In a business environment increasingly characterized by agility, customer-centricity, and rapid innovation, technical infrastructures are no longer merely supporting components. They are at the forefront of an organization’s growth strategies, mainly as companies make significant efforts to adjust to market disruptions, strengthen customer relationships, and maintain a competitive advantage.

Due to this transformation, integrating cloud technologies, network optimization, and endpoint management, formerly considered merely ‘IT’ tenets, are crucial to achieving overarching business objectives.

However, this poses crucial questions: Do our current cloud strategies align with our long-term goals? As we design future networks, can we ensure they accommodate anticipated market developments and business growth? How do we ensure seamless operations while rigorously safeguarding vital business data in our highly interconnected era?

This complex combination of technology and business strategy is challenging to navigate. How do today’s IT executives develop strategies that strengthen resilience and growth in these converging domains?

Watch this video to get answers to many pressing questions, including:

• • How are we ensuring our technological strategies align seamlessly with our overarching business vision in a dynamic environment?
  • Amidst many technological advancements, how do we differentiate foundational technologies from transient trends?
  • How is our technological infrastructure advancing to foster deeper and more sustained customer relationships?
  • How are we ensuring a rapid yet secure technological environment as digital operations expand?
  • In anticipation of imminent technological disruptions, how are we positioning our infrastructure for resilience and adaptability?
  • How do we effectively articulate the significance and rationale behind our technological choices to non-technical stakeholders?

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:05]:
Hello, and welcome to the CTN Virtual Roundtable. The topic is infrastructure in flux, bridging technical evolution with business ambition. My name is Sanjo Gaul. I am from CIO Talk Network, and I’ll be your moderator. But then I wanted to talk to you about the genesis of this topic. So, coming from a media background, and of course, talking to leaders similar to who we will have on this discussion today globally, what we are seeing is people are very busy building the next generation, digitally enabled enterprises and experiences. But all of that that is being done is being done with an infrastructure which may not be catching up, or it may not be fully aligned, or in some cases, it is actually breaking apart, and then we have to do some last minute break fix. So, yes, you want to adjust to market disruptions, yes, you want to build and strengthen customer relationships, and yes, you want to build a competitive advantage.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:21]:
But do you think your cloud strategies, your network design, your endpoint management capabilities, and these are just three that I picked up. There could be more, which are under the umbrella of infrastructure. Are they really where they should be? Are they being designed for them to support what your current issues are and what your future issues could be? So we wanted to get this panel together to have a discussion around the top challenges these leaders have and how have they been trying to solve. And if they’re hitting a snag, how the other panelists in this discussion can help out by offering some new, more or different advice and pointers based on their experiences and expertise. So this is more like a workshop, more like a hackathon. And to make this successful, we have Jeff Gan, the Steve information officer for encore electricity. Robert Dixon, chief information officer with Wichita Public Schools. Rohit Agarwal, who’s the vp of IT and global head of hybrid cloud with Siemens Healthineers.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:28]:
Michael Roberts, vice president of information technology with Utica University. Rajiv Rao, global vice president, security and networks for zones Raj Palanki, head of IT and digital and divisional CIO with Vacker Chemical Corporation USA David Yasenshock, director of Cybersecurity governance, Risk and Compliance, University system of New Hampshire. And Aslam Mohammed, director of IT and business applications with Globe Union Group. So that’s quite a compelling panel. And what we will do is we will start with asking each of the leaders their top challenge, which holds them back from building that infrastructure that would support the business ambitions. And as we start with each question, I would also like each of the panelists to answer yet another question. If your organizational infrastructure was a superhero, what would be its superpower and why? Along with your top challenge. So starting with you, Jeff.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:34]:
Ken, take it away.

Jeff Cann [00:03:38]:
Thank you, Sanjog. It’s great to be here with everyone. It’s a great panel. I would say that my biggest challenge is helping a construction company, which does not have it as a core skillset across the enterprise, understand how does our infrastructure strategy relate to our business strategy. What are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? How can we basically enable the company for growth? Encore is now over 1100 employees. We operate in many western regional states, and every job site is remote, which causes great complexity in our network architecture and our use of cloud technologies. Furthermore, we have a lot of dfars cybersecurity requirements. Think of NIST 800 171, which are overlaid on top of all of that.

Jeff Cann [00:04:24]:
So there’s a lot of challenges to really managing the infrastructure. And so my challenge has been how do I help the company understand those challenges, given that they have kind of a short attention span and relatively lower interest in these details, because they feel like our technology team is capable of handling them. But there are times when we need more input. So I think that’s. I would love to get some feedback from the panel on how do I help educate, you know, bring them along, help them see the perspective that we all struggle with on a daily basis, knowing that these are not a group of CIO’s that I’m talking to.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:02]:
Great. Thank you, Robert Nixon.

Robert Dickson [00:05:05]:
Yeah, so I love that Jeff led off with that because my work is in education, where we look at the future of work. So I get to oversee both the operational side of technology as well as the instructional side of technology. In Wichita Public schools, which is the largest district in Kansas, we have over 90 schools and programs. I have over 70,000 users. Right. The pandemic changed a lot in education and moved us to the cloud. Also, you have some disruption happening with AI and large language models. So I think the biggest superpower for me is seeing change happen in the future of work and focusing on skills, both digital literacy, for parents, staff and students.

Robert Dickson [00:05:57]:
And I think inevitably those things are help change happen within an organization or even outside an organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:05]:
All right, so, hey, Jeff, did you give your super answer to the superpower question yet?

Jeff Cann [00:06:11]:
No. So, geez, my superpower would be translating the language of it into business and vice versa.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:22]:
All right. Okay. So, Rohit, over to you.

