Welcome to the Cloud Native in 15 Minutes podcast. I'm your host, Derek Harris from VMware. If you've listened before, you know that I normally interview an expert on a particular cloud-native technology or general enterprise IT topic for each episode, but this week I'm trying something different. This week's episode is like an audio blog post, kind of a short version of an audio book, where I'm going to read you a couple of blog posts that I wrote over the past year for Intersect, our executive-level blog site, which you can find at pivotal.io slash intersect. These posts are focused on how executives can use the tools in their belts, from hiring to budgeting to leading by example, to help make their company's digital transformation efforts successful. Both of these posts include links to analyst reports, which you can access within the blog posts themselves on the Intersect site. And if you enjoy this format, drop us a line at intersect at pivotal.io, and we'll try to do it every now and then with different authors. And as always, please remember to rate this podcast wherever you listen. And without further ado, here is the first audio blog post titled, How CEOs Can Drive Digital Innovation Without Learning to Code. This blog post is from March 18th, 2019, and you can find it online at content.pivotal.io slash interselect slash how CEOs can drive digital innovation without learning to code with a hyphen in between each word. The story of the iPhone's development has been told many times from many angles. But one constant is that Steve Jobs had a vision and was heavily involved involved in making sure the finished product lived in making sure the finished product lived up to that vision, even if he's an always portrayed as the hero. Under his direction, In the direction, Apple invested significant time, Now, you don't need to worship at the altar of Steve Jobs to recognize the value of a CEO who groks technology and is actively involved in product development, even if that CEO can't really be labeled a technologist. Over and over and over again in the past decade, we've seen innovative CEOs give rise to the likes of Amazon and Facebook and Airbnb and Netflix and Tesla. The list goes on.
2:05Today, you could expand that list to include CEOs from any number of more traditional companies, ranging from Target to T-Mobile, who have embraced digital transformation and are riding it to new levels of success. That's because today software is fast becoming the focal point of many digital innovation strategies. And when software is the lifeblood of your company, the whole company must be aligned around making sure it's done right. Ask the right questions, measure the right things and break down walls. If you spend your days in the C-suite of a traditional large enterprise, a report from Forrester titled "Foster the Software Capabilities That Your Firm Needs" provides useful insight into how you can facilitate successful digital transformation without moonlighting as a full stack developer or distributed systems engineer. You can read the whole report in this blog post, no registration required, and learn a lot about reconsidering how your company measures ROI, how it manages technology budgets, and how CEOs should partner with application owners and technology leaders to ensure everyone's goals are aligned. There's a lot of detail in the report, but I pulled a handful of insights and pieces of advice to whet your appetite. One, digital transformation is a fancy term for customer innovation and operational excellence that drive financial results, the measure of a CEO's performance. So, if the goal is improving upon the status quo, then managing digital transformation using legacy approaches can be a recipe for mediocrity. Doing different things for a different era starts from the top. And because modern software delivery is a continuous process, everyone from engineers to executives must be on the same page about everything from corporate priorities to tolerance levels for failure. Or, as Forrester puts it, freedom to learn. Two, software metrics don't focus on business results. This is critical to understand. While there are good reasons why IT might have followed certain practices and measured certain things historically, those might need to change in order to account for software's new mandate to help grow the business. It's easy enough to measure an application's uptime and release cadence, but more difficult, and arguably more important,
4:08is measuring how that application contributes to business goals such as revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Three, competitive opportunities usually can't wait a year for the first release of software to capitalize on them. The same is true of competitive threats. This is a big reason to embrace agile development methods, but also to embrace agile funding models. Given the way modern software is built, application teams can benefit from flexible budgets that take into account current priorities rather than playing psychic and allocating everything up front. Four, modern software is a team sport with the best ideas and results coming from collaboration across disciplines. This goes beyond CEOs understanding software and developers understanding business priorities. It's really about opening up lines of communication and transparency across groups and forcing silo busting when necessary. It makes a lot of sense when you consider, for example, the interconnected nature of a modern retail experience that might touch a mobile app, an inventory database, and in-store personnel. Five, investment in people is sacrosanct in your digital strategy. Higher salaries on hip offices get a lot of attention, but there's more to attracting and retaining talent than those things. If a company can afford it, opening offices in cities with strong talent pools and cultural appeal can be a good move. Also, at the end of the day, software developers and engineers want to be productive, so it's important to make sure your company's platforms, processes, and tools facilitate that. Essentially, CEOs and other execs need to understand the difference between running a company that uses software and running a company that innovates with software. That means knowing enough about modern software development to ask the right questions, measure the right things, and give product teams what they need to operate. And the second post for this episode is entitled, "For Designers or Developers Actually Trying is the Key to Hiring Digital Talent." This post is from October 31st, 2019, and you can find it online at content.pivotal.io/intersect/how to hire digital designers and developers, again with a hyphen in between each word in that last part.
