So we're going to focus here on some of the folks that are, you know, right at the ground level working with customers and helping them through those big challenges. That of course is Datalink that's here with me today. Datalink has cloud and virtualization practices and work with many technology providers to help them understand and take advantage of many of the new technologies that are available today. Hey, so special broadcast from the Wikibon Studio in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Joining me for this segment are Kent Christiansen, who is a CUBE alum. We've had him on at EMC World talking about Converged Infrastructure. And Kent is the virtualization practice director. Kent, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. Great. And also we have Mark Myers, who's first time on the CUBE. And you are the cloud service management director. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here. Great. So gentlemen, with the setup that we have that, you know, there's so many changes that customers need to think about. And the way IT has done has changed a lot. Mark, Datalink's been around for 20 years now. Can you talk to us a little bit about what Datalink does and how what you've done has changed over those times from a technology standpoint? Datalink started, as you said, about 20 years ago. It started as a hardware technology reseller focused on storage. As the industry evolved and we started moving, especially as we moved into more and more virtualization, more and more technology, and the climate has become much more complex, Datalink has also evolved. Over the last couple of years, Datalink has started developing close relationships with not only the clients, but with advanced services. What we're looking at is how do we bring more than just technology to our clients? So that is they're trying to figure out how they best play and where IT fits into their business. We're actually helping them move IT from just a data center or the wall group to actually a partner in IT as a service. Mark, can you tell us a little bit about geographically and what kind of headcount you guys have? Datalink has approximately 500 people spread across the U.S. We've got, if you break it down, everything that we do is driven by partnering with the clients throughout so that we've got a very large technical team on the order of over 200 people. We have the sales team that goes out and helps work with clients. And the idea is not just to look to see what they want from a technology piece, but what is their business doing? So the sales team is almost 100 people and then we're developing a new division called Advanced Services. And right now that team is about 50 people. The idea of Advanced Services is how do we partner better with the client? Great. And I love the services focus that you guys have. Obviously, there's certain technology players that you guys work with. Can you give us a little bit of that spread? Can I pass that to Kent? Talk about some of our technology? Yeah, so we have very strategic partnerships. You know, we're here with EMC down the road, NetApp, Atachi Data System, Cisco, VMware, Symantec. So those are examples of what we call strategic partners. And then we have partnerships with a lot of other leading edge technologies, best of breed technologies that fit into those overall solutions. Okay, great.  Let's talk about what you're seeing from the Converge Infrastructure market. Obviously, you guys are working with Cisco, you said EMC, NetApp, who's got their FlexPod partnership, Atachi, who's got a play in that position. What are you seeing in the Converge Infrastructure market and how is that maturing from your point of view? Yeah, so as you mentioned, we've been in that for quite some time as it was, Mark was pointing out that we were evolving as our customers were evolving and the challenges they were trying to meet. We knew just selling storage didn't make sense. So we started building and working with our leading providers in Converge Infrastructure. A lot of that is around Cisco, feeds into EMC infrastructures and VCE infrastructures and FlexPods and even some of the variants of Atachi. Certainly our customers are under a lot of pressure to meet the bottom line and one of the ways they do that is leveraging more of a unified and converged infrastructure. So we have invested in that heavily over the last three to four years, created a leadership position in that. We offer a lot of the different solutions that the customers can consider and can help them compare and contrast. It's a market that by almost any measure is growing very, very rapidly. So when Wikibon looks at the Converge Infrastructure base, we think it's much more than just kind of wrapping a bunch of pieces into a single hardware. Wikibon CTO David Floyer actually said that the further up the stack you go, kind of exponentially how much more value is added. If we look about how solutions are integrated, probably the one that's most integrated out there is Oracle. They own the entire stack, they put a red stack together. If you look at what VCE is doing, what NetApp is doing, they're adding applications and specialized systems. But you guys play a part in kind of that application piece. Can you talk to that some? Absolutely. So it is about delivering the application, and it is about delivering business value and being more efficient. And so one of the roles that Converge Infrastructure plays is it gives me a head start. So I'm not starting with pieces from multiple vendors and trying to figure out how these things wire together. It takes risk. I'm going to go and deploy a new architecture. Am I the first one to ever do that? It doesn't work, and that's a lot of the value prop that VCE brings. It does an ordinary amount of testing. But as you pointed out, then there's also the application testing that the organizations do that says, well, if I really wanted to roll out Oracle or SAP or something like that on an infrastructure, has it been tested and can we leverage that testing? So definitely it's about delivering the applications and delivering the value. Okay, so it sounds like you're also helping kind of that last mile of the application, because no matter how much testing has been done, in general, how do I get that into kind of my full stack environment? Is that true? Yeah, I think to imply Converge Infrastructure starts to lead into cloud and delivering IT as a service, et cetera, and to kind of think that a product, right, it's more of a solution, right? What are you trying to accomplish in your business? Let me bring solutions that meet those needs and help you accelerate your time to market and things like that. So if you look at it as I've got a product and I'm going to go sell it to you, that usually doesn't work as well now, is architecting something into their environment. So we have the, there's still a lot of work to do over and beyond a Converged Infrastructure. One is to make sure we get the right stuff to meet your need. Two is how do we get the applications onto it, right? And then three is Mark will elaborate on is, you know, how do we get into automating that and creating, you know, a cloud-like service offering, which a lot of them are good foundations for. And then once I have those pieces in place, what is it I'm trying to do? What will actually meet the business need and what are the services that I should be automating? Great. So you brought up cloud and of course cloud can mean many things to many people. Private cloud, you know, built on Converged Infrastructure, you know, obviously is growing pretty great here. Mark, I wonder if we can come back to you. You've got your cloud practice. How do you, how do you start that discussion, you know, with the CIO, with the IT team as to how they approach cloud, which I guess for this discussion I'll say, you know, cloud's going to include everything, you know. Salesforce has their Dreamforce conference going on right now as, you know, one of the early software as a service solutions out there. We were just at Amazon's conference, which has, you know, infrastructure as a service, and you've got private cloud solutions like what you were offering. My understanding is you help them, you know, but can you unpack that a little bit for us? Yeah, and that actually is probably one of the most common questions we get right now is what cloud do we need? And we say, okay, deep breath, step back. And we start with a service catalog. One of the big areas that we're finding is that as public cloud is available, business units are going to almost the public cloud immediately because they can get it fast and get it agile and then get what they need. Yeah, swipe it with a credit card and you're off to go. And T departments are saying, but we're trying to meet their needs. So that's why we say, let's step back and let's start getting a business alignment and business requirements how the company operates really drives where they use the cloud. Most of our clients will end up in a hybrid cloud, but that's not where they start. It's helping them figure out what their processes are, understanding what they have to deliver, aligning that to business, moving to a private cloud and then moving to a public cloud, but also finding places where a public cloud can help right away. Proof of concepts, if they need to do a quick prototype. Public cloud is great for that. It helps them move it, but not them having to build that. So it's helping them understand, actually it's helping the IT departments come out of the data center and actually talking to the business units and understanding how the business units operate and whenever they go to a public cloud provider, what are they asking for? Because it's in their own data center. It's hard to get to. When you say hybrid cloud, a lot of times that word gets a little confused. Are you talking about hybrid because they have multiple solutions that they're implementing? Or are you actually seeing federated applications where an application will actually span between more than one of those solutions? I expected to evolve into hybrid and everything you just said where starting out is both a public and a private cloud but also moving to where a fully federated system you might host the application itself in a public cloud, easy to get to, anybody can get to it, but keeping the data because of security issues in a public cloud, keeping the data in a private cloud. So that's where we're seeing some of the initial combinations as people go to a hybrid. If they're not purely private, then the hybrid is whatever can be seen unsecurely or with less security on a public and then full security on a private. Because even when you talk about that example that you just gave, you're saying I have my payments I'm going to keep in-house because I need that from a security standpoint, but I'm not moving workloads. The traditional application was we're coming up on Thanksgiving and I need to be able to burst and be able to do a lot more. We find those a lot more rarely. Obviously you get companies like Netflix that have huge bandwidth Amazon and the like, most companies, they have certain pieces of the data or the application that are living in one place because moving data between those is difficult. And that's a part of the challenge is where does the data reside? How do you keep it? What's the life cycle of it? And the burst is probably the biggest reason that a lot of people are going to public cloud because they can get it immediately. But now it's helping the IT departments understand their usage patterns. In the past, most IT departments have kept kind of a capacity trend but they haven't really looked at the demand when did they get hit hard? When did they need that burst? And that's a part of the shift that we're bringing in to help them understand if they're going to build a private cloud, they have to be positioned for that burst. That's also where public cloud and even public cloud providers can be of great benefit. Yeah, absolutely. We talk about in the public cloud, you really pay for the average and pay for the peak. So you really want to be able to shrink that difference which is