Rohit Agrawal [00:06:27]:
Thank you, Sanjok. Hello, everyone. Glad to be here. I’m working for Siemens Healthy News and top challenge that we face with infrastructure being influx, right. Is the rate of change and the change management for our employees, for our users, related to the infrastructure transformation that we are doing, whether it is an area of network transformation, whether it is workplace, zero trust due to cybersecurity, increasing threats, cloudification, or is it emerging trends or disruptive trends, disruptive technologies like generative AI incubation and adoption in the organization. So how much change to bring to the users so that it is not overwhelming to them, and how to manage this properly in the organization. So this becomes a top challenge for us. Talking about superpower, it will be software defined everything for us, whether it is network, whether it is workplace, whether it is data centers, cloud, you name it.

Rohit Agrawal [00:07:33]:
With that, we will be able to make large scale changes without bringing disruption to the day to day business processes, is what I feel.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:46]:
All right, great, Michael.

Michael Roberts [00:07:49]:
So I’m going to start with my departmental superpower first, and I think that’s working in higher education, especially a small university, it has to be the people. And because of that, my top challenge is.

Michael Roberts [00:08:09]:
How.

Michael Roberts [00:08:13]:
The end users, because we have such good people in higher education and create such a family atmosphere, they go directly to the people that they need help from. As a leader, I have a hard time capturing the needs of the institution because of that. So they are circumventing processes. So how do we grow and implement new things and capture the workload necessary to make sure that we’re putting the time and resources necessary to complete it?

Sanjog Aul [00:08:48]:
Great. And so, Rajiv.

Rajiv Rao [00:08:53]:
Yeah, so for me, my superpower would be to have a magic wand for anything and everything that shows up in my way.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:03]:
But this is like the infrastructure superpower, even that.

Rajiv Rao [00:09:06]:
Right?

Rajiv Rao [00:09:06]:
Because I know Jeff mentioned a few things, and, Michael, all of you kind of mention things that bring back memories of pre pandemic and during the pandemic. I wish every one of us at that time, when we were pivoting our businesses from a well established model to something that was a great unknown, we all reinvented ourselves and figured out how to go about getting that operational continuity so that we could continue to survive in that time. Right? We may not realize it, or we may have forgotten it already, but we all have that inner ability to adapt and survive. So don’t ever second guess yourself in the sense that we all have that capability. We have done this already. And so for me, it’s interesting to hear all these nuances about the relationship where people are circumventing processes, where you’re unable to understand what is the need of the organization to where Jeff was mentioning all remote sites. And then how do you secure how do you manage environments like that? To Rohit, constantly worrying about fatigue on the user side when it comes to change. But what is that sweet spot for maintaining constant change to benefit the business versus tolerance of the user? So there is that balance that he is trying to walk, and kudos to him to keeping that, because user experience is an important cornerstone of what we do, because that directly relates to productivity.

Rajiv Rao [00:10:49]:
If they’re going to be bitching and moaning, if I can use those words, pardon my expression, if that’s inappropriate about it, they’re not going to be doing their primary work. They’re not technicians, employees, and their job is to do whatever they were hired to do. And if it becomes the topic of the, you know, of their life and their existence, then they’re not productive and you’re failing in your mission. So I’m just enjoying this conversation. It’s an honor to be here with you guys and listen to what’s going on here and certainly will contribute to, you know, almost everything that you’re talking about. I’ve seen it in one form or another in my experience. So happy to collaborate with this group here.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:31]:
Great. Thank you, Raj.

Raj Polanki [00:11:34]:
Hello, everybody.

Raj Polanki [00:11:35]:
I’m very happy to be here and excited to listen and learn from all of you guys. So I represent a manufacturing company, which is a global manufacturing company, and I’m responsible for nine sites running in the US. Sometimes I feel exactly the analogy of what I think many of you are all familiar about changing the tires of a running cardinal. So sometimes I see that way. My primary job of challenger is to make sure that the sites are running with appropriate infrastructure, with the safety, security and reliability. I cannot compromise on that. But at the same time, I would enable the business with what’s possible with the technology. So my other side of the challenge here is how can I enable my business by letting them know what’s possible? Because what they don’t know is what they don’t know.

Raj Polanki [00:12:24]:
What’s possible with the technology is a lot, and they hear some small bits here and there, but they cannot see entire picture. I think as a technology leader, it’s my job to showcase them what’s possible, but at the same time give a roadmap and progress the business to the transformation. And in fact, that’s what goes to my superpower. If I have superpower for my it, I would transform my business on a faster scale to leverage the technologies, what’s possible in the market.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:53]:
All right, David.

David Yasenchock [00:12:56]:
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Dave Yasenshock here from the university system of New Hampshire. I’m going to go over my superpower first. My superpower would be patience. If you’re dealing in a university system, you’re dealing with faculty, collective bargaining units, staff, and you got to be patient with people with that. And I find that is very helpful to do that. We often say that things at the university go at a glacier speed. So one of our biggest challenges right now is, as we know, what Covid cloud applications has become the end thing.

David Yasenchock [00:13:35]:
We’re using M 365 canvas workday banner, all cloud based systems, and we’re really relying on them to give us what we need as part of third party risk management. We’re having a challenge to really analyzing all our third party systems, which we have about 1300 of them for it, and really get a hold on them. Are they really doing what they say they are doing, not only from a service level agreement, also from a regulatory agreement, if there’s any sensitive data, are they being stored, as they say? And we’re finding a difficulty with that, as most of our breaches for this year, our cyber exposures for this year, have been from our third party providers. And it’s being a challenge.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:22]:
Your superpower was patience. Right, Dave, what would be the superpower of infrastructure? So it delivers on the promise.

