>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition. Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event. Is the biz Opps Manifesto unveiling? So the biz Opps manifesto and the biz Opps coalition have been around for a little while, But today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling are excited to have some of the foundational people that put their put their name on the dotted line, if you will, to support this initiative to talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest, we're excited to have his doctor, Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Task Top. Make great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think. Right. >>Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. >>I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us a couple a couple of weeks back, so hopefully things air, uh, getting a little better. And we get those fires under control? >>Yeah, Things have cleared up now, so yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U. S. And it's gonna have the Arabic clean as well. >>Absolutely. So let's let's jump into it. So you you've just been an innovation guy forever Starting way back in the day and Xerox Park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox Park for the first time last year. I mean that that to me represents along with Bell Labs and and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers. That's got to be one of the greatest one. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox Parc. You know, some of the lessons you learn and what you've been ableto kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah, I was fortunate. Joined Xerox Park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then, and the computer science lab where some of the inventions around programming around software development names such as Object of programming and ah, lot of what we had around really modern programming levels construct. Those were the teams that had the fortune of working with and really our goal waas. And of course, there's a Z. You know, this, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really, it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write. Code like this is back in 99 we were looking at new ways of expressing especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are who want to innovate for their business, to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. So we created a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie that former chief actor Microsoft, who is responsible for I actually got a Microsoft word as a out of Xerox Parc and into Microsoft and into the hands of Bill Gates and the company I was behind the whole office suite and his vision and the one I was trying to execute with working for him was to, you know, make Power point like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else fundamentally wrong that programming languages or new ways of building software like Let's try to do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of Dev ops and really this kind of embracing of of, of sprints And, you know, getting away from M. R. D s and P. R. D s and these massive definitions of what we're gonna build and long billed cycles to this iterative process. And that's been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the Biz Ops Coalition? Why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the programming language levels of teams can have. Effective languages deployed softened the club easily now right and at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades decades ago was formed. We were adopting all the all the teams I was involved with on. It's really become a solved problem. So agile tools, agile teams actually of planning are now very mature and the whole challenges when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that Agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the Technology Party organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things. One set of metrics, one set of tools and the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a a whole different set of measures. It's pretty interesting because I think it's >>pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver, because they've got a feature set right and they've got bugs and it's easy. It's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is is disconnect on the business side in terms of, you know, is it the right investment you know. Are we getting the right business? R o I on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or shall we building a completely different products? That so it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resource is you can't Nobody has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to dio. It sounds like that's a really big piece of this of this whole effort. >>Yeah, Jeff, that's exactly it. Which is the way that the adult measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are. Are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of, ah, rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market and those are those are all around the customer. And so what? I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them trying to apply those principles vigilant develops that those are not enough. Those measures technical practices, those measures, technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we needed to go. So I want to shift gears >>a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a best selling author project a product, and and you you brought up this concept in your book called The Flow Framework. And it's really interesting to me because I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow in the process flow, and you know that's how things get done and and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in a little higher level, existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort. Which floor you talking about in your book, or is it a little bit of both. >>That's a great question, is it's not what I gotta ask very often, cause me, it's It's absolutely both. So the thing that we want to get that we've learned how toe and, uh, master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me Holly teachings mentality. There's a beautiful Ted talk about him as well, about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project surprise, How can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How come we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the bazaar manifesto? It says, I focus on Out comes on using data to drive, whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics such as How quickly did we implement this feature? And now it's really how much value did the customs of the future and how quickly did we learn? And how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really, that with companies like Netflix on, like Amazon, have mastered, how do we get that every large organization, every idea, organization and make everyone be a softer innovator. So it's to bring that on the concept of flow to these entering value streams. And the fascinating thing is, we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster developers actually become more happy. So things like that implying that promotes course rise. And we've got empirical data for this. So that beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able thio, combine these two things and and see the results in the data that you increased flow to the customer, your development or more happy. I >>love it. I love it, right, because we're all more. We're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive winner in the flow. So I that is a great melding of two concepts. But let's jump into the into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you know, that took this approach really of having kind of four key values, and he gets 12 key principles and I just want to read a couple these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead, right? Of course. Right. Of course, you should focus on business outcomes. Of course, you should have trust and collaboration. Of course, you should have data based decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever is the loudest person in the room on toe, learn and respond and pivot. But >>what's the >>value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper? Because again, this is not this. These are all good positive things, right? When when somebody reads these to you or tells you these or sticks it on the wall? Of course. But unfortunately, of course, isn't always enough. >>No, I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifested two decades ago. The whole Dev ops movement of the last decade off flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing transformations, have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology innovation is through costs For many organizations, the way that they actually are looking at at their moving to cloud is actually is a reduction in costs, whereas the right way of looking at moving the cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how could quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So, really, the key thing is to move away from those old ways of doing things that funding projects and call centers to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback for how quickly you're innovating for your customer. So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing. To focus on these, you need to actually have accurate real time data off how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not given on data. If you don't know what your bottle like, it's. And this is something that in the decades of manufacturing car manufacturers, other manufacturers master. They always know where the bottom back in their production processes you ask, uh, random. See, I all want a global 500 company where the bottleneck is, and you won't get it there. Answer. Because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you follow like is because that's what's making your developers miserable and frustrated on having them context, which on thrash So it. The approach here is important, and we have to stop doing these other things right. >>There's so much. They're a pack. I love it, you know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as a cost saving device as opposed to an innovation driver, and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And, you know, I think the same thing always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting riel tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors. But the real power, I think in Moore's laws, is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what will you build and design? E think it's funny to your your comment on the flow in the bottleneck, right? Because because we know manufacturing assumes you fix one bottleneck. You move to your next one, right, You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know you're not. You're not increasing that speed down the line unless you can identify where that bottleneck is, or no matter how Maney improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly, and you also make it sound so simple. But again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottleneck is. And but these bottlenecks are just as you said, if it's just lack, um, all right, so we need to understand is the bottleneck, because our security use air taking too long and stopping us from getting like the customer. If it's that automate that process and then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploy yourself through the clouds is taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first rather than again the sort of way cost production first you have taken approach of customer centric city, and you only focus on optimizing cost. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one, these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value your flow time from six months to two weeks or 21 week or two event as we see with tech giants, you actually could both lower your costs and get much more value. Of course, get that learning going. So I think I've I've seen all these cloud deployments and modernizations happen that delivered almost no value because there was such a big ball next up front in the process. And actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going flow first rather than costs. First, there are projects versus Sochi. >>I love that and and and and it begs, repeating to that right within a subscription economy. You know you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customers. It's it's such a different kind of relationship, that kind of the classic, you know, Big Bang with the maintenance agreement on the back end really important. >>Yeah, and I think in terms of industry ship, that's it. That's what catalyzed this industry shift is in this SAS that subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is that divide their customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much. How about how many quality improvements or scaler performance improvements you delivered? So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto was was the forefront of touch on is, if you can't measure how much value delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just back again measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value to survive in in the subscription economy. Mick, >>we could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization. Because right day has been talked about for a long time. The huge big data mean with with Hadoop over over several years and data warehouses and data lakes and data, oceans and data swamps and you go on and on, it's not that easy to do right. And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially were just around the corner from from I, O. T and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale again this is gonna overwhelm, and one of the really interesting principles that I wanted to call out and get your take right is today's organizations generate mawr data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can again, you've got some great historical perspective reflect on how hard it is to get the right data to get the data in the right context and then to deliver to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs, making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah, and Jeff, I think the front part of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into these swamps. As you mentioned, because if you don't have the data and the right format, you can connect, collected that the right way, you're not. Model it that way the right way. You can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there have been the number of data, warehouses and a typical enterprise organization, and the sheer investment is tremendous. But the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've known this is that if you can model your value streams so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery value and how long that takes. What is your time to value through these metrics? Like for the time you can actually use both. You know the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that balance as it the assay, far as you can to the organization. But you can actually start using that those models to understand, find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, Right? Well, you can detect interesting bottle next one you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that we're not intuitive to me that had to do with more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually organization. That was very good at working from home because of our open source route. So the data is highly complex. Software Valley streams are extremely complicated, and the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front, part of what you said, is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all the tools, but not modeled in the right way. >>Well, all right, so before I let you go, you know? So you get a business leader he buys in. He reads the manifesto. He signs on the dotted line. He says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with With the development teams, you know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data driven. How do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early winds, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative, >>right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website. Uh, on the is a manifesto, but the key thing is just it's exactly what you said, Jeff. It's to get started and get the key wins. So take a probably value stream. That's mission critical. It could be your new mobile Web experiences, or or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analysts pipeline. But take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the entire inflow of value. Make sure you have a volumetric that everyone is on the same page on, right. The people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO and one of the where I encourage you to start is actually that enter and flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization. That is the one metric that even Cockcroft when people I respect tremendously put in his cloud for CEOs Metric 11 way to measure innovation. So basically, take these principles, deployed them on one product value stream measure into and flow time on. Then you'll actually you well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and develops all the way to the business to the way in your operating model. >>Well, Mick, really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and and get into this, because I just I just love the perspective. And, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox parc. And it's, you know, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So the to incorporate that and to continue to spread that wealth, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>Alright. And go to the biz ops manifesto dot org's Read it. Check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the Cube. I'm Jeffrey. Thanks for watching. See you next time.