having some kind of hybrid strategy can help us. I'm wondering if you have an example. There's so many different paths that customers can choose. Do you have one that you can say how did they address their portfolio and choose what went where? We're actually working with a client right now that started as a software company. They're 25 years old. About 5 years ago their customers started asking for them to host the services. What they realize is that IT is not their strength. Their strength is the software application. So they're moving to a software as a service model where they're going to start with a private cloud that will ultimately what our expectations. So we have to work with them over time in a business where the application will be in a public access where everybody can get to it. But the data, because of its sensitivity relative to personal identifiable information the records that it's keeping will stay in a private cloud. We're very methodically helping them move IT to a managed service that goes into a private cloud that ultimately I think will evolve. I've heard a lot of times when you're talking about the public versus private it sounds like security and the government risk and compliance the GRC are some of the main reasons why people would keep things in house. Is that true? That's exactly it. Because of the data security to compliance one of the key areas is auditability and to be able to ensure that you can pass an audit the public cloud providers are moving in that direction but they're not guaranteeing that they can meet all of the government compliance everywhere from a health care to other security areas of PII personally identifiable information. So they're not guaranteeing that at this time. So that's why a lot of that data is staying in private. There are a lot of service providers that are putting together either hosting or services that they offer for specific verticals are you seeing that taking off anywhere or is it much easier to have things in house today? I'm seeing I say health care because of the data taking off I'm seeing different some manufacturing but most of the area that I see right now and it might be one of the areas that we're focused on is data link to the health care area. So if customers are still having stuff in house Kent I want to get back to you what are customers how does it change their purchasing decision if I think that some of it's going to live in house some of it's going to not be in house at some time moving back and forth what kind of impact does that have on what they're purchasing in house today? They're trying to go to a delivery of the service model and one of the challenges with cloud and we probably couldn't in this session figure out all the different ways you mentioned sales force as an example of cloud that is extremely popular Amazon is being brought in to a lot of organizations so they can do something quick ultimately it's about the application what are we trying to do it gets down to that if I wanted 500 servers for four hours then that's a good use of public cloud if I prototype something quickly because I don't want to buy the infrastructure for something that I'm not sure if it's going to go into production yet even as a software as a service company it's an example of they may try that out on public cloud because I can get it more quickly so agility is one of the things they get from cloud as they roll into production then they may have to think about well how do I run my environment more efficiently anybody who's providing those services Mark gave an example of a software as a service provider to be extremely efficient whether I'm serving out applications to internal customers or I'm serving out applications to external customers so a lot of times they'll find that I may go and prototype something out on public cloud because it's quick and then I want to start bringing that back in-house and to run it in production because that's more efficient yeah absolutely DevTest is a huge application for the public cloud I'm wondering from a technical standpoint getting from that public cloud back inside a lot of times it can be a challenge it's not necessarily running the same stack if you said I'm running VMware in-house we actually did a survey and said customers love that DevTest in the cloud and in-house they want their own production environments and they said in theory it should be the same stack but if you look at what everybody has who's the market leader in-house today it's VMware and who's the leader in the cloud and that's not the same virtual machine today so how do you help customers bridge that gap so that's a great example so as providers of technology everybody's cloud is what I have so there's an example of a market leader in the private cloud saying this is my definition of cloud and the market leader in public cloud saying this is my definition of cloud and as you pointed out how do I manage that it's not compatible how do I deal with these different departments that's probably changing as Mark pointed out we see people going to hybrid so Microsoft's got a strategy that has a hybrid strategy between Azure and their private cloud VMware is now announced a strategy there is a lot of compatibility so that they can go and prototype something in what they call VCHS which is intended to compete with Amazon they can go and prototype something out there but with the same management security and networking policy so I call this the two lane highway to the cloud as opposed to a one way there's a lot of talk about how do I get things back and forth between incompatible clouds so that is a challenge how do I manage this great point because if you looked at both of those examples you're saying if I choose all Microsoft I have a great strategy if I choose all VMware I have a good strategy however as you've seen from what you guys are offering you guys are offering lots of different vendors today tend not to just buy off a single vendor I mean there's plenty of companies that might standardize on IBM they've got a good cloud offering with the soft cloud now HP has their offering Oracle has the full red stack even in the cloud now so we can do that Mark I guess from a services and kind of a management standpoint can you weigh in on this topic and that's actually one of the areas that we look at is when to move to cloud how to move to cloud some of the big decision areas CAPEX versus OPEX do the companies want to own the assets do they want to as you said if you're going to own it you have to build for spike you have to build for the biggest use case in demand that you have whereas if you go to cloud all you're doing is you're paying for average so your per unit cost is more but your total cost of ownership is probably less by managing that so that's what we'll work with some of the clients on let's say with the CAPEX model because that fits their business better and they don't give up the controls and where does that fit into their operational expenses so we look at it from an operational cost point of view do you have some tools on that to help customers figure out what's the price point as you said spinning up a thousand servers for a couple of hours obviously it doesn't make sense it's going to take me nine months to get those all configured with the rules of thumb probably not something simple you can just put on a spreadsheet but how do you help work through that discussion point actually the client I was referring to earlier we're helping put together a financial case to show them what it cost to make those decisions that if they stay in house this is what it cost to host it in their data center it's what they're paying for the data center if they collo and put it into an external data center so they get rid of some of the risk it's actually sitting down and helping them develop the way their business operates a cost model for them so when I think about the operational efficiencies that cloud gives you Ken it brings me back to the current verge infrastructure discussion that we were having before when I think about the experience I get with say a VCEV block is I buy it all the levels are kind of maintained on it I can follow a stream so I don't have to worry about Microsoft patch every week that I have to put on it VCE and you as a partner are going to help them through that can you talk a little bit about from an operational standpoint what kind of cloud and various models and increased infrastructure mean absolutely we talked about the example of incompatible clouds and the challenge and there's nothing wrong and people probably still do go and buy a bunch of different vendors products and try to figure out how to make those together into some sort of a virtual data center there's nothing wrong with that some want to go more toward a converged infrastructure for the reasons we were kind of outlining is that I take a tremendous amount of risk out of the business I've got my storage and my networking and my servers and my virtualization strategy all kind of pre-tested and pre-built and engineered to work together there's a huge amount of safety reduced risk and therefore I should be able to get to market more quickly so that's a huge value problem others want to migrate into that if you were to look at VCE with a V block but EMC will also say well another path to cloud could be something like V specs that says maybe I want to migrate into this use an existing storage device but use best practices to put that together so again it depends specifically on the customer and where they're at in their business model what they're trying to accomplish is the application and some will say something like a V block is exactly what I want to run this tier one application on and others will say maybe something like a flexpot is how I want to build out my cloud strategy and start delivering IT as a service on top of that and that's the value I think we bring is helping align a very solid strategy to what they're trying to accomplish so if we look at cloud agility is something that comes up a lot when virtualization on the server side was launched over 10 years ago agility was really what we talked about I wonder if we can drill in for a second if you talk about how long it takes companies to adopt new technologies changing that stack is hard I remember one of the first use cases I heard for VMware when you left test dev was Microsoft was going to end all support for Windows NT in 2002, 2003 let's stick Windows NT VM and leave it there forever and from an operation standpoint it's like oh great my server is never going to die I can keep using it but as somebody that looks at technology they say oh my god I'm never going to change that environment I'm going to fall farther and farther behind my competition cloud is almost versionless it seems if I'm using Amazon I don't need to change my version if I'm using VM where most companies are within a year or so of the latest release Microsoft still seems to be a little bit behind so what's your viewpoint on this what do you think the rate of change is accelerating so there's definitely if we sat here eight years ago virtualization as you pointed out it was an efficiency play I can save money by virtualizing and I'm going to do it in test dev initially because I feel safe about that but eventually the benefits of that became more and more apparent to the application owners and they were comfortable that yes but also I might get some benefits from this I might have reduced down times and things like that then you go into maybe the virtual data center where we start saying okay this virtualization thing is an efficiency play and it helps me drive that agility by doing that as we move into cloud delivery models a lot of times based on that private infrastructure a lot of times leveraging that virtualization as a launching pad to be able to do some of these things companies are all over the board and they will adopt at different rates of speed but one thing we could definitely see is it's accelerating so you could look at virtualization over the last seven years it's just taken off and that's something that's pretty fast right how fast will be delivering cloud