David Yasenchock [00:14:33]:
A secure network that’s a superpower that’s not able space, provide you a secure network. Don’t have to worry about it.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:42]:
Okay. All right. Always secure. 100% secure.

David Yasenchock [00:14:46]:
100% secure.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:47]:
Beautiful. Beautiful. Hey, Aslam, how about your challenge and your infrastructure superpower that you would like?

Aslam Mohammad [00:14:55]:
Good morning, everyone. Again, thanks for having me in this panel for us. The superpower, I would see if I have to imagine, is something where the it team is able to support cross geography. So we have a team that understand the entire infrastructure across the globe, and anybody is able to support anybody. And we are often time in infrastructure. Sometimes people have to work overnight, multiple days if things goes wrong, is because we don’t have the right backup setup. So to me, that will be the ideal state. And our challenge is we have.

Aslam Mohammad [00:15:47]:
We are a manufacturing company, different places. The way it has evolved over the time is from a decentralized to centralized mode. We are moving towards. So infrastructures are different vendors, different systems are being used, and our challenge is how do we, as we get into the stage of refreshing the infrastructure, which one to pick, and how do we consolidate all together so that we have a consistency in the environment and have the skillset that can support cross geography.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:27]:
All right, good. So now, Jeff, I’ll come back to you because you’re the first one who started, and you laid out your challenge, and since it was your top challenge, could you give us very specifically things that you did which worked for you to crack that problem, and then finally a snag that you’re hitting where you specifically could use some very targeted inputs from the panel? Okay, so you’re.

Jeff Cann [00:16:52]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Cann [00:16:53]:
So there. I would say what I’ve tried to do is try to give some conversations and education to fellow C suite leaders about challenges of infrastructure. And that’s what I was talking about the translation a little bit, because I’ve had to back away from technology language and try to draw analogies to the construction world. And I found that that’s been very helpful to speak their language, help them understand really what’s beneath the sort of, like I said, the tip of the iceberg that they only have visibility into. And that’s been very successful on the cybersecurity front. And so I’ve got executives who are a lot more clued in on the challenges of cybersecurity. But I think cybersecurity is very easy to be educational with. I think the challenge is, when you talk about something that’s a little more conceptual, like.

Jeff Cann [00:17:44]:
Like an infrastructure, they kind of understand it. But I guess the approach I’ve taken so far has hit a snag, and that I’m not sure how to reach them. And what is the importance of reaching them to have them become. I’ll call an educated, educated executive with regard to infrastructure. So, for example, we have a huge brick of data in Microsoft 360, 514 terabytes. And we’re trying to explain that if we, despite our three, two, one backup architecture, you know, if we have a ransomware event that is a minimum of three to four weeks of restoration, and so trying to help them understand the impact and things like that can be a challenge. So I guess I would invite the panel to give me some tips and suggestions about how they’re working with their executive champions or sponsors or stakeholders, whatever you call them in your area, and just have them help them come along, board alongside of you to understand the technology a little bit more. Or maybe that’s not important, and maybe you found other ways to help them support the initiatives of growing the infrastructure so that it will be secure, so it’ll be cloud based, so that’ll be nimble.

Jeff Cann [00:18:56]:
So those would be some ideas I would love to hear more input on.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:00]:
Great. So, Rajiv.

Rajiv Rao [00:19:02]:
Yeah, Jeff. Great, great questions. And to be, not. Not to sound too techy here, but great problems to solve. Actually, it’s very fascinating what you’re talking about. I boil all that down to business continuity. What matters most to your business really is the construction folks. They want that business to continue to go on.

Rajiv Rao [00:19:22]:
And if it is supporting in that manner, the first question you really ask is what is your tolerance? What is your tolerance from a business perspective? That you don’t have your tools and your systems. How long will the business stand and run on its own? So when you establish those KPI’s with the business, then you can easily have conversations around what it takes to maintain those KPI’s. You mentioned something very interesting about your 14 terabytes and the backup. Right. You talked about it in the context of restoration and the time it takes to restore. Right. I find a gap in that. I’m not trying to educate anybody on it, but I find a gap in that far too often everybody thinks having a backup is an answer to business continuity.

Rajiv Rao [00:20:08]:
It’s not. I’ll give you an example. In my previous work environment, I was dealing with a county that had been attacked by ransomware. Completely zeroed out the systems. And they being a county, their job is to support the citizens of the county. Imagine the scenario where a young couple walks up to the county and submitted an application to get married. The county told them to go away, the computers went down, they could not get married. That does not even make sense.

Rajiv Rao [00:20:47]:
But you’ve got your mindset that, oh my God, my computer is down, so therefore I cannot do my business. So business continuity is bigger than just backup restores. It is about understanding your tolerance, your processes, youre all of those things that have to happen in the interim while the it folks are able to restore in within the KPI’s what needs to happen. So we lose the art of that and the business doesn’t understand it. They look at Jeff and say, jeff, you said we had good it systems and now I’m unable to transact that order. When are you going to get that? To me, that is not the point. You should be able, the county should have been able to say, here’s a piece of paper, write your first name, last name, your date of birth, this, that and the other. And here’s my marriage certificate I’m giving you like I did, like the county gave your grandparents, way back when, before the computers were available.

Rajiv Rao [00:21:35]:
So go ahead and be happy. Versus becoming a newspaper article the next day. That was a laughingstock at the town, right? Because you are not thinking it through. So business has this unique ability to point at it when something breaks or something doesn’t work, but do not understand the appropriate investment that needs to be made to support the KPI’s that they expect from you. So happy to have those conversations around what it is we do in that space and how we go about looking at it from a KPI perspective and business quantity perspective. And not only that, but also from a recoverability perspective. And he talked about backup on the store, and I want to put this in everybody’s head. This notion that a backup is a good backup is a false notion.

