what that willingness actually means and what they need to do differently. >> Yes. The problem is that, I think everybody understand that you have to be agile, right? You need to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs. You need to put the customer at the center of everything you do, right? So, conceptually, everybody understands that. The problem is really the operating model that many of these large organizations are dealing with to this day, right? So, you have these sort of Berkeley, kind of organized organization, with functional roles, specialized roles. And when you think about kind of generally, well, one of the big challenges is that you need to start to think horizontally, right? You need to start to start to think about what kind of value streams and what part of the cross functional teams that need to be organized and integrated to deliver on specific business outcomes. You need to start shifting from the traditional contract-based model that(indistinct) to a model which is much more based on trust, right? And we need to move away from vanity measurements and KPIs that many of the organizations typically lead by, to really focus on one thing and one thing only, which is that business value has been delivered. So, fundamentally, I think it requires a bit of a redesign of the operating model in these organizations. And one where, especially when you have a risk adversed kind of organizations, you need to start to be more accepting of risk, fundamentally. >> More accepting of risk. You brought something up there starts that I want to tackle in the next question with respect to culture. But one of the things that the survey uncovered was an interesting kind of seeming contradiction. The majority of respondents said, "We agreed, digital transformation "is about business outcomes "more than it is about technology." But 62% said, "We're still adopting technology for technology's sake." What does that actually mean? And what's the kind of cultural impact there for organizations to really get that more aligned on the digital transformation and the technology and the business outcomes? Pierre, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So, I think there were a number of reports this year talking about what's happened, what's not happened, and the majority of them focused on the fact that, as tech leaders, for years we've been praying to the gods to get budget approved to do all kinds of modernization activities to our infrastructure, our IT, tools, et cetera. And, lo and behold, the ball comes rolling down the hill, smashes a few things and we basically get some blank checks. So, we run around and we buy a whole bunch of stuff to modernize and to embrace this ability to do things differently. And in that whole process, what we basically did was buy more tools and buy more technology. And in that whole process, we didn't really embrace what it is that we're trying to achieve. So, basically aligning the technology to the actual business requirements getting closer to the customer, being able to understand where our market's moving, how we're capable of reducing the journey, if I can put it that way, and make sure that we're more aligned to where we need to be. So, although a lot of CIOs and CTOs got away with doing a lot of great stuff over the last year and users like me are like, "Ooh! I don't have to worry "about stupid VPNs and things anymore." That all went away. But in the same instance, I didn't really get anything that changed the organizational dynamic, which is a challenge. We still have the fundamental problems we have because the business leaders are not yet embracing the deep monitor of the processes that are supported by the technology. And then driving that in such a way that we can gain more business value which is important. To Serge's previous point, we're doing all these great things but we're not focusing on the incremental value that we're supposed to be getting. >> Dave, did it surprise you that there was this seemingly contradictory response? Yes, it's more about business outcomes and technology, but we're still adopting technology for technology's sake. What are your thoughts on that? And how can organizations actually start to move the needle on that? >> E-comm by cultural change, right? But you do know that your board and your leadership want you to do something, and the easiest thing you can do is buy something. I'm a sort of now an American, so, that's kind of my mantra in life, right? "When in doubt go shopping." Which is fantastic, just for the record. (Lisa laughs) But so, you've got to be seen to be doing something, whether it's replacing a VPN, which is always a fun thing to do, or whether it's getting on Slack. Everyone's going to be on Slack. that's going to help. But actually the core is that, exactly what Serge and Pierre have been saying all along, it's that, "Okay. So what is our business all about? "What are our customers? "what did they actually need? "What do our employees need? "How do we build a better value stream "from customer to the organization? "How do we align our teams to that? "How do we incentivize correctly "both the employees that are working "and our partners that are providing things "in this supply chain. How do we do all of those things?" Ultimately though, that means that we have to take a step back which is a very frustrating thing at the moment. And actually look at what is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers? Take a moment to find what those are. And then, soon as we have that, and we don't have to do it. As Pierre said, we don't have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally. Organizations are very inward looking. That is the industrial mindset. That is that paradigm. It's looking, as Serge talked about, silos, "optimizing my department," "optimizing my budget, optimizing my kingdom." And what we're talking about is something that cross cuts all of that. So, the decision making is going to change around where the investments go and that's going to be really, really challenging. So, I'm not surprised, I'm not at all surprised that everybody says we should be doing this. And it's like classic. Everybody says we need to be fitter, but we're still all not fit. (Serge laughs) It's sort of, that's just the reality of the world that we live in, right? But we have to start making a stand. And the place we begin is customers. That's the place. And as soon as we start doing that, then everything else just