IT as a service takeoff and it's definitely accelerating so Mark we're starting to talk a little bit about application so I want to bring it back to you we kind of talk that we're entering the third phase of cloud which is hopefully we're getting past stealth IT and IT is really kind of take control and use some of those tool sets that are around there what are you seeing inside of the companies you're working with as to how kind of the line of business and the application owners are functioning with IT what's the role of IT going forward and how do they work closer with the business I think that one of the ways they work closer with the businesses is an API an application programmer who is actually working with the applications to be able to bring them in and all the interface programming that has to be done because the application programmers are thinking what they do to get the applications up and running the IT's got to be able to provide the platform to do that and deploying the technology configuring it but also being able to do the interface so that as the applications come in they can actually run in the IT environment one of the big areas that is growing is mobile apps and being able to support that so IT is having to get out of the data center and being able to support all of the mobile apps all of the different technologies that people want to use with their own devices yeah great so when you talk about it I noticed you didn't say desktop virtualization or VDI I'm wondering what your take is on kind of all these new apps in mobile and kind of the traditional desktop virtualization how do those two play together or don't they? They absolutely do and I can't give you a good reason why I left that out I'm glad you brought it up because what we see is everything being virtualized I look back to years ago we had virtual terminals, X terminals and the idea that I can go now anywhere at any time and be able to have my desktop there are virtual environments being built there's a university in Ohio that the students have a virtual desktop on a thumb drive and they plug in anywhere and they get to their whole environment and I fully expect that the world will keep being that way where IT and that's why I talked about the mobile apps where everything is now virtual the virtual desktop, the virtual world that they can plug in anywhere at any time back to security it has to be secure but being able to get to anything that they wanted on a thumb drive I think there are plenty of those new applications that are mobile that aren't necessarily tied to my desktop do I enable mobility or am I tied into my corporate image and to be honest when I think when I worked at big companies that corporate image drove me nuts and you're always trying to I don't want to use that browser I don't want to use that application I want to use the applications I want I work for a small company we're on Google apps if companies want to use Salesforce that's not necessarily on what we're doing we're doing mobile enabled applications that aren't necessarily on the desktop that's the differentiation I was making I think you're right and we're capturing and driving that with the service catalog so as we're talking to clients what do their end users really want and what are the demands and one of the things is the what Apple has created with the App Store well that's what we're finding that businesses want they want to go to IT and say here's what I want I actually wrote an article I think like 18 months ago I said is VDI the killer app for converged infrastructure because when I talked to NetApp FlexPod and EMC's V specs it was really easy to get your foot in the door on a project basis and VDI really had to have many changes from the infrastructure standpoint and the organization so is VDI still one of those top use cases that you're seeing or where does it fit in the convergent picture from what you're seeing it's big VDI has probably been slower VDI as that virtual desktop technology because it had some technology challenges and so a lot of people would prototype it but then when they tried to scale it up across the organization they found problems and I think we're a lot smarter so was that price performance both yeah all of them so if I go with the virtual desktop does that save me money like my virtual server did well it might not right and so maybe you have another reason for this you know as Mark is pointing out mobile what the business is asking for is agility they want access to everything from anywhere and so they're asking for agility and VDI is one way to deliver that I can give you your image with your personal things and everything you need to get your job done on any device quickly there was some technical challenges to that A the software technology had to evolve to a point that was challenges in storage where boy that's a lot of IO for a storage device so how will flash how will help that and now we see that you know we know how to scale it up but we know how to you know you can see a V block or a flex pod that's designed specifically for not 200 virtual desktops but 2000 or 3000 virtual desktops so mobility is here to stay I mean everybody wants access to all their information at any time without concern over compliance and security in many cases right so they're going out to Dropbox and they're going out to get the application IT needs to be able to deliver what they're asking for I'll give you all your information at any time and VDI will be a killer app or mobile enablement will be a killer app that's great did you want some to jump in on that Kent start thinking about you know just massive growth one of the things the storage industry has been talking about for a while is unstructured data and how it's really kind of dwarfing the structured data market you know what are you seeing from the unstructured data standpoint you know what pain points are customers having you know are their home directories all over the place or you know is it the big data applications that they don't know where to put everything you know what are you seeing out in the marketplace today yeah I mean Big Dave is probably an overused term to a certain extent like cloud and there's you know one major area that people are addressing now is I just have massive amounts of data I have to store health care would be a perfect example where I'm digitizing everything but the other thing I'm trying to do is I'm trying to consolidate my decision support system so why is an x-ray stored in one system and an MRI in another system and as I start to bring that down I end up creating a big data problem so I think there's another example where you know companies like EMC and NetApp are bringing out technologies that allow you to manage and more efficiently store you know many many petabytes of unstructured data whereas you know the structured database isn't growing as fast as those use cases for unstructured data and unfortunately you know the concept that X amount of data took X amount of people to manage I think that you know both the technologies and the management around that to support those large big data solutions that would unstructured data solutions you're able to have one person manage many many petabytes so obviously I need to be able to manage and grow that environment that typically means I need a lower price point than I traditionally had so companies out there looking at things like scale up NAS architectures and object storage do you have any commentary as to what's winning deals out in the marketplace today for that unstructured data I'm not asking a specific company technology just you know from an architectural standpoint what's doing well you know there are things like Hadoop that are coming their scale out NAS I think is really evolving very quickly right now so in the ability to manage it as I scale it out and be able to you know one of the most important things is to try to get the right amount of data to the right application at the right time so if I have many many petabytes really expensive stuff some stuff is very hot right and so that needs to be on something that's very fast and maybe closer to the application so we see that happening where people are putting storage in the server to be able to serve certain things out that are hot more quickly and then getting colder storage for things that haven't been accessed for a while so that tiering technology I think we're just at the beginning of seeing how not only do I store it efficiently but how do I manage it right so that I'm delivering the application so Mark at the beginning of the segment here we talked about there's so many changes going on Ken said the rate of change just keeps increasing it's the only thing that's constant in this industry is that things keep changing right so I'm wondering are there any pitfalls you see out there or people coming in with just not ready to change what's stopping the industry if we could just change one thing what would make it better or if they could follow the example of somebody what would make things easier I think one of the big pitfalls it is changed it's organizational change where we have IT that has performed and acted a certain way for almost their whole life and the advent of and it's an overused word but this time I'm going to say it's correct the cloud the truly something that is elastic, usage based billing I'm only charged for what I use I can get it when I want it easy access I think that technology has been a total game changer and the impediment is actually getting people that are in IT to think differently they have to look at what they do in a very different sense and that's where we're spending a lot of time also some new evolving roles so the game changers with ways to move forward is looking at I mentioned it earlier an app programmer bringing that into IT where they're spending more time making sure that everything that is running actually runs smoothly and runs together and I think that's going to be the evolution of the people that are doing that and no unfortunately for Better Force nobody just jumps out at me who's easily making that change but that's why a lot of our customers are bringing us in they recognize that that's the path they need to go down so as we look to bring this segment to a close Kent I want to give you both the last word on this you were talking about Flash for a second we think that Flash has been going on for about five years now since EMC and Fusion IO really started bringing Flash to the enterprise we believe that there will be even more innovation over the next five years we'll probably see more innovation over the next two years in Flash than we've seen in the last five years come on what other technologies are hot in your space what should people really be keeping an eye on obviously that's one that's really going to change the dynamics of how storage is laid out over the next few years you know cloud delivery models you mentioned what's the biggest challenge and I agree it's changed right and people will say I have to adopt cloud because I'm not even sure why but we're going to adopt it at a 50% rate as opposed to aligning it with the business etc so that leads to delivering IT as a service you know what of all of our business users going out and doing they're getting their job done and we need to align all of this technology to the business benefit so virtualization will continue there will be flash storage and storage there will be cloud delivery models all of those things are probably some of the biggest trends and then throw big data on there for good measure and you've got probably some of the biggest growing trends so Kent I said that was my last question I want one follow up for you so we talked about VDI a lot of those went to pilot and failed what's the success rate on cloud doing these days so cloud to journey right so as Mark pointed out you look at an organization and say if you just did these things and then technology is probably somewhat easy to figure out but how to consume that and how to optimize it and capitalize on that for the organization that's the things that people are working their way through but it's not different