Rajiv Rao [00:22:23]:
Now, today, it used to be good five years ago, ten years ago, because the guys who are out there to do harm know that you have a fallback. And if I take away your fallback, you are now don’t have any leverage to deny me what I’m looking for as a bad actor. You follow where I’m going with that. If I’m going to ask you for money, I have to make sure that all other avenues to you are closed. And everybody knows your avenue is your backup. In a connected world where your backups are connected to your systems, they are not safe anymore. So it will be fool’s paradise to think I have a good backup. Unless it is air gapped, unless it is immutable, it’s not a good backup.

Rajiv Rao [00:23:08]:
Don’t ever rest yourself, put your head on your pillow and say, I’m all good as an it guy. Not to scare anybody, but start thinking business continuity and start thinking immutable. Start thinking air gap. Right. Because those are important. All right, I’ll stop right there.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:24]:
Aslan.

Aslam Mohammad [00:23:27]:
I’ll just add a couple of things here. To get business buy in, we start with, if we don’t do anything, what is going to happen? So if I can project that and make them understand what is the risk of not doing it? And cybersecurity has been easier. Like other panelists said, we have ran into a ransomware issue that not only caused the server to go down, but even the backup affected, which, you know, going to the Rajiv’s point, that backup is not always going to be the good one. And how do we think about business continuity? So we had a learning from that episode and then, you know, next event we had was a hardware failure, storage failure. And from that learning, what we had done is had a, like a war room place where all the department gathered and the business kept going in a slow motion, though, because, you know, it couldn’t execute as fast as it would otherwise have done. But business kept moving. So business continuity is more than you know, the backup and recovery. I totally agree with that.

Aslam Mohammad [00:24:43]:
And the other point I made is anytime business get to see that there is a risk. And if we can quantify, you know, an example I would, cybersecurity is one. But other example I’ll give is demand forecasting. If we forecast wrong, what is the impact of that on our revenue or how much cost we are going to encourage us? One container miss shipped will cause that how much dollar. And that helps us help business understand that. If that happens, what is the cost of not doing it?

Sanjog Aul [00:25:24]:
Great.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:25]:
Michael?

Michael Roberts [00:25:26]:
Yeah, and I’ll just expand on a couple points that were made. The three to four week restoration. How much does that cost the business? You’re either going to pay for it now or you’re going to pay for it later. Like Rajiv was saying, you can never be sure, and it’s a matter of when. And if you can put things in place to mitigate a three to four week downtime, you sell that the return on investment on how much would it cost to be out of commission for three to four weeks until that is restored, if it can be restored and put it in the framework of the bottom line.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:15]:
Great, great. So, Rob, you’re next. Share what specifically knew more or different that you did to crack the problem you had and the snag that you’re hitting so other people can help?

Robert Dickson [00:26:27]:
Yeah, I think for myself, it’s kind of meeting people where they’re at from a digital literacy perspective, adopting cloud technologies and different solutions. I mean, we create our own apps now, which is not something that we did pre pandemic. We are trying to move people along. I think you see phone based payments now everywhere, and those minuscule things that we keep moving people along are moving their digital literacy level, too. And so I think breaking those pieces up to where people can consume them, like you see a lot of good cloud technologies move people just incrementally so that they can do that without having formal training. And I think for myself, it’s trying to find ways of doing that in small amounts for people’s time. I think from an operational technology perspective, the challenge that I have is around cybersecurity, whether that be, you know, thinking about cybersecurity insurance and continuing to change and adapt as the market forces us to adapt. Knowing that I have, you know, users from ages three all the way to staff members who are getting ready to retire, that’s a wide swath of customers.

Robert Dickson [00:27:50]:
Right. And thinking about how we can move them to understand identity and the other challenges around cybersecurity without taking risks. Right. The risks of ransomware and how education space is targeted specifically around ransomware. I think those are large challenges to set on both sides of, so I’d love to get other people’s perspective.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:17]:
So your specific challenge is cybersecurity is everybody’s problem, right? So how would you qualify your challenge with respect to cybersecurity? Is this not enough, or are you trying to get to a holy grail of 100% security?

Robert Dickson [00:28:30]:
Well, so I would say that it’s more of, like, moving people along and understanding risks. Right. In cybersecurity and building their digital literacy model while being pushed from a market side around, you know, the qualifications for cybersecurity protection at the same time.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:53]:
Okay, very specific, actionable advice, starting with you, Rajiv.

Rajiv Rao [00:28:58]:
So great problem to solve there. I liked your terming of the microservices and incrementally getting people where they need to rob. That is perfect. On the flip side, I don’t envy your position in the sense that you work in a workspace where there’s a gazillion attack vectors because of your audience and your use cases. So, yes, cyber is going to be paramount, in your case, literacy in that space. If you look at them outside of the work environment that you present, everybody uses it or technology to solve their day to day problems, whether they are on a social media platform, whether they are wherever they are very quick to adapt those things. So your presentation of building your apps really should cover the need for cyber within it so that it is not an undue, over the top education requirement. Rather than baked into the development of the Devsecops operation side, where you’re building the security inside the app so that you know that you control that ecosystem, you put all the checks and balances in for controlling security, rather than trying to run a campaign to teach them how to do it correctly, do it so that they cannot do it incorrectly.

Rajiv Rao [00:30:18]:
I think you’re on the right path. All the best on that side.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:23]:
Beautiful, David.

