1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,760 Welcome to the Cloud Native in 15 Minutes podcast. I'm your host, Derek Harris from VMware. 2 00:00:05,220 --> 00:00:08,520 If you've listened before, you know that I normally interview an expert on a particular 3 00:00:08,520 --> 00:00:13,380 cloud-native technology or general enterprise IT topic for each episode, but this week I'm 4 00:00:13,380 --> 00:00:17,800 trying something different. This week's episode is like an audio blog post, kind of a short version 5 00:00:17,800 --> 00:00:21,840 of an audio book, where I'm going to read you a couple of blog posts that I wrote over the past 6 00:00:21,840 --> 00:00:27,120 year for Intersect, our executive-level blog site, which you can find at pivotal.io slash 7 00:00:27,120 --> 00:00:31,560 intersect. These posts are focused on how executives can use the tools in their belts, 8 00:00:31,860 --> 00:00:36,520 from hiring to budgeting to leading by example, to help make their company's digital transformation 9 00:00:36,520 --> 00:00:41,800 efforts successful. Both of these posts include links to analyst reports, which you can access 10 00:00:41,800 --> 00:00:47,300 within the blog posts themselves on the Intersect site. And if you enjoy this format, drop us a line 11 00:00:47,300 --> 00:00:51,860 at intersect at pivotal.io, and we'll try to do it every now and then with different authors. 12 00:00:52,340 --> 00:00:55,880 And as always, please remember to rate this podcast wherever you listen. 13 00:00:56,740 --> 00:01:02,700 And without further ado, here is the first audio blog post titled, How CEOs Can Drive Digital 14 00:01:02,700 --> 00:01:09,780 Innovation Without Learning to Code. This blog post is from March 18th, 2019, and you can find it 15 00:01:09,780 --> 00:01:18,780 online at content.pivotal.io slash interselect slash how CEOs can drive digital innovation without 16 00:01:18,780 --> 00:01:25,440 learning to code with a hyphen in between each word. The story of the iPhone's development has been told 17 00:01:25,440 --> 00:01:31,400 many times from many angles. But one constant is that Steve Jobs had a vision and was heavily involved 18 00:01:31,400 --> 00:01:36,160 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. 19 00:01:36,360 --> 00:01:37,360 Under his direction, 20 00:01:37,360 --> 00:01:43,320 In the direction, Apple invested significant time, 21 00:01:43,320 --> 00:01:54,320 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. 22 00:01:54,320 --> 00:02:05,280 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. 23 00:02:05,280 --> 00:02:16,240 Today, 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. 24 00:02:16,240 --> 00:02:28,200 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. 25 00:02:28,200 --> 00:02:49,160 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. 26 00:02:49,160 --> 00:03:04,160 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. 27 00:03:04,160 --> 00:03:10,160 There's a lot of detail in the report, but I pulled a handful of insights and pieces of advice to whet your appetite. 28 00:03:10,160 --> 00:03:20,160 One, digital transformation is a fancy term for customer innovation and operational excellence that drive financial results, the measure of a CEO's performance. 29 00:03:20,160 --> 00:03:28,160 So, if the goal is improving upon the status quo, then managing digital transformation using legacy approaches can be a recipe for mediocrity. 30 00:03:28,160 --> 00:03:31,160 Doing different things for a different era starts from the top. 31 00:03:31,160 --> 00:03:42,160 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. 32 00:03:42,160 --> 00:03:47,160 Or, as Forrester puts it, freedom to learn. 33 00:03:47,160 --> 00:03:50,160 Two, software metrics don't focus on business results. 34 00:03:50,160 --> 00:03:52,160 This is critical to understand. 35 00:03:52,160 --> 00:03:57,160 While there are good reasons why IT might have followed certain practices and measured certain things historically, 36 00:03:57,160 --> 00:04:02,160 those might need to change in order to account for software's new mandate to help grow the business. 37 00:04:02,160 --> 00:04:08,160 It's easy enough to measure an application's uptime and release cadence, but more difficult, and arguably more important, 38 00:04:08,160 --> 00:04:13,160 is measuring how that application contributes to business goals such as revenue growth and customer satisfaction. 39 00:04:13,160 --> 00:04:20,160 Three, competitive opportunities usually can't wait a year for the first release of software to capitalize on them. 40 00:04:20,160 --> 00:04:22,160 The same is true of competitive threats. 