becomes quite easy, actually. >> I like that. Focus on customers and it becomes easy. Serve, I'm kidding. What are your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think Dave summarized it well. It's very easy to just buy a tool or buy something, right? Fundamentally changing kind of an operating model is very difficult, but you need to fundamentally rethink for instance, all the responding initiatives. So, something as mundane as, You know, as a leader in my organization I have a budget, right? What's my incentive of collaborating with my peers in terms of delivering credible analysis form. And so, that to me kind of a fundamental shift that we need to operate, and that's probably one of the reasons why many of our largest organizations that we're serving are starting to introduce some new roles like a Chief Digital Officer, as kind of a way to kind of bring kind of a slightly different organization design. The challenge, though, is that, well, all of these teams are still kind of integrated with this fabric of these large systems which exist. So when we look at these value streams, in fact they're not independent from one another. You have a bunch of interdependencies. You are looking at kind of networks of these value streams. But the fundamental shift that we need to see is what we want these organizations to think about, ultimately with the part of the products or services that need to be focused on, all of these become kind of the primary things that we measure from point of view, and how do we align teams and projects and funding along these kinds of outcomes? >> So being customer focused, also being more broadly focused you mentioned the Chief Digital Officer role, which has an interesting role. It's supposed to look more, holistically, internally and externally. And we know that these organizations know we need to be better at this. like Dave's joke about we know we need to be more fit. But what's it going to take to actually create that collaboration, so that IT and business leaders are really working in lockstep and doing so in a timely fashion, so, that they're able to stay competitive. I do want to know from each of you, are you seeing examples of this already in progress? Pierre, let's start with you. >> I can only give you another example and say, one of the interesting things that we did was we try to embrace the delivery of services at HR in kind of a different frame this year, and kind of productize the services that we deliver. Now, if you're most people, you're trying to think about, "How do I set up things like communities "of practice and collaboration between people so "that they can work together on developing new services "new features, new products, et cetera." And we set out with creating this agile way of working. What we didn't anticipate, which was a very nice side effect, is that, because of COVID, because of the catalyst that it provided us, the remote working, people sense of ownership is inherently there. Meaning that self-organization of teams started happening. Nobody needed to crack a whip to get a bunch of guys to talk together with one another to figure out how to get stuff done. It's not like you could walk over to the water cooler and have a chat to Bob. Bob is a thousand miles away, or Bobby's sitting in another State. So, all of a sudden, all dynamic changed. And I have to say, people are a lot more resilient than what they're being given credit for. And if, as organizations, we embrace the culture in such a way and harness it in a positive way, we can actually get this movement to happen. And we actually can make the sum of the parts to be more than the whole. And this year we've seen that happen. And by no means, are we done 'cause we still have a lot of work to do, like Serge said, we have budgets, and budgets give you finite amount of movement left or right. Then you have to do what's best and possible within the frame that you're given. But I think embracing the cultural change and helping people to really excel at that and empowering them makes a huge difference in the way that you can get stuff done. >> Absolutely. Dave, what are your thoughts on this? >> I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, I think. I'm not a big fan of Chief Digital Officers. It just seems like we've got a problem. And some would argue that, "Well, if you've got a problem with somebody "you should get a coach" and all this stuff "and you get it sorted." And that's probably a good thing. But most digital officers, they're going to build a long-term career and create yet another stove pipe and that stove pipe's responsible for bringing all the other stove pipes together. It sounds a bit odd. If a digital officer is really there as a short term enabler, 'cause you asked IT and business leaders, trying to get them to work together better. The best business leaders (bell dings) know about IT, right? The best business leaders are IT sanctuary. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are great business leaders, but they know about technology, right? That's what brings them together. Technology is an asset and they may not be the most biggest expert in it, but they care deeply about learning about that stuff. So, I think the next few years we're going to see a lot of C-level and leaders in organizations become a lot more tech savvy, and maybe hire coaches to help them navigate. And the Chief Digital Officer will become more of a coach rather than a person that rolls out Slack or something, you know? (Pierre laughs) So, I think that is going to be the next big jump, really, when we realize that you don't get an additional thing. It's just part of what you do. >> Serge, agree, disagree? >> I agree. The reality is that it is happening, right? Don't get me wrong. We see that every day that so many States are highly integrated, organizations and teams are measuring business value, business outcomes. The problem is that it's oftentimes a very small subset of what these organizations are doing. And so, it's almost like the CEO is coming as kind of these new kind of, as Dave described. And it's got this new style organization which is really there to kind of scale what has been working with these organizations, but we're kind of creating this kind of almost shadow organization, as opposed to fundamentally rethinking and redesigning the organization and redesigning kind of the operating model. And so, we're kind of layering new stuff as opposed to fundamentally transforming. So, as