David Yasenchock [00:30:25]:
Hey, Rob. I know a fellow person in higher education. We know funding can be really tight, and what you need to do is, look a lot of free services that are out there. You might be a member of some of these services, but the multistate isacs has a k through twelve group, and they offer a lot of discounted and free services through the k through twelve space. And the MS ISAC is also going to be starting a higher education group in that too, the center for Internet Security. They have a lot of good free stuff and offerings CISA with the Department of Homeland Security, know who your state advisor is. And we had them come out and do a cyber assessment for free. Not only did they do a cyber assessment, they also did a physical assessment of our critical infrastructure for free.

David Yasenchock [00:31:18]:
And the Ren ISAC is another one that’s more geared for higher ed. But look at some of these ISAC services that are out there that offer it to free, low cost, and some of them are really good services. And I don’t think we could really have a good at the university system. I don’t think we really could have a strong infrastructure without leveraging a lot of these free resources. Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:40]:
Great resources. Thanks so much, Raj.

Raj Polanki [00:31:42]:
Yeah, so the way we did around the way I’m putting this, the managing our cybersecurity posture is having three pillars, and I hope it helps. One is how can I improve the awareness to my employees so they won’t fall victim of phishing either. It can be social engineering or online way of capturing the information and then cause disruptions. So that is a user awareness point of view. The second pillar is vulnerability management. How can I manage what’s already identified, if not identified? How can we have an appropriate monitoring and scanning mechanisms to identify and take care of mitigate any vulnerabilities? I’m not talking about incidents, I’m talking about vulnerabilities and systems there. The third pillar in here is preparation for business continuity, as Rajiv was mentioning. And it can be part of cybersecurity incident management.

Raj Polanki [00:32:38]:
When something happens, what is our playbook to follow? To get there, we need to have a right mechanism of this playbook return practiced. And business continuity is planned for most common scenarios like ransomware attacks. So having these three groups helped us to bring the clarity and me to go on to my business leaders and say, we’re going to partner with this. If we don’t do, these are the risks. This is what our plan is. And of course I’m asking for funding.

Raj Polanki [00:33:06]:
Right.

Raj Polanki [00:33:06]:
So hopefully that helps.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:09]:
Thank you so much, Rohit.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:11]:
Yeah.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:12]:
I can only imagine, Rob, the challenge that you mentioned, right, with the on one hand, three year old to on another hand, somebody who is retiring.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:22]:
Right.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:22]:
So from my perspective, you can only build so much security upfront. There will always be threats out there that you cannot anticipate and that you have to prepare your customers for.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:37]:
Yeah.

Rohit Agrawal [00:33:38]:
And this is where maybe more targeted campaigns based on the also the customer group or user group. Because if you look at three years old or I mean that this is a digitally native generation right. They pick up technology very fast. So I don’t think we need to train them on phishing and whatnot right there. Maybe we are more worried about deep fakes and misuse of AI or whatnot. Right. But what is where, if you look at baby boomers and others right there, I think awareness about phishing not clicking wrong links into the emails that they get for checking if they are really to use your applications versus somebody is sending them spam that looks like email coming from you, for example. So I think more tailored campaigns, in my opinion can help looking at that diverse customer base.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:40]:
All right, so now that was the time when you were trying to help someone. For now, the point is spotlight is on you, where you could share what you did, knew more and different about solving your own problem. And where do you need help from the other panel members?

Rohit Agrawal [00:34:56]:
Yes. So I talked about change management and the rate of change that is there for our employees or for our users. One of the things that we have started putting more focus on in last month is communication. And communication not being just a generic communication, but communication at different levels, more targeted communication. And with that communication also trigger the collaboration from the business side, whether it is stakeholders from R and D, or from manufacturing or customer service or marketing, sales, you name it. But to involve them early into the change process to explain to them what is changing, why is it changing to take them along with us on the journey. So this is something what we have started a lot more than the technical execution of the change or the transformation. And this definitely we see as positive where we are able to accelerate transformation and make it less overwhelming for our users.

Rohit Agrawal [00:36:01]:
One snag or kind of snag, right. Which is a constant challenge for us is development of the workforce from the. How do you keep them updated on the technology that you are adopting in the organization, right. Or something new that is coming there. How do you develop your own team members in that regard to be at par with cloud technology or generative AI or new VPN solutions or new cybersecurity skill sets or whatnot? So how do you basically make sure that this is also learning is not overwhelming for the employees, right. But they can also learn at par with the transformation to be able to manage the pace of the transformation for rest of the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:59]:
Now, when you mentioned about how to make them aware and keep them updated, is this across the board or is it just your tech team?

Rohit Agrawal [00:37:06]:
Tech team as well as the users. They are using new technology as well.

Rohit Agrawal [00:37:11]:
Right?

Rohit Agrawal [00:37:12]:
So how do you keep them trained? It’s not about just rolling out a webinar here or a web based training there.

Rajiv Rao [00:37:18]:
Right.

Rohit Agrawal [00:37:19]:
Or having a, I don’t know, lunch and learn event. Right. So it’s, at least, we feel it’s a constant education of the workforce, whether it is your team or whether it is your users on the technology. Right. And so it will be good to hear ideas like, how do you do this in your organizations?

Sanjog Aul [00:37:39]:
Rob, do you have a thought?

Robert Dickson [00:37:42]:
You know, I think it’s important to keep in mind that people’s attention has changed. So attention span has gone from two minutes, 42 seconds down to 41 seconds now. And so when you think about even learning or continuously learning, we got to break those down and we got to help people along. And I think from a user standpoint, when you see our workforce as wide as it is today and people don’t get used to because there’s just a lot of uncertainty in the world, it’s important to, in the mix of dividing that up, understanding the different digital literacy levels to bring somebody along. And I think that constant, our inflection point with technology is at such a high rise right now that it’s a constant change. And I think having a high frequency in different mediums, I think is important because people communicate today very differently than they did even 20 years ago. Right. We use a lot of different mediums to communicate and collaborate, and we’ve got to reflect that in the training that we use.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:54]:
Specific tips from you, Rajiv.