virtualization started that way too it's like okay we could virtualize everything but we're not going to because the application owners don't trust this yet so they'll try it somewhere and then they'll do more and people are still virtualizing right it's not like we're done the same thing with cloud people are adopting it at different rates of speed I can't think of anybody besides Salesforce it's a complete cloud company or cloud operated company but they're starting to adopt it and consume it and see the benefits of it and then increase from there yeah no great point even as I said I was in Amazon show last week and somebody asked is Amazon.com all run on AWS and they said most of it but there's actually a couple of legacy pieces that aren't on it so even you know the cloud giant out there doesn't run everything on that service so Mark I want to give you the last word on how to kind of wrap up this segment as we move to the cloud changing what we do from an IT side how we do it I'd say the biggest change is really aligning IT with the business where they're now a partner they're at the table if you look at any other department when somebody wants to roll a new product out or a new service they have all of the marketing the sales the product development all at the table IT needs to be considered a part of that team and the only way they can be a part of that team is really understanding the business and transforming themselves into true service providers that says what do you need to do that whether an enabler as opposed to just a contributor Mark and Kent thank you so much for joining us here today it was great to really unpack big trends that are happening from converged infrastructure how that's laying the foundation for private clouds how public cloud services software as a service are really giving customers lots of options


Good afternoon everyone and thank you for making time for this session. As you can see, Agility in Complex Transformation Programs and Oxymoron is the title of my session. A little bit about myself. My name is Yashasri Barve. I am working as an Enterprise Agile Coach and a Transformation Consultant at TCS. I've been with Tatas all through my career. It's gone complete 25 years in July in the IT industry. I'm an author of this book, the image that you see here, Agile Mindset, which is available on Amazon. I'm a blogger. I blog at my personal website. I'm an avid reader. I'm a speaker at conferences. I'm also a volunteer for TCS's Purposeful Life. We have an initiative which is called Youth Employment Program. So it's a lot of pleasure to talk to people who are like the youth who are from underprivileged background to prepare them to come into corporate. So that's about me and my Agile journey actually started in around 2007 and I had been working as a technical architect then. I just got fascinated by the way we had been... Do you need some time? So I just got fascinated by the way we were collaborating with teams, working with business to churn out something which was working software. Rather than having a project manager, I didn't even know when I switched my role from a technical architect to an Agile coach. And it's been a great journey since then, working with various product teams, helping them as a scrum master as an Agile coach to evolve their way of working, helping them in transforming and also delivering working software. So when I started, mostly I had been working on products like one or more teams. That's how it started and the way things were looked something like this. So this is like the road construction in a local neighborhood. So there are limited number of stakeholders, limited number of people who are going to get impacted, maybe thousands. If this is somewhere in Mumbai, even a local neighborhood road would be like thousands of people will be affected. But it will normally be a single authority, single administration who will be involved in construction of a road in a local lane kind of a thing. In the recent years, the work that I have been doing, which is on large programs actually started something like this. It started looking something like this, which is like a mega highway that gets constructed and that is connecting multiple states. The complexity levels are very different, right? Normally to construct a mega highway across multiple states, it would mean that we have to have many, many multiple things getting involved. Multiple state authorities, state governments, different political parties. There will be legalities involved because land acquisition has to come in place. Forest department, N number of resistances that will come from the locals. If it is the Mumbai Nakul Samruddi highway, which is there, we would also have to take care of animals. Like there is an underpass that had to be created so that elephants could cross. So the kind of complexities that happen in such a program is enormous as against, you know, simple road construction that happens in a small city or a small town, right? Well, of course, I am not involved in this domain. I am still talking from a software domain, but yes, the complexities of having those multi things are still very, very valid in that case. So coming back to software domain, I thought, let us just set some context with respect to what do we mean by a transformation program? So this definition is coming from PMI. It is coming from a paper that was presented at a PMI conference. And it talks about how the transformation change the way people, processes, technology, physical infrastructure, etc. Change to cover the new capabilities that have to be developed for organizations to achieve whatever are their new outcomes, right? Like for example, the mega highway that we spoke about, it actually helps people to commute in much, much lesser time than they would have already taken to commute across multiple states. Or it might just explore the opportunities for trade. We might have many more opportunities, many more potential opportunities for people to travel and look for new jobs and things like that. So lot of new opportunities open up whenever we undertake such transformation programs. They also are driven by a sense of urgency that we want to complete it in one year, two year, whatever, you know, multi years that we are looking at. And they are very, very broad in terms of their scope as well as in terms of their impact. So typically any of such transformation programs will be. When we talk about transformation programs, I know that many of you would have noticed that the number of transformation programs have really picked up during COVID and post COVID. Though of course we had a lot of digitization and digital transformation programs that were already happening. But a transformation program could be anything. It could be an enterprise transformation. Let's say there are mergers and acquisitions. So, you know, there are some enterprise level transformations that have to happen. Or those could be technology transformations like classification or moving to cloud, you know, those kind of transformation programs can happen. It could be change in the structure of the organization. So the organization wants to transform to new way of working or new operating structures and so on. So there could be many such things. And however, one thing that is common across all of these transformation programs is the complexity, right? The scope, you know, the way so many things are touched and so many lives of people are touched. That is what is probably common across these. Let's also look at what do we mean by agility? This one I have picked up from Merriam Webster dictionary. So the agility is basically the quality or the state of being agile, right? Or nimbleness. How quickly are we able to do something? Whereas agile will mean ready ability, marked by ready ability. Ready ability, something where we are ready. We are able, we are ready to move with quick and easy grace. So it is not that we are able to move quickly, but we are kind of, you know, leaving a lot of chaos behind, right? Like not like monkeys, right? Whenever they are agile, but the way they create nuisance, that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about something which is quick, easy graceful leader, right? So that's what we are talking about being agile. So when we put these two things in the context, like agility, which is being able to really move quickly, being able to respond to changes quickly, and the large transformation, complex transformation programs, it really doesn't really go very well together, right? And that's where I started thinking about, you know, whether it is really like an oxymoron, right? Are we really able to, none of the transformation programs say that we are not agile, right? Nowadays it's like a crime and people don't look at you with the same perception if you say we are not agile, right?  Like, for example, I am working on a SAP transformation project and yes, we are using agile ways of working, but where is the agility? And that's where I started thinking about how is agility in the context of large transformation programs. So just a quick show of hands, like how many of you are part of transformation programs? Everybody, excellent. Great. Okay, all right. So just moving to this, there was something that really triggered my thought and, you know, this was, this video is, you know, this person, anybody, do you know this person? This is Andy Hunt, one of the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto and the author of the series of pragmatic books, pragmatic proof of hammer and so on. We had an amazing talk by Andy last year and it was about the legacy, like, legacy in you.  How do you churn out working software, etc.? Do you do the scrum events? Well, etc., etc. So he was like, he literally said that, you know, all that crap may not be agile, but there is something that very, very simple test to see whether we are being agile or not, right? So I just wanted to play that quick video. I hope I'll get the sound. So here's the test, you know, am I agile enough? Suppose there's a big change in how you understand the user requirements. There's a big shift in technology, a big shift in the market. Can you quickly and easily adapt to that change or not? Can you cause that change on purpose and then adapt to it so you have a competitive advantage? That's what agile is all about. Yeah. Did you agree? Was it what he said? Yeah. So we are talking about, like, Andy, what Andy speaks about is that if there is a change that happens in the technology or in the requirements, how easily are we able to adapt to it? Also, if let's say that change has not happened, are we able to make that change, bring that change and see how easily we are able to adapt to it? If we are, then yes, then we are agile. Otherwise, you know, we may be doing all sorts of scrum events. We may be doing all ceremonies. We may have the right roles, but we may still not be, we still may not be agile. So, sorry about that. So, going from there, like, keeping the context of the transformation programs, agile and what we heard from Andy, if we look at the industry data on the way the large programs have happened, the data is pretty bad. The data says, like, if you look at any of the analysts like Mackenzie's or the VWC's and gardeners of the world, what we see is maximum of the programs that we had, like, a lot of large programs that we had, 25 to 40% of them exceeded their budgets. They had schedule overruns, right? And, well, I have been seeing that also, like, when we are working with our customers, a lot of large programs are facing these kind of problems, right? And even more than 50% of the schedules, you know, are being overrun. And a tiny, tiny portion of 2.5% completing 100% of their projects on time, or if you see 60% of the data projects failed was a prediction, but they really found, like, 80, 85% of the big data projects, transformation projects failing, right? So, this is a really, really bad data which says that majority of the transformation programs are failing and they are not able to actually adapt to whatever changes are being brought in by the market or technology changes or whatever are