Wrapup of Day 1
My key ideas, thoughts and stats from day one. Not too many ‘ah-ha’ moments today but a quick summary of proceedings after the keynote.
Key ideas from day 1:
- Innovation is well and truly a buzzword, with all the vagueness that buzzwords bring.
- Innovation requires focus on specific results, specific purpose, better use of time to fully understand the problem before jumping to solutions and often starting with a clean slate to shed legacy.
- Being clear on purpose before process is a shift for most IT organizations who are very process-centric and service delivery (order taker) focussed.
- Walls between business and IT are crumbling. We are dealing with a new generation of IT-savvy users. The balance of control is shifting to one of influence. The non-functionals ('ties’) will remain but the amount of focus on them will change.
- Focussing on cost savings has proven to be a leading cause of business capability deterioration
- The approach we are following (educate, communicate and collaborate) seems to be widely accepted good practice.
- Our customers are the customers of the business, not the internal business. There is too much internal focus in organizations.
- Use complaints as a lead into conversations. People only complain about things they care about.
- Don’t measure outputs, rather focus on outcomes.
- Influence is a key tool to use alongside formal org structures and often it’s more effective.
- DevOps is being taken up my more and more organizations as they build private cloud services.
- The concepts behind Cloud Computing have well and truly been flogged to death - that horse ain’t getting up!
- Netflix have built resiliency in at each layer of the stack which is why the Amazon outage didn’t take them down. They run 'chaos monkey’ to actively simulate active processes being killed off at random to test failover in real time.
Key stats from day 1:
- Survey stats suggest more than 50% of organizations believe real business & engagement is occurring around their enterprise architecture - to varying degrees.
- In APAC about 88% of survey respondents say they have a clear business strategy which the organization widely understands - that number seems very optimistic.
- Most companies have innovation in their top 5 priorities; in it’s various shapes and sizes.
- About 10% of Gartner customers have a partner scorecard to gauge how well business divisions partner with IT. This significantly helps to speed up the shift from order taker to partner but requires a top level mandate which can be a sticking point.
- Reasonable turnout this year: 1500 attendees with 350 CIOs
Overall we are about where everyone else is up to in terms of progress - we are even more advanced in some areas. The work we’ve done in the last 18 months has been crucial to getting us thus far.