41 00:04:22,160 --> 00:04:28,160 This is a big reason to embrace agile development methods, but also to embrace agile funding models. 42 00:04:28,160 --> 00:04:38,160 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. 43 00:04:38,160 --> 00:04:45,160 Four, modern software is a team sport with the best ideas and results coming from collaboration across disciplines. 44 00:04:45,160 --> 00:04:51,160 This goes beyond CEOs understanding software and developers understanding business priorities. 45 00:04:51,160 --> 00:04:57,160 It's really about opening up lines of communication and transparency across groups and forcing silo busting when necessary. 46 00:04:57,160 --> 00:05:07,160 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. 47 00:05:07,160 --> 00:05:13,160 Five, investment in people is sacrosanct in your digital strategy. 48 00:05:13,160 --> 00:05:19,160 Higher salaries on hip offices get a lot of attention, but there's more to attracting and retaining talent than those things. 49 00:05:19,160 --> 00:05:25,160 If a company can afford it, opening offices in cities with strong talent pools and cultural appeal can be a good move. 50 00:05:25,160 --> 00:05:34,160 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. 51 00:05:34,160 --> 00:05:43,160 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. 52 00:05:43,160 --> 00:05:51,160 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. 53 00:05:51,160 --> 00:06:01,160 And the second post for this episode is entitled, "For Designers or Developers Actually Trying is the Key to Hiring Digital Talent." 54 00:06:01,160 --> 00:06:18,160 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. 55 00:06:18,160 --> 00:06:21,160 Here is a cold, hard truth. 56 00:06:21,160 --> 00:06:31,160 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. 57 00:06:31,160 --> 00:06:40,160 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. 58 00:06:40,160 --> 00:06:47,160 Now, there is a lot to learn, and it covers everything from office design and culture to how the corporate mission is presented. 59 00:06:47,160 --> 00:06:52,160 Becoming the type of company where the best and brightest want to work is not something that's going to happen overnight. 60 00:06:52,160 --> 00:07:03,160 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." 61 00:07:03,160 --> 00:07:07,160 You can find that post in this blog post with no registration required. 62 00:07:07,160 --> 00:07:17,160 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. 63 00:07:17,160 --> 00:07:24,160 Here's an abbreviated version of what the report suggests, as well as some additional context touching on digital transformation in general. 64 00:07:24,160 --> 00:07:27,160 One, train employees. 65 00:07:27,160 --> 00:07:36,160 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. 66 00:07:36,160 --> 00:07:40,160 The short-term benefit is that your company gets some of the skills it needs in a few weeks or months. 67 00:07:40,160 --> 00:07:56,160 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. 68 00:07:56,160 --> 00:08:01,160 Two, evolve your culture, and probably your offices. 69 00:08:01,160 --> 00:08:08,160 Collaboration and empowered employees are key components of any digital transformation effort, because the whole idea spans such a wide spectrum of needs. 70 00:08:08,160 --> 00:08:12,160 On the back end, the application lifecycle needs to become continuous. 71 00:08:12,160 --> 00:08:16,160 On the front end, experiences and interfaces need to become user-friendly. 72 00:08:16,160 --> 00:08:25,160 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. 73 00:08:25,160 --> 00:08:28,160 Also, office layouts and amenities do matter. 74 00:08:28,160 --> 00:08:32,160 People want to feel like they're out of place that values employees and creativity. 75 00:08:32,160 --> 00:08:35,160 But without the right culture, they're only a veneer. 76 00:08:35,160 --> 00:08:39,160 Three, sell the opportunity and the company. 77 00:08:39,160 --> 00:08:44,160 Skilled digital talent is not a dime a dozen, which means employees need to sell themselves. 78 00:08:44,160 --> 00:08:48,160 You'd be lucky to work for us is not a line that will go over very well in interviews. 79 00:08:48,160 --> 00:08:56,160 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. 80 00:08:56,160 --> 00:08:58,160 Maybe even be the shaping force. 81 00:08:58,160 --> 00:09:09,160 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. 82 00:09:09,160 --> 00:09:13,160 Every startup, no matter how mundane, talks about changing the world. 