Rajiv Rao [00:38:57]:
All right, so. Right, great. I. Great problem to solve. Honestly, in my previous job as chief technology officer for the state of New York, any change I wanted to make in terms of technology either impacted 160,000 employees or 19 million citizens of the state. Communicating those things is an art form, and I’m not going to say I’m good at it. I would be very impatient with people not being able to understand that it had to be done. But over time, I come to realize that the context of the change has to be in their domain, not your domain.

Rajiv Rao [00:39:34]:
When you go in there and say, this has to be done because it’s a security issue, it’s not going to resonate as much as saying, we’re going to this VPN software so that we don’t have loss of productivity in your case, or we don’t get compromised due to a vulnerability, is that the company may be exposed to. I think relates and resonates more with people than you saying, I like this widget better than the other widget. Then for them, that perception is you’re just making me go through all these iterations because you found a new shiny toy versus the business value, the return on that for the business and the user experience, keeping that centric to that, it is better for you, it improves your productivity, it improves the, the company’s security posture. I think those messages resonate more and people accept those as valid reasons for accepting or assisting with transformational change.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:34]:
Raj?

Raj Polanki [00:40:36]:
Yeah.

Raj Polanki [00:40:37]:
Regarding the user training, the skillset part of it, obviously for any transformation, we need them. But the way I grouped again there, I’m going with the three things here is, is my team, is my team have right skill set and do they know what is even out there? So the way I approach is helping them to give the opportunities to train and learn new things by showcasing what are the training programs out there? But most importantly, I try to get them outside exposure. For example, we talking about all these things is getting me outside exposure, something similar to my management team. I encourage them to get the outside exposure on what other companies are doing, what kind of challenges they’re going through, or what kind of accomplishment they have. That gave my team more exposure, to be more enabled and empowered that, okay, we at company, we can do this, we can maybe try the different things. So that is how I was able to get my team’s skill set to the next level. I know we’re not there yet, but I’m progressing. But other two groups I touched quickly on that.

Raj Polanki [00:41:43]:
One is whatever tools, technologies we have in the company, the end user training is so important because they cannot take the value out of it if they don’t know how to use it. So that is my another pillar of user training. But third pillar of user training is where my executives for them to know what’s possible with what we have, what is outside. And that is a big challenge, which I’ll talk later when I have my challenge going on, but hope that helps. Jeff.

Jeff Cann [00:42:11]:
I’ll recommend something that I learned from Chris Laping, former CIO of Red Robin. He wrote a book called people before things. And one of the things he illustrates in the book is a change management strategy. I won’t get into the details, but the one thing that I can recommend is start with the why statement. I think that helps people understand. So, for example, in our HR system, our wife statement was we take care of our people from prehire to retire. And so that becomes our guiding star, both for training, education, communication, but also to make decisions of design about the system itself. So if you start with a good why statement for that change, that can help people understand and get into the details, Michael.

Michael Roberts [00:42:59]:
So I’d just add in the different areas around the organization. Find your champions, find the ones that are in your court that’ll help you move your initiatives forward and leverage them to help train people, to help raise awareness around what you’re trying to do, because over time, it just becomes white noise from it. Find the people that are in your court and have them help you move things forward.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:30]:
Great. And now, about your own challenge, Michael, and what have you done about solving it, and where would you like help? From our fellow panelists here?

Michael Roberts [00:43:40]:
So, my challenge around growth and maintaining the community atmosphere. A few people have talked about communication, and we’ve tried to communication, but I think the bigger struggle for me is the transfer of knowledge. We haven’t been able to transfer knowledge. We have our say, our rock stars who are implementing new things, who are moving us forward, who are initiating projects that are making us better, but long term, their ability to support that will hold us back, and that the transfer of knowledge on how to support those systems, the infrastructure that we put in place, is not being transferred to those that ultimately need to support our end users. And I don’t know if it’s a resource thing. I don’t know if it’s a time thing. I don’t know if it’s a project management thing. It’s just a struggle.

Michael Roberts [00:44:45]:
You know, as David said, the education space works very slow, but technology is moving very fast. So the transfer of knowledge and the continual support of in different areas isn’t happening at the same pace as things are being implemented.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:09]:
But do you have a different benchmark of at what pace should it run for you to build that, for you to identify that this is a gap or that is just. That’s how the animal works? Essentially.

Michael Roberts [00:45:22]:
It seems like right now, that’s how the animal works. But the questions I’m asking are, how much time are you spending supporting your end users? How much time are you spending implementing new things? How much time are you spending looking at our business process and making it more efficient? If we’re spending 40% supporting end users and then 30 and 30 trying to move things forward, we’re not moving things forward as fast as we could be. If we spend a chunk of that 40% of time transferring knowledge to other people that can support it, you know, are we able to, you know, are we able to be better as an organization?

Sanjog Aul [00:46:15]:
So, Rajiv, any specific tips of how this perceived overallocation could be better balanced?

Rajiv Rao [00:46:22]:
Yeah, Michael. So it’s not the easiest of challenges getting users to. Because for them, it’s easy to say, I don’t know, this is too tough. Let me know. Somebody else has to help me. That has always been a challenge in this industry, where the operational transfer of operational knowledge to people becomes a difficult thing. And the more complex a solution, the more resistance to accepting that you can do it on your own. Making incremental changes or making changes that are intuitive.