the changes, right? So, this is definitely something that makes one feel that are we really being agile in any of these programs. So, as so many of you have also been working in large transformation programs as you raised your hands, can I request all of you to please give your inputs on this mentee survey quickly? So, the question is which barriers have you seen to agility in large complex transformation programs, right? You can go to mentee.com and the code is 5640-0382. So, I've put in some, it's not readable, I'm sorry about that from here. But I've put in some of the barriers that I have seen in large complex transformation programs and I'd love to see what are the things that you have seen? Any programs? Multivander scenarios? Centralized decision making? Big long releases? Big bang releases? Too many dependencies? Conflicts? Decision making seems to be along with dependencies? No time? Thank you, thank you for that. It resembles very well with what I have in my presentation. I'm happy that you are also looking at the same barriers that I have been looking at. So, I want to take a opportunity to talk about three things that really, really have impeded agility in the programs that I have worked with. First is the dependencies. For any large programs, and we heard this in the morning, right, about dependencies that dependencies are going to be there and we have to minimize dependencies as much as we can, but they are unavoidable. We heard it from Fred. I'm so happy to see that dependency there. The second is about scope and it is just never-ending scope. Never-ending changes in the requirements. It just doesn't stop and it just blows all the release planning that we have done. That is the second thing. The third thing is about team dynamics. I saw a lot of you feel that Multivander creates a challenge and actually there are just too many people, too many departments, too many teams involved and that actually impedes the agility a lot. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to talk about the problems that are faced in these three areas and some of the things that have worked. I don't think there is a clear-cut answer as to these are the 1, 2, 3 things that we need to do and then we will be able to get rid of the dependencies or things like that. If there was some, then we wouldn't see the data that we saw, but I just wanted to share what has worked and I will also share what has not worked for any of these. Any reactions, any comments so far? Yes. No, we are not talking about agile transformation programs. We're talking about business transformation and technology transformation. Enterprise any transformation program, not necessarily agile. It could also be related to agile. If you know, like for example, you started with something, you planned for maybe a couple of departments and you said that maybe this is our journey and this is where we want to be and then in one of the reviews, you keep getting, oh, but what about DevOps? When are you going to start with the DevOps side of it? It could even be related to that, but my focus majorly is on business transformation, technology transformation programs. Agility in those programs, basically. Yes, absolutely. I completely agree and to give you some examples, like any transformation that would happen in an enterprise. So just to take an example of the one that I have been involved in, an SAP transformation, there are business systems in the enterprise which nobody wants to touch. Nobody wants to make any changes to that. However, we still want, like they still use the data. So the data is still the same, like enterprise the whole database is the same. So data structure, the way data is stored is going to change once we move to some products, right, which are probably not customized, then what does it mean? Unreal impates. And we talk about also giving some examples, like we talk about, we tried a lot of things to bring in agility in the way, even the SAP things work, right? So we would say, yeah, at least in these three weeks, four weeks, we will do this, or five weeks, we will at least complete this. Legal systems, they don't even want to promise, right? Because they really don't know how much time it may take. Yes, I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, right. So even the team structure, like the way, you may want to structure the teams in certain way, but you simply can't because of the one thing. Yes, absolutely, yeah, that. Yes, absolutely, yeah, I completely agree. And a lot of team dynamics also happen because of the dependencies, right? Like for example, this legacy thing that we were just talking about. So this transformation, whichever team is actually doing the, let's say taking things to cloud is dependent on the legacy system because they are not able to do it. So there is a lot of dynamics that happens, right? Like people start blame games and that further impedes the whole progress that we want to make. Yeah, so I agree, yeah. Okay, all right. Anything else? Okay, so let's start. So I really wanted to, like whenever I thought about, you know, how to represent dependencies, I could think of a metaphor of a dungeon, right? So once we are lost in a dark dungeon, you really can't figure out where to go and you just keep finding your way out and you find that more and more deep dungeons and, you know, our way is completely lost. Dependencies sometimes feel like that, right? So you try to resolve one and then you discover there are more and you try to complete one and then newer ones come up and we simply start, you know, feeling like we are lost completely. So here are some of the things that I heard and these are things that real people said on the transformations, right? So we can't really do anything before they complete it. So there is a story, but however they are not able to do anything before somebody else completes something. Or we cannot even start working on it till the interface is not finally. So I had this one point where there was a interfacing system that was supposed to do some changes. They said that we cannot even start till you don't even complete the interface. You know, we can only start. So in spite of having a five-week sprint, the first two weeks a particular story could not start because they said we cannot start till the interface is finally at all. Or design gets stuck or the number of dependencies sometimes is so huge that there are 300 plus downstream applications that take this data, right? Whenever there is any core system getting transformed in an enterprise, there are so many systems that are dependent on, you know, with respect to data and so on. So a lot of these things keep happening. I just wanted to take a quick case study of a program that I was involved in. So 200 plus people, 300 plus upstream and downstream systems that are impacted because of the changes that we are doing. It was taking something from on-prem to cloud. And the problem is that it was not simply just moving something to the cloud, like the on-prem application to the cloud. But the enterprise also thought about taking an advantage and doing also a business process transformation because of that. So because of that business process thing, 10 plus departments, which is like one department is IT and nine departments are non-IT departments that are getting involved in the decision making, right? So with this case study in mind, I would like to share what worked for us. So the first and the most important thing which we feel helped, though did not completely resolve the dependencies is the way we managed our rate items, right? So rate is, I'm sure you would have heard, but risks, assumptions, issues, or impediments and dependencies. So it is extremely critical for any transformation program or any last program for that matter to make sure that we are managing the risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies very, very well. And when we say we are managing, it means that it will start with identification. That is the first step, of course. What are the risks? Identifying what are the risks? Then trying to log it into your, whatever is your tracking tool that you're using as you develop, etc, etc, Excel, whatever it is, log it and then continuously track it. So it is extremely important to have it made transparent, right? So we normally use RAID dashboards for all the various teams that we have and every team is using the RAID dashboard on a daily basis. So we kind of try to make it transparent and also inspect and adapt. The kind of frequency that we have been using is for every team we do it daily. So every day, we look at what are the dependencies that we have and how are we placed, how are we going to make progress on those dependencies. And at a multiple teams level, it is twice a week. So every team does it daily and all the teams come together and look at dependencies on each other twice a week kind of a fashion. Dependency maps, again, another thing that we found it useful. So we use JIRA. So the dependency maps created in JIRA really helped us to actually look at, you know, where things are stuck and so on. And raising early blacks. So we kind of used the concept of blockers. So started flagging things as blockers is, if the dependency is soon going to turn into risks, then we started flagging those as blockers and that has really helped us. Anything on risk or RAID management, dependency management anybody wanted to share? Anything else that has worked for you? Yes. Yeah. So to understand your question better, so there is a strategic risk and then that has caused some risks at the team level. So how do we track it? So normally we have been tracking team level risks on a daily basis in the daily, connects that we have daily hurdles and strategy risks are revisited twice a week in the cross team hurdle. And of course there are separate meetings that happen for the leadership teams and they handle, you know, the strategy risks. They also discuss the dependencies and strategic risks there. Yes. Yeah. Is it a separate meetings or it is same meeting you are discussing with the RAID or risk register or something like that? So yeah, so we don't use risk register but of course, I mean any of the ways we can use it, but we use JIRA dashboards basically for RAID. So in that same daily hurdle that we have to track our synchronize our daily progress within a team, we also discuss the rates. Yes. Thank you. Okay. The second most important thing that also has a lot of dependencies and what we've what we observed is the decision making delays. Yes. No, that's fine. So the way I typically tell the team is, RAID stands for us, we don't want to discuss assumptions. So issues and dependencies are something that we'll have to manage. But I try to at least minimize assumptions. Mm-hmm. At least one is knocked off. The faster we move the assumption to either a dependency or a risk. Absolutely. A dependency naturally will return. See, it's a cyclic process. Like you can't just eliminate something out of it. Yeah. So if you're making an assumption, which typically means to say, I will assume that this technology would be finalized. I don't want to do that. I put that as a dependency on the technology stack team who's deciding it or the CTO office who's making that thing and get to an end date to say, it's a dependency on you. I'll track it as a dependency. I'm not making. I'm not making it very clear that I'm not assuming anything. I'll ask. Yeah. So that way the assumption typically is more or less in a very small number and I try to move it into a dependency quickly or to a risk so that if you make, we all know, assume word is... Yeah, yeah. You don't want to create a problem there. Yes. That's one way to manage it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Yes. I think just extending his point, even in my experience, we have stopped using A there and what I've been using is CRED. Again, not referring to the CRED app or something, but C stands for Constraint. So Constraints are important to call out by the teams or even at a portfolio level to really call out that what is the constraint for me to deliver up front so that we can work on it. So A is no longer sort