long as it is just kind of just a step towards kind of a true transformation, I think that's fine. The challenge is to, again, create kind of a new set of silos, which are now called value streams, as opposed to young functional silos that we have today. >> So a lot of opportunities identified in this survey but there are still a lot of challenges there. So, I'd love to get you guys and our final question here in this panel to help us understand, from the BizOps coalition's perspective, how are you helping organizations to navigate these challenges, so, they can become successful, transform and actually become agile to respond to rapidly changing market conditions? Pierre, kick us off. >> Sure, from a coalition perspective, we're just trying to make sure that there's a set of sensible principles. That people can look at, can adopt that I think Dave mentioned it in another discussion, that give you that clarity of thought and mind in terms of what should you be thinking? How should you be thinking about it? What are the various aspects you need to consider? And then from that perspective, how do you implement these things in a sensible way for your organization? By no means is this this like, "Here are the 10 steps, you do them, and you're done." You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. It's not how it work. You're still going to have to work at it. You're still going to have to figure some stuff out. You're going to have to deep in yourself in your organizational policies, procedures, understand how the organization is actually working. You can't strap a V8 to Mini Cooper and expect to break the land speed record, without the wheels falling off, or something going wrong. So, you really need to harness that in a more sensible manner to move forward. And I think the coalition is on the right path to help organizations realize, "what is the sensible way to go?" "What are principles we can adopt "that we can abide by that will help us drive business "in a different way and close this chasm of disparity "between business and IT?" >> And Dave, your perspective on the BizOps coalition, helping organizations to sort through these challenges. >> Yeah. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story. So, I must admit that I wasn't keen on the whole idea, and Serge sent me some stuff and he's like, "Could you just provide some feedback." And I did, and then there was a press release with my name on it. I saw, I was like, "Oh my God! "I better get involved because I don't want to "have my name associated "with something that doesn't make sense" But I've actually been surprisingly, I've actually found it a lot more positive than I thought because of exactly what Pierre's saying. So, basically, the coalition is a group of vendors, a bucolic of consultants, some pseudo thought leaders that think they are very thoughtful and maybe they're not, people like me. (Pierre laughs) And what we're doing though, is actually trying to get some clarity of terminology, get some clarity of, what are the principles? What are those key principles? How do they relate to each other? Get some, some synergy to allow, 'cause there's so much noise out there. And hopefully, this is going to say, "Okay, this is what BizOps is. "This is why it's important. "These are some simple things." And then hopefully, because of the breadth that Serge and others have managed to get in terms of membership, we're going to get all of those organizations to be consistently talking about these things, which will then create pressure on the market to actually start adopting these things in the way that we're proposing, or challenge those ideas and then make them better. So, I'm kind of excited about it, surprisingly, 'cause the last thing we need is yet another manifesto and group of people that spend their whole time talking about things and never getting anything done. But actually I think there might be some valuable stuff that comes out here and we're going to inspect and adapt to make sure it is valuable. And if it isn't, we will stop. (chuckles) (Lisa laughs) >> And Serge, strap us up with your thoughts and extending that value. >> Look, we started the BizOps manifesto really with kind of a very simple observation. Everybody's talking about the same stuff, right? But you have a value stream management church, the digital product management's church, the DevOps church, with Scrum church, the safe church. Right? But we're all saying the same thing. But we create so much confusion with our large enterprise customers, but it's just not a grain on a set of principles. And just saying like, look, fundamentally, we're all talking about the same thing. And there are process aspects, there are cultural aspects. There is what you measure. But fundamentally we agree on the same core set of principles. And so for me, the BizOps manifesto, first and foremost is to get the stakeholders from these different communities together, and recognize that, at the end of the day, we share the same values and create some clarity to the market as to how these pieces fit to one another. The second aspect, which is more from our point of view, as one of the vendors of tools, right? There's tons of tools out there. We talk a lot about kind of measuring business outcomes as a primary way to actually align to everybody in our organization. Well, today if you look at any of these organizations, on average, they use about 40 different tools on one of these value streams. None of that stuff integrates with one another. It's extremely difficult for an organization to be able to trace from an investment, all the way to stuff that delivers value and production to a customer. And so, one of my hopes for the coalition is that we start to actually provide some platform, data models, ontologies, to start to integrate those different tools to facilitate that kind of integration. So, those are kind of the two things which I think we can really help kind of develop and and improve on. >> Well, we know that there's a tremendous amount of folks out there that are wanting to embrace agility across the business, identifying areas where they need to do work. So, great advice from the three of you. Thank you so much for joining me on this power panel today and sharing what organizations can do to really embrace that agility across the organization. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pierre Viljoen, Dave West and Serge Lucio. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)