6:18Here is a cold, hard truth. Nothing turns off young, capable, and in-demand digital talent like a large enterprise committed to retaining a stodgy, bureaucratic, and adversarial large enterprise culture. You don't need to be a web giant or a well-funded startup to attract and retain the right people, but you do need to heed some lessons from those companies and put forth some real effort to implement them. Now, there is a lot to learn, and it covers everything from office design and culture to how the corporate mission is presented. Becoming the type of company where the best and brightest want to work is not something that's going to happen overnight. However, Gartner analyst Brian Prentice provides a good starting point in an aptly titled report, "How CIOs Can Successfully Attract and Retain Digital Talent in a Seller's Market." You can find that post in this blog post with no registration required. The report focuses on digital design talent, a pool that represents its own unique challenges in a space that's increasingly strategic, but much of the guidance also applies to software developers. Here's an abbreviated version of what the report suggests, as well as some additional context touching on digital transformation in general. One, train employees. If you can't hire the unicorns and top-of-their-class graduates that are destined for riches in Silicon Valley, you need to upskill the employees you do have and can hire. The short-term benefit is that your company gets some of the skills it needs in a few weeks or months. The longer-term benefits are that your company establishes institutional knowledge, processes, and people that should make it easier to hire the right talent, as one, universities pump out more qualified graduates, and two, mid-career prospects begin looking for something new. Two, evolve your culture, and probably your offices. Collaboration and empowered employees are key components of any digital transformation effort, because the whole idea spans such a wide spectrum of needs. On the back end, the application lifecycle needs to become continuous. On the front end, experiences and interfaces need to become user-friendly. Across the whole organization, leadership needs to embrace a culture in which employees are encouraged to collaborate and solve problems without fearing repercussions for swimming outside their lanes.
8:25Also, office layouts and amenities do matter. People want to feel like they're out of place that values employees and creativity. But without the right culture, they're only a veneer. Three, sell the opportunity and the company. Skilled digital talent is not a dime a dozen, which means employees need to sell themselves. You'd be lucky to work for us is not a line that will go over very well in interviews. On the contrary, let potential employees know how valuable their work will be for the company and how it will help shape the company's digital culture going forward. Maybe even be the shaping force. Depending on your industry, your company also has an opportunity to sell prospects and how they can make a difference in people's lives through better software and not just through streaming content or yet another messaging app. Every startup, no matter how mundane, talks about changing the world. What's your story? We've covered the topic of people management in the context of digital transformation at least a handful of times in other Intersect posts, sometimes coming at it from different angles. The most recent example is the five pillars of digital transformation, which you can find online at content.pivotal.io/intersect/thefivepillarsofdigitaltransformation, with hyphens in between each word in the last section, which is very much worth reading. Author Suthu Kamal lays out the case for employees' creativity as a company's single most important asset and for smart technology adoption as a tool for opening up that largely untapped resource. He specifically discusses collaboration software as an enabling factor for successful organizations, but also dives into the value of democratizing access to data and even certain programming capabilities to a broader swath of employees. We also touched on this back in April in a post about keeping true to your corporate identity, the good parts obviously, while undergoing evolution of any kind. You can find that post at content.pivotal.io/intersect/knowthyself, hyphenated in that last part. That post includes a link to a blog post and accompanying podcast where my former colleague Om Malik interviews Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and you can find that post at om.co and just scroll back to April 8th, 2019.
10:38The interview itself is quite insightful, but Om's synopsis of their discussion on the topic of how to build an engineering culture hits the nail on the head. Quoting, "Every company has its own unique needs, and a company should be structured in a way that will enable it to serve those needs. That sometimes means the intelligence and talent of the team have to be managed more carefully and intentionally. Other times, it means allowing team members to be more autonomous. But it's the DNA of that particular company that makes the determination." One example I always look to as evidence of what this all looks like when it's done right is Dick's Sporting Goods. The retailer has openly discussed how it rebuilt its technology practice into a thriving environment, while maintaining the parts of its culture that make it Dick's. But buried in that all-important talk about software velocity, development empowerment, and team organization are some little nuggets that any company can do to get started. Such as this anecdote from Dick's Director of Engineering, JP White, just shortly after the company began its digital transformation in earnest. Quoting, "In addition to restructuring the way we're working, we've restructured the physical layout of our offices as well. So, as one team figures something out, there's an opportunity to physically just spin around and to talk to another teammate that may be facing a similar problem. And then that becomes the de facto standard. The more we can identify these best practices and templates, it allows the teams to focus more on solving customer problems." Finally, I would point to this post from March titled, "How CEOs Can Drive Digital Innovation Without Learning How to Code," which we covered and linked to in the first part of this podcast. It captures some findings from a Forrester report detailing the most important things companies can do to prepare themselves for a software-centric future. And, like the Gartner report discussed above, calls on the C-suite to take ownership of these initiatives. Not surprisingly, implementing a collaborative culture and placing an emphasis on hiring and retaining key talent are among the main suggestions. But all this being said, talking about these strategies is not the same as implementing them. And half-heartedly implementing them isn't really much better than lip service.
12:39As Gartner's Prentice points out, upon realizing that they are not being set up for success, digital talent will depart from more lucrative opportunities, leaving executives to deal with staff churn on top of the broader goal of transformation. The thing about these amazing digital designers and software developers that everybody wants to hire is that while they do expect certain things, perfection is not one of them. An honest effort at becoming the company you want to be can go a long way. And finally, a little extra credit. Commit to reading Hacker News comments for a week on stories not related to software development, and you'll get a good sense of what developers really want. You'll probably find that it isn't always money or freedom to write code in the latest, greatest new programming language. You can check out Hacker News online at news.ycombinator.com. There you have it. I hope you learned something. And if you haven't read these blog posts before, I hope you now listen to them for the first time and found them informative. If you missed the titles or the URLs earlier, you can find both of these blog posts at pivotal.io/intersect. Just search for two posts, one from March 2019, entitled How CEOs Can Drive Digital Innovation Without Learning to Code. And the second from October 2019, titled For Designers or Developers Actually Trying is the Key to Hiring Digital Talent. And you can check out all things cloud native at pivotal.io and at cloud.vmware.com. Thank you.