of use because assumptions, we'll have to deal with it. Constraints are really critical in that way. Yeah, absolutely. Great inputs, I think. Perfect. And we also have kind of laid out a model in which we have educated teams to ensure that if there are risks that are really like aging risks that are not getting resolved at all, converting it into issues. Similarly, dependencies can become risks and risks can become issues. Even that kind of education, that kind of a model is set, I would say. And that helps because at least whether we are able to solve it or not even after raising it as a blocker with the leadership is a separate thing, but at least the teams have done everything that they can. That's the commitment that we normally have from our teams. Okay. All right. So another place where there has been a lot of dependency and a lot of delays that have got introduced is in the process of decision making. As we saw in the example and typically the case, there are so many different departments that are involved. And a lot of times we have seen that there are too many people who are involved in making decisions and the decisions just don't happen. The decisions are pending there and the due dates change and that really, really impedes the delivery that we have to make. So we actually had very nice retrospective discussions on that and we figured out that major reason behind this is the FOMO syndrome, right? The fear of missing out. What happens if I'm not a part of that discussion, right? What if some decision is happening without my knowledge and so on? It's not easy to tackle FOMO because everybody wants to feel important and it has become more and more critical in today's days when there are so many layoffs and people want to ensure that they are considered important in their organizations. But we kind of try to come up with a working model with the teams and the decision makers so that we can really have small number of people who will take the decisions. It is easier for that meeting to be scheduled and decisions to be taken and everybody else will be kept informed. So this is tough thing but we have tried as much as and however still I feel that the whole decision making and the dependencies on decisions has been a major factor in delaying whatever plan we had in mind in my programs. So I also want to share like this is... So many of you would have known would have heard of Kendra Bin, Kendra Bin the Essential Scrum Author. There was one talk that I attended by Kendra Bin in one of the I think Agile Virtual Summit sometime back and it was very, very eye-opening and I will highly recommend you to look at you know if you are struggling with dependencies in your programs highly recommend you to look at what he talks about it. He also conducts separate workshops for teams to actually look at dependencies and understand how you know there could be structural or instantiated dependencies and how to... What are the various improvement strategies can you know one can get even if you don't want to attend a workshop you can go to Inolution or you can just search dependencies are killing your agility Kendra Bin and you will you know find the whole... He has so many different improvement strategies suggested I'm sure you know you will find some of the other solutions for your problems there. All right. So just to sum up what we spoke about dependencies the rate governance the risk assumptions impediments dependencies governance modeling them, mapping creating maps and tracking them focusing on decisions closing decisions on time and team structures team structures we didn't discuss but it is there in Kendra Bin's things One of the ways to get rid of the dependencies is to form team in such a way that it is a multidisciplinary team like what we heard in the morning team that can actually cross-functional in the sense where even people who are taking the decisions are also involved somebody from the data is there somebody from technology is there All right. Moving to the next one which is about scope scope often is a challenge in actually looking at the progress right and I have seen this so many places I mean I wrote it as silent support age so well there is and it is unintentional in my context I think we heard about support aging in Fredstock but in the context that I am putting this this is not intentional it is not that somebody wants to delay the whole program so they are putting in new things but a lot of times I have seen that you know there are too many missing pieces too many new things that keep discovering that it is very very difficult to really put together the whole puzzle of what exactly is needed in this transformation program So I have heard things like now this is SAP we always do big bank releases it is not possible the first one is my husband who says this right he is an SAP consultant and he we never talk about agile at home because you know he does not believe in it he talks about SAP and big bank releases right so either it is first-gen or first-july first-july date missed we will go next first-gen and so on so it is very very ingrained in the way he works and you know many of the people who are working on large products and so on or people just do not know what is expected in a story or in a requirement that we do not know we cannot even commit how much time it will take it is very difficult and that happens in transformation programs right if it is a small product that we are working on and we are discovering and constantly working with product knows it may not happen but when we are talking about multiple stakeholders being involved multiple stakeholders giving inputs it is very well possible that it happens so I have one more mentee for you just a question which techniques have helped to prevent scope being sabotage so I have to go to the next slide product ownership MVP MVP reprioritizing managing expectations governance thank you so I have an example of a program which is around 300 plus people involved in the program 50 plus teams which have multiple stakeholders giving them requirements and there was a 50% schedule over it was a one year program which already got delayed by 6 months so which is like a 50% overrun and one of the reasons like some of the reasons that we figured out is the lack of strong product ownership there are multiple stakeholders and there will be multiple stakeholders because it is a large program right we will not have only a couple of people but so many people but if the team is getting confused and the product owners themselves don't know how to prioritize and what are the right things that the team should take up next and when they should be completed then there is a big problem and big risk to the program so a very very strong ownership is needed and managing stakeholders right the product owner will understand that it is impossible to satisfy or make everybody happy they have to choose what is it that really makes sense for the program to move ahead and accordingly take a call and it is also critical to do the vertical slicing now it is very easy to do vertical slicing for products right because we can simply go by feature by feature it becomes more and more complex when we have programs wherein maybe a small size doesn't make sense right we had a lot of challenge in convincing people who are working on SAP projects and they are developing RICEFW objects as they call it which is reports, interfaces, convergence forms and workflows that they can do a slicing in a way where they can come up with some kind of MVPs right and once we could demonstrate one of that can happen then they themselves could come up with multiple MVPs and we could actually take smaller piece which could be done in a sprint and then you know evolve over it it is like a very no brainer kind of a thing for any scrum teams and product owners when we are working on products but not so much when we are working on large programs but I just want to say that it can be done and we have tried it with a good percentage of success and the most important thing is prioritizing and reprioritizing descoping so we like the previous program that we just spoke about took a stand and said that you know you have to know what is it that you really really need for day 1 what is it that cannot go without what are the things that cannot wait after day 1 plus and doing this rootless kind of prioritization is extremely critical otherwise we will get into the same problem that we had in waterfall world wherein we want to do everything so the scope has to be finished so the schedule will go on right like the 6 months program will go to 1 year and 2 years and it will never get over it is not easy but it is extremely critical to do so asking the right questions you know my product owners has to be really a strong product owner for that maybe we can take questions if at all there are any thoughts you want to share later I just want to finish up some of the things that I had so this was about the scope issues wherein having strong product ownership, vertical slicing focusing on MVPs and also maintaining traceability also we did not speak about traceability I think but traceability is about where we have started like we have started to complete something and of course that has maybe you know you have large requirements and like in SAP parlance we have BPML business process master list and breaking it down into L1 L2 L3 L4 and whatever we are working on how is it related to the business process right we have a story or we have a small piece of requirement how is it helping us to have a particular piece of requirement being fulfilled is extremely difficult to to know the last one which is about team dynamics right so the barriers of us versus we versus ours versus you know they themselves right very very very very evident we also saw most of you agreed about the multivander environment right we here at D in and out they only want to increase their head count which is in case of you know if there are vendors that have been hired to work on certain things and if they say that this takes this is going to take more time or we need more people this is what we are they only want to increase their head count that is why they are doing this they do not understand system or what were they doing all this while and how can they come up with some critical requirements right they were sleeping all this time what all of these things which are putting blame on the right they here could be a different department a different vendor different role a different team different region right in this region it's always like that or they never know what they really want that kind of a couple of things that have helped this is a very very difficult problem to solve but a couple of things that have helped is alignment to the vision so over and over talking about what is it that we as a team like the whole program team want to accomplish and forget about this is what this vendor wants to do or that department wants to do and so on having that vision iterated again and again and getting an alignment to the vision really helped and leadership so we I have had fortune I mean fortunate enough to have leaders who speak about I do not want to hear that this vendor could not complete this or this vendor brought in these challenges I do not want to hear that I only want to hear how you can now work so that we are able to fulfill our vision it's extremely critical the leadership gets into you know doing five eyes on why this vendor could not do certain things the program is doomed because then everybody simply gets defensive and no real causes will come out and people will simply try to you know just do something for the sake of doing it and for the sake of avoiding penalty and so on right the other thing which I think is very very critical and we did this for all the teams is setting up the working model who will do what what are the various roles whose responsibility is what making it laying it down making it extremely clear crystal clear by having a discussion within the teams right so what is what is it that our working model is what are the team norms that we want to set and the last important thing is