83 00:09:13,160 --> 00:09:14,160 What's your story? 84 00:09:14,160 --> 00:09:24,160 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. 85 00:09:24,160 --> 00:09:39,160 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. 86 00:09:39,160 --> 00:09:50,160 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. 87 00:09:50,160 --> 00:10:03,160 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. 88 00:10:03,160 --> 00:10:12,160 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. 89 00:10:12,160 --> 00:10:21,160 You can find that post at content.pivotal.io/intersect/knowthyself, hyphenated in that last part. 90 00:10:21,160 --> 00:10:37,160 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. 91 00:10:38,160 --> 00:10:45,160 The 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. 92 00:10:45,160 --> 00:10:53,160 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. 93 00:10:53,160 --> 00:10:58,160 That sometimes means the intelligence and talent of the team have to be managed more carefully and intentionally. 94 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:02,160 Other times, it means allowing team members to be more autonomous. 95 00:11:02,160 --> 00:11:06,160 But it's the DNA of that particular company that makes the determination." 96 00:11:06,160 --> 00:11:11,160 One example I always look to as evidence of what this all looks like when it's done right is Dick's Sporting Goods. 97 00:11:11,160 --> 00:11:19,160 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. 98 00:11:19,160 --> 00:11:28,160 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. 99 00:11:28,160 --> 00:11:36,160 Such as this anecdote from Dick's Director of Engineering, JP White, just shortly after the company began its digital transformation in earnest. 100 00:11:36,160 --> 00:11:42,160 Quoting, "In addition to restructuring the way we're working, we've restructured the physical layout of our offices as well. 101 00:11:42,160 --> 00:11:50,160 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. 102 00:11:50,160 --> 00:11:53,160 And then that becomes the de facto standard. 103 00:11:53,160 --> 00:11:59,160 The more we can identify these best practices and templates, it allows the teams to focus more on solving customer problems." 104 00:11:59,160 --> 00:12:09,160 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. 105 00:12:09,160 --> 00:12:16,160 It captures some findings from a Forrester report detailing the most important things companies can do to prepare themselves for a software-centric future. 106 00:12:16,160 --> 00:12:23,160 And, like the Gartner report discussed above, calls on the C-suite to take ownership of these initiatives. 107 00:12:23,160 --> 00:12:30,160 Not surprisingly, implementing a collaborative culture and placing an emphasis on hiring and retaining key talent are among the main suggestions. 108 00:12:30,160 --> 00:12:35,160 But all this being said, talking about these strategies is not the same as implementing them. 109 00:12:35,160 --> 00:12:39,160 And half-heartedly implementing them isn't really much better than lip service. 110 00:12:39,160 --> 00:12:52,160 As 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. 111 00:12:52,160 --> 00:13:01,160 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. 112 00:13:01,160 --> 00:13:05,160 An honest effort at becoming the company you want to be can go a long way. 113 00:13:05,160 --> 00:13:07,160 And finally, a little extra credit. 114 00:13:07,160 --> 00:13:15,160 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. 115 00:13:15,160 --> 00:13:21,160 You'll probably find that it isn't always money or freedom to write code in the latest, greatest new programming language. 116 00:13:21,160 --> 00:13:29,160 You can check out Hacker News online at news.ycombinator.com. 117 00:13:29,160 --> 00:13:30,160 There you have it. 118 00:13:30,160 --> 00:13:31,160 I hope you learned something. 119 00:13:31,160 --> 00:13:36,160 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. 120 00:13:36,160 --> 00:13:44,160 If you missed the titles or the URLs earlier, you can find both of these blog posts at pivotal.io/intersect. 121 00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:54,160 Just search for two posts, one from March 2019, entitled How CEOs Can Drive Digital Innovation Without Learning to Code. 122 00:13:54,160 --> 00:14:04,160 And the second from October 2019, titled For Designers or Developers Actually Trying is the Key to Hiring Digital Talent. 123 00:14:04,160 --> 00:14:13,160 And you can check out all things cloud native at pivotal.io and at cloud.vmware.com. 124 00:14:13,160 --> 00:14:15,160 Thank you.