Rajiv Rao [00:46:56]:
Intuitive to. If you think about the Apple model, you think about the app model. When have you ever called every person that you’re supporting today in your organization that will act like they’ve never seen this thing in their lives before, has 50 or 60 apps on their phone that they’ve never called anybody to use? They know they’re rock stars in those apps, whether it’s candy crush or whatever it is. They don’t have to call any support. But you give them an email icon that they have to launch an email on, God forbid it works for the first time, they’ll call you 50 times for it. That is just human behavior. When they know there’s somebody to call, they will call rather than help themselves. Making the application intuitive is the key.

Rajiv Rao [00:47:40]:
That’s exactly what the app builders do on the app stores. The app is built in such a way that there is no question left unanswered. You don’t give them an opportunity to pose a question. So you have to start putting a little bit of thought in your communications, in your changes out there, to make it intuitive that the faqs are out there. Everything is out there upfront to say, what else have you not answered? Everything has been answered. And then pushing them back to that. Hey, we told you all this before. Go look at the faqs.

Rajiv Rao [00:48:10]:
It’s very easy. Don’t make it sound like an annoyance. But, hey, you know, it’s a lot quicker if you do it yourself. Look, it’s there. Go to the faqs and you can. It’ll work like that. It’s a challenge, but you’ll get there. It’s just that you’ve got to remind them that they have 50 apps that they don’t call anybody on, but they call you on this one little thing that you put out there.

Rajiv Rao [00:48:33]:
All right, good luck with that, Rohit.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:36]:
Pointed, actionable advice.

Rohit Agrawal [00:48:38]:
Yeah. So one thing. What, Rajiv, you touched upon, right. Is to train the user behavior to go to the published, let’s say, knowledge base or whatnot, right. The other thing, Michael, right. From the operational continuity or from the knowledge transfer that you touched upon, right. What I feel is there are so many, let’s say, topics, right. What your team might be working on that maybe they’re not capturing the knowledge into documents or concrete knowledge bases over there.

Rohit Agrawal [00:49:16]:
And this is at least what we see as of growing importance, to be able to take time as part of way of working, as part of developing these apps or whatever their day to day work, that they take time to also document what they are building, how they are building, because this will be then the foundation of all adoption of these LLMs and Genai and whatnot. To be able to then make it more automated to continue this knowledge transfer from people to people, if people will take time to document and manage this repository of knowledge.

Rajiv Rao [00:49:53]:
Great.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:53]:
Aslam.

Aslam Mohammad [00:49:54]:
Yeah. In our organization, we are a public company in Taiwan. So through finance or internal audit, we have set up a process to have a SOP we call a standard operating procedure. Each department have to write it documented. So every time we release a new system, new application, we provide the documentation that becomes part of their SOP process. So I’m not saying that there is, you know, it’s perfect, but it puts a responsibility on individual user group to maintain and manage these procedure. And anytime there’s a new hire, the trainer trains the new hire. And that’s how the tribal knowledge keeps flowing.

Aslam Mohammad [00:50:39]:
We keep the master copy. So anytime, you know, there are questions they can’t answer, we do answer, but for most part, we rely on our user base to manage that knowledge base.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:52]:
All right, Rajiv, very quickly, any specific input you’d like from the panel based on what you’ve seen your. I know you’re in a unique position where you’re on more people solve, but any specific data point in or thing, practitioner based input you’d like from the panel on any specific challenge which you feel has been a tough one, or you almost four seats riding on the wall that you will face as you try to help solve people’s problems?

Rajiv Rao [00:51:20]:
Yeah, I think. I think what I’m looking at, I’ve been doing this for about two weeks now. I’ve been pursuing a lot of input from the market space, like, let’s say, voice of a customer perspective on trying to understand what is that that keeps a person or a business up at night. What is the one thing that you cannot tolerate or cannot absorb in your line of work and have you a good handle on how and does everybody in the organization understand what the standard operating procedure is going to be when that KPI is breached, when that SLA is breached? However you measure your organization and it’s uptime. So I’ve been in this journey now trying to understand, because to narrow it down to a single thing like it’s an IT problem is living in a fool’s paradise in my mind, right? I’ve changed the scope to, yeah, I’m an IT guy, but I’m not in the business of trying to solve an IT problem. I’m busy. I’m in the business of trying to solve a problem that keeps you up at night. It may be the solution to the problem.

Rajiv Rao [00:52:36]:
It may be the reason for the problem, whatever it is. It’s to put on this advisory hat and have a discussion on where and what questions have to be asked. Very pointed at times that are required to get a very honest assessment of yourself and your company in terms of its readiness to handle that disruption in their business. It’s a very simple thing. Do I have the tolerance to handle the disruption? And if I don’t, what are my next steps to get to that level of resiliency that I can tolerate that kind of a new right? These are exercises that have to happen. These are things that we have to start looking at. Enough of these point solutions where I’m building an answer protection system. I’m doing this and I’m doing that.

Rajiv Rao [00:53:24]:
The whole ecosystem, we are one pillar in your roles. You’re one pillar in a larger organization, but a pillar that literally is in the center of the organization because you’re so it centric now, if that collapses, the business implodes upon itself. Right? So you, as thought leaders and as practitioners of that particular trade, are literally central to your organizations. And so having a seat at the table to have this bigger conversation where, how does this business survive, in case we have in these scenarios, is a big discussion that has to be had at the sea level, where you are at the seat of the table. Gone are the days when you’re calling the back office to say, let me call the it guy. You’re not that person anymore. You’re sitting at the table having a conversation. Because I’ll just mention this quickly.

Rajiv Rao [00:54:19]:
I was at a conference and I was talking to the CEO of Ford, and she said she’s the CEO for Ford in terms of it. She said for the first time in Ford’s history of 100 plus years of making cars, that there was an IT person at the table when Ford was deciding on the launch of its next vehicle. Why? For the simple reason that Ford f 150, for an example, has over a million lines of cord on the system on board, its computer, on the car without that system, that truck does not run. So there it is. It is the central component of a truck that has nothing to do with it, but that is the big fundamental shift. So position yourselves in that space. You are the central figure.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:12]:
Beautiful.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:13]:
Thank you. Thank you. So, Raj, very quickly, your specific things, you did your talk challenge. Let’s, you know, continue the discussion that way, you’re muted.

Raj Polanki [00:55:28]:
Okay.

Raj Polanki [00:55:29]:
Yeah. So what I did specifically, I think I was telling initially that when I did the team and the systems and the process, how can I give reliability to my business? How can I give them the confidence that I have the reliability and security for my infrastructure? So over the period, what I developed is something I think you guys all know, that called site heat map. So we have different sites and different systems, and the heat map with a simple color coded red, green, yellow. And the color code is decided based on the comfort of the team members and the vendor who’s supporting, what are they saying and how we are measuring the system’s health with these factors. When we put this color code, and then we were able to figure it out, what are the systems which needs lifecycle maintenance or upgrades or even the cloud transfer opportunities? With that, I was able to reach out to my executives and present to them that, hey, we are doing all these things, but here are the risk items. If we don’t take care of the risk, then we are going to run into these problems. So to mitigate the risk, this is my roadmap of the project proposal, what I have. So do I have your blessing? So I was able to get the funding, what I needed to take care of, bring the reliability.

Raj Polanki [00:56:40]:
Now, coming to the next step of the challenge, okay, I’m taking care of my reliability, but the next step is how can I help my business to transform on the scale what’s possible with the digital technologies, with the cloud technologies, with the AI and ML technologies. Everybody knows about generating AI, but the first thing it is going to say is, stop, don’t try anything. We’re not there yet, but how can I get my business that we are there to. We are there, and how can we leverage this technology? That’s where my challenge that I’m open to learn from other people.

Sanjog Aul [00:57:14]:
All right, team, who would like to share some inputs?

Rajiv Rao [00:57:20]:
Hey, Roger that last bit you talked about, what was the last sentence? You broke up a little bit on my end.

Raj Polanki [00:57:27]:
My last step is to basically to enable the business, not only just educating them that what is possible, but taking them along with technology maturity and transforming the business to do a better state, right?

Rajiv Rao [00:57:41]:
Well, yeah, that’s always a challenge. Right. We all know, as it people, we’re the stepchilds of the organization. We’re always asking for too much money, and we get nothing in return. Right. Is the thought process. But like I just said earlier, right. This awareness that your systems are it driven is conveniently forgotten when it comes to budget time.

Rajiv Rao [00:58:06]:
Right. They forget the fact that you support the organization in terms of its productivity, and so continuing to demonstrate ROI in terms of the investment they make in it to what productivity it has produced, I think gets you in a good place where you build this trust within the organization. Nothing is better than being able to call the finance person and say, I need $10 million. I’ll tell you this as an example. I did a project that was widely accepted as a good, successful project for the state of New York. New Year’s Eve, I was in the office. I was working on something, and something hit my head. I was.

Rajiv Rao [00:58:51]:
I drew something on a piece of paper. Next morning, I called the budget director for the state and said, I need $10 million. She didn’t tell me, get out. She said, for what? Right. And I said, here’s the value for the state, citizens of the state of New York. This is what we can do for them with this. And it was half an hour conversation, and she said, send me a proposal. So this comes only from the fact that once you demonstrate that you’re doing it for the right reasons, there is value to the state.

Rajiv Rao [00:59:23]:
In my case, it’s the state that it spend the money in this space. Once you have that trust relationship, you don’t have to try very hard, because you’re all marching in the same direction. Far too often, they end up thinking it, folks are boat anchors and dragging them back, but actually, you’re lifting them while you climb. People forget that. And your job as leader in that space for your folks is to make sure they continue to understand that you’re carrying this organization as you climb up and bringing the organization to more productivity. So your ROI conversation, your constant forward thinking in how it’s going to improve productivity for the organization, and having those conversations with the c level suite, I think, is the approach I have taken, and successfully as well.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:08]:
Great.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:09]:
Great. Jeff.

Jeff Cann [01:00:11]:
One thing we tried, Raj, which is working really well, is we formed a, we call construction technology, but it’s basically an R and D team made up of what we would call business users. But these are guys in the field, and these tend to be relatively just out of college project engineering roles. They’re very tech friendly. And so we work with them on a regular basis to talk about what are their challenges, what tools are they seeing when they want to conduct a pilot. We’ve got a fund to help with that, and we just walk them through that process of being innovative. What we found is that it works really well because taking from the page of lean process, the people that do the work know best how to solve it. And so by combining those problems that they have and supporting them in not a heavy it process, we’re able to get a lot of traction and a lot of great implementations through. So, for example, we built out a tool called structure site 360.

Jeff Cann [01:01:06]:
It allows 360 degree camera walks, think of job sites, think of Google Street View, except you’re walking a construction site. And so that saves hundreds and hundreds of hours on a project to document the progress. And that we would have as it not come upon that problem to solve necessarily. But because this R and D group of business individuals is suffering with trying to use their phone to take pictures to document construction project progress, it was really impactful for them. So I think having a group of tech friendly people that you can help guide them through what R and D looks like and how to then build the business case, then get the funding and then finally implement it, I think that can be helpful. At least it is for us.

Sanjog Aul [01:01:49]:
All right, David, quickly, your challenge. And then the team helps. And of course, what you try to.

David Yasenchock [01:01:55]:
Do to help to basically fix third party risk management. We have about 1300 vendors that we have to track and look at different things. And what we did is through the rent ISAC, they have something called a hex Vac form, higher education vulnerability assessment tool that we