change management and I'm not talking about the change management for the end users of course that is important because I mean there has been an instance when a CFO told us that don't worry about the adoption we will take care of it it could not take care of it the whole rollout got postponed by six to eight months I think because you know the people were simply not ready to adopt the new system but I'm not talking about it I'm talking still about the IT team because different people are working with each other they may be familiar with certain ways of working but now we are talking about probably different ways of working when they are working together they may be just to give you an example we have a custom application development team which is highly mature in terms of DevOps and they have a dependent like they are upstream system for an SAP system and the first time when we meet they say you do not have CICT I mean this is not how we work yes right but this is SAP we are still you know going to work on it and we are trying to figure it out so it is different ways in which people are working right like the SAP team works in a different way the custom application development team works in a different way so that management is a real challenge that we have to work with ok alright so yeah so just one last minute so just to summarize about the team dynamics getting everybody aligned to the vision having leadership support for doing that extremely critical things before we can even think about having the team dynamics making it better defining a working model collaboratively not like one person defining model and just dictating it to others but team coming together and defining how they want to work together very very important and change management we really have to bring in that empathy towards we have to bring in empathy towards others and you know educate others to bring in the empathy towards us and that is probably you know the way we can help in terms of improving the team dynamics in a program ok so that brings me to the end we talked about dependencies scope we talked a little bit about team dynamics and a few things that have worked for us in certain ways like rate governance dependency maps decision making team structures strong product ownership vertical slicing MVP prioritizing traceability aligning to the vision change management leadership support and defining the working model so that's what I had and thank you very much and we can stay connected please connect with me on LinkedIn and this is my website name so thank you very much I just wanted to mention that some of the images that I have used are from Pixabay and some of them are AI generated images if you want you can try this deepai.org just for fun my son taught me this but it's fun to have those AI generated images thank you very much if at all any questions if any questions please or any thoughts I have a question how do you measure what does good look like in product ownership how do you point out that this is not good product ownership that's a good question ask the team probably I would like as an agile coach I will probably ask the team what is it that they believe in terms of there is the product owner helping them or how is the product owner helping them do they understand the requirements clearly are they able to work on the requirements is the feedback also going back right so I mean to have more scientific answer there are like a few questions maybe I can share with you separately that we normally ask in terms of the requirements management do we think the decisions are getting delayed because the product owner is not able to work with multiple stakeholders and you know it is not not able to prioritize things or is the product owner coming back and saying everything is high priority and you have to get these things done at all every time those are the kind of things I would look for but I think that is where anybody else wants to share anything maybe yeah okay we will take the last question yeah sure in this large transformation kind of project context do you think the contracting type for against with the different vendors would that play a major role in the process yes yes I am sure it will play a large role because a lot of times what we have also seen is like we want to have we want to have the team to come together and you know work together like I will give you an example in some of the programs that I have worked with different vendor works on development and different vendor works on testing and that is because of the compliance requirements like there are places where we have same vendor doing development and testing in some of the regulatory compliance things they need to have a independent verification something like I do not understand it completely now here there is so much so much tug of war between the development team and the testing team and the testing team is not the unit test unit test of course are being done by the developers but the final integration or the system testing that happens the final verification and validation so it will be very critical people say that I have had an instance where the product vendor said that the contract that we have is only for consulting we will not touch the code we will not do any development we literally had to get into a discussion with the leadership and you know that product vendors leadership to say that you know these are the people who can probably spend some time and do things you know do the configuration rather than only saying that what you are doing is not good and we had to literally revisit the contracting terms I mean had to revisit the terms but I personally feel like and this will come up when we define the working model let us say the whole team is coming together the testers developers or you know whoever are the advisors they are coming together they would say that my contract does not allow me to do this then what do we do if it is really critical and if it is becoming a risk to the success of the program we probably have to go back and revisit the contract and take leadership and leadership support will be extremely critical in this because depending upon the budget that they have and the way the contracts have happened Thank you Thank you very much Thank you for attending


Hi everybody. Thank you for having me here. It's a great session. I love Ben Hammersley's keynote speech and even though he say we are cyborgs, to a certain extent, I believe that we are human beings, that have human behavior, which I'm going to talk about now. I'm going to take you through a day in the life of us people, a day that is very much characterized by the mobile internet today. My name is Maria Åkerlund and I'm working at Ericsson Consumer Lab. So a few words are marketing first. At Ericsson, we build networks of course, but we also run networks for our operators and we need to understand the people that are using our networks. And that we do by interviewing about 100,000 people every year in around 40 countries. And we've done that since 95. These people represent about 1.1 billion people around the world. And we also started to dig into 15 mega cities every year to understand what's happening in the city. Because a lot of things is happening in cities as we heard before in high city.  Observing them and talking to them, not picking the brains, to the same extent as Jens did. So what I build my conclusion upon are perceptions. Perceptions that people have of their everyday life. And I would like to go through a day in their lives to see what habits people have based on what we've found here. And during my session, I will ask you questions, because that's my profession. I love questions. And I'm very curious. First of all, what did you have for breakfast this morning? Was it the same thing you had yesterday? Or perhaps not, because you were at the conference? Think a week back. Was it different from a month ago? Did you commute here today? Did you use the same means of transport? The same route? Well, I did at least. I'm a coffee person that defines me. I'm a car person that defines me. Because first we make our habits and then our habits makes us. Our habits are very important to us and they guide us in our choices. Through life. They guide us on what kind of technology we use very much. So let's start the day. What's the first thing you touch in the morning?  That might be needed because it's very hot in here. Open your eyes. And what do you touch? Anyone? Alarm clock. Good. Someone might touch your husband or wife, but loads of people touch the alarm clock. But compared to a couple of years back, or say 10 years back at least, it's now in the phone. So even in bed, before we go up, as soon as we open our eyes, we do turn to our mobile phones. Amazing, right? What do we do next? Have breakfast? Not yet. Then you use the internet. We see that globally, in 54 countries, two out of five smartphone users go on the web using Facebook, using email, checking weather, checking news. And it's not just the kids. We did see that a few years back that the teenagers were obsessed by their SMS flow even during nighttime to see if they were loved. Did someone remember me already in the night?  Has anything happened? What's the weather going to be today before even I open the blinds? And you can also check the emails, even before you get up. A few years back, you didn't have time for that, or at least you didn't perceive you had time for that before. So the internet can do quite a lot for us. Affecting our habits and our habits to be in control, to be loved, to be connected, affect how we use our tools. But then you go out of bed. You have to start the day. But what do you bring with you when you leave home in the morning? What kind of companions do you have with you? Well, we did go to Shanghai, New York, Paris, and Berlin last year and ask smartphone users, what kind of things do you bring when you leave home in the morning?  And 90% says, of course, the mobile phone and keys. So we are very, very important for us to be able to unlock doors, to lock doors, and to be connected and to be reachable.  We can't leave them at home, right? We feel naked. If we leave the home without the phone. And then 80% of us bring cash or wallets, because those kind of things are not really yet in the mobile phone. We have very few people who use mobile wallets and so on, so we still bring our cash and cards. And we who commute by public transport, we use a commuter pass, so we bring that one. And a few still bring the MP3 player, the stand-alone, even though it has moved into the mobile phone. Still a few of us bring a second device. But very few, only 20% bring their laptops and their books. And we would say that if the mobile phone is the mobile, the mobile device, the laptop is more of a nomadic device as the book, you bring it when you know you're going to be able to read it.  So from an everyday behavior point of view, it's not as mobile as the mobile phone. And finally, the tablet, it's not as mobile either yet, because only 10% bring their tablets more or less every day, even though the ones who use them and have them at home, where if you bring them. And the portable gaming console is now very much entering the mobile phone. So now we've left the door. We'll bring our mobile phones. Do we use them? We did use them already in bed, right? And we continue using them. After going up from bed, the users just go up, up, up, up. In the morning, during commuting time, during lunch, we tried to eat as well, multitasking, using our mobile phones. Throughout work, we do use them for work. We do use them for pleasure during work time, Facebook, right? During work time as well. But then we have a sacred moment, dinner time, where we eat. I guess we eat the things we didn't have time to eat during lunch. And we talk to family and friends. But then as soon as we put our dishes in the dishwasher, we go online again, using our mobile phones. We have recent data showing that the mobile phone is a very, very dear companion by watching TV, for example, because the TV experience becomes so much greater if you can share with people not in the room, or people who have the same strange interests as I have, and share them on Twitter. But I think this commuting time, where our consumption rises, is very interesting from an everyday life perspective, because during commuting time, we get quite frustrated, don't we? Have you ever got stuck in traffic? Yeah. It's not fun. Commuting time is not fun, according to our respondents. It's a time that should be as short as possible, or you would like to utilize time as much as possible. So what people do then while commuting? Well, we went to the U.S. and we went to Sweden to see what people do and compare these countries. And we do see that the Americans tend to navigate a lot, use the maps and listen to music on their mobile phones. While Swedes do a lot of things, except on navigation. Why is that, you think? Why are we so different in our smartphone behavior during commuting time? Exactly. Our habits of using both public transport and cars in Sweden also affect how we use our tools. We want still to utilize our time, but we can do it differently. While the Americans drive, they mainly use the navigation tools and maps and music. I guess some of them do email, but it's dangerous, right? You've never done that. And people expect so much more than just being able to utilize their time and go from point A to B. Because our consumers' expression wish to have even more. I want to have notifications if there are big accidents somewhere so I can avoid them. My smartphone's GPS system knows where I am, but it couldn't warn me away from problems. And we heard before you were in this room about how smart a seat can be if it shares its data. And we consumers don't just say that we want these kind of services. What I bring with me from this quote is that we do expect so much more than developers could imagine. We believe that our smartphones are smart. We believe that there are information out there that should be in the mobile phone. And everyone knows where I am anyhow via the GPS system, so couldn't I get even better information? And those are the requirements and expectations consumers have on technology today. All to stay in control, to be in time for the meeting, to picking up kids, to make a day as effective as possible, to make use of our valuable time and valuable money. But let us leave commuting time for a while. We did see that dinner and lunchtime were a bit different, and we can talk a little bit about eating habits. Do you like experimenting with food? Try out new tastes. Well, I do. And a lot of people do. More than half of the consumers globally say that they enjoy experiment with new foods and drinks. We are so creative. Want to try out new things. At the same time, two-thirds of these gastronomic experiment says concerning food I eat a stick pretty much to what the things I'm familiar with. And if you think back for about a week, did you experiment on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? Perhaps Friday, right? Or was it the Freda's mice, as we say in Sweden? Same as usual. Perhaps you did try out a new restaurant, a new dish on Saturday. Most of us, at least. So once again, I would like to return to our habits, a very dear to us, and guides us in many of our choices. And these habits also affect us in the media industry. We should be aware of these habits because they make us very dependent on the clouds and affect the things that we expect from the cloud. Smartphones and mobile internet today is not just about personalization. It's not just about rumble. It's not just about having your latest fitness app. It's about keeping up the social infrastructure in life as well. We know for a fact that kids still love to meet in person. All kids are not anti-social, as by traditional terms, they love meeting in person. But these tools help us to make the frequency, the quantity of meetings better. We can always access Facebook. But what I think is the most interesting part of this pyramid is the bottom one. Where we start today to expect our tools to help us navigate the societal infrastructure, where services and technology that knows our local whereabouts, my preference in my local context, and in situations that are not that fancy or create big emotions during commuting, during grocery shopping, when we're going to travel for vacation, when we're going to pick the latest, I don't know, computer or whatever, we turn to our tech tools today to get the guidance to become more efficient. And I personally believe that a lot of the killer applications from a consumer point of view, i.e. applications that will change or help me in my everyday life, they would make a difference will be done here. And we did actually ask people what you want in your mobile phone from an everyday life perspective and compare that with the interests in the latest personalization apps and services. And the results we got were these, this is from last year, Shanghai, Paris and Berlin. And as you can see, most of the interest, the highest interest is in services that help me navigate throughout my everyday life. They want to have better travel planners that are smarter, that knows my presence. They want to have barcode scanners so they can shop easily, more easily, and in not shopping like the latest shoes or the latest gadgets. It's helping me to do the grocery shopping.  The kids are screaming if you have kids, or someone is waiting outside for you in a car and you come to the cashier and darn, you forgot the milk or you forgot the bread, or you come to the meat dish and see that, oh, they only have lamb. What the, I was expecting pork for dinner on another type of meat. Then you would like to be able to turn to your devices and say, oh, let's just show me indoor navigation, where to find the best route through the store so I don't miss all the things I've written down on my shopping list. Or let's point at the pork or let's point at the lamb and see what I can do with other things I have in my basket. Instead of having to walk back the whole way and pick new things for dinner. So all in these small everyday routines, mobile internet and smartphones can make a really difference for us people, make life a little bit more easy and open up for time to do more pleasant things. But it has been a busy day, right? Connected all the time, doing a lot of multitasking and we can't read, so we go to bed. You set alarm in the clock, in the phone when you go to bed. And once again, what we do next? Are we too exhausted? Do we fall asleep immediately? Ah, we go on the web. You're nodding. Yeah, I recognize myself as well. Half of all smartphone users do that. What's the latest bus on Facebook before I need to fall asleep? Or can I just send this email before I go to sleep? Then we fall asleep. And what I see in all these behavioral changes is a new kind of society which makes all of us, regardless of what kind of industry we're working in, if we are a goods provider, if we're a service provider, if we work with retail, if we work with restaurants, making tables, whatever industry we're working in.  And I believe that to be truly relevant for our people today, you have to be in their smartphones or the mobile phones. You have to be somehow connected. And as we did see with the quote before from the gull who was commuting and frustrated by that the GPS system didn't work as well, we see that the consumers are way ahead of us. They expect more things than are available today. And I also believe they are ahead of us because, as Speaker Befor mentioned, that it's complex. When we start to talk about traditional infrastructure, transport infrastructure, legislation, buildings are going to talk to each other, we need collaboration. And we in this industry, including Ericsson, are not as good as consumers collaborating yet. So we need to start there to make truly relevant services for our consumers. And as I think you all heard her, Johanna saying in the beginning of this session when she welcomed us, she said that she had been affected by the internet. She didn't stay asleep for a couple nights trying out a new fancy thing of internet. And therefore I would like to end with a quote from Ericsson Consumer Lab where we believe that first the internet shaped our habits, we didn't sleep as much in the beginning, but our habits are so strong because we are creatures of routines. So we believe that our habits will shape the mobile internet going forward. Thank you.


In a recent video about Jesus being God, I received a comment that I want to share with you guys, and then also give a response to this comment. The comment says, Funny how the Apostle Paul referred to Jesus as the Son of God. Peter, James, and John had no problem with his teachings. Come on, man, we know God was in Christ. And because you say Funny how the Apostle Paul or the others referred to him as the Son of God, with that same thought, I want to also say to you, Funny how you don't seem to know what the Son of God means. Funny how you don't know, but the Jews seem to know. You know, in John 10, 31, when Jesus says, Why do you want to stone me?  The same person who was calling himself the Son of God and the Son of Man. How do they understand it? Funny how they knew what he was speaking of. Funny how the Jews knew that Jesus was saying that he was God. Funny how they knew that, but funny how you don't know that. Funny how in Hebrews 1, God calls Jesus God. He calls the Son God. But how could that be? There can be no other gods. God himself said you can have no other gods. Is he going against himself? Funny how he calls him God and knows that he's God and it doesn't violate anything. Funny how you don't know that. Funny how Thomas, you know, the Apostle Thomas calls him God and Jesus doesn't correct him. Just like when the Jews accused him of calling himself God, he didn't correct them. Funny how Jesus is fine with being called God. Also funny about Paul. Funny how he says that you must call on Jesus as the Lord. You know, the same as Moses calls him the Lord. The same Moses who in Deuteronomy 4, 35, 39 says that the Lord is God. Funny how you don't know that the Lord is God. Funny how you don't equate that Jesus being the Lord and the Lord is God. Funny how you don't make that connection. Funny how the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament is God. Funny how people like Hagar, people like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, people like Joshua, people like Gideon. Funny how they call the angel of the Lord God. And when Moses sees the burning bush, the Bible says it was the angel of the Lord who called from the midst of the bush. The angel of the Lord, the Lord, God. Funny how everyone understands that the angel of the Lord is God. Everyone but you. Funny how God himself says there's only one Lord and Savior. Who is the Savior? Well, who is the Savior? Well, in Isaiah 43, 11, God says he's the Savior. Funny how God says that I am the Lord. That is my name in Isaiah 42, 8. Funny how you don't make the connection between God being the Lord and Jesus being the Lord. Funny how God says that he will not share or give his glory with anyone, but he does to Jesus. Isn't that funny? How Jesus would be blasphemous for asking for the glory and for claiming the glory and receiving glory if he's not God. Isn't that funny? There's only one Lord and one Savior. And funny how the Bible says that at the name of God every knee shall bow. But wait a minute, isn't it funny that the Bible says the same thing about Jesus? At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and tongue confess. Funny how in Isaiah 44, 6 that God is the first and the last. But then in revelations, it's also interesting that Jesus is the first and last. That's kind of funny, huh? In Exodus 34, 14, it's funny how only God can receive worship. However, interestingly enough, funny enough, Jesus receives worship. Funny how you miss all of this relating Jesus as being God. That's funny. However, what's not so funny is that if you do not see that he is the I AM, if you do not see that he is the Lord, if you do not see that Jesus is God. According to Jesus' own words, what's not so funny, he says in John 8, 24, that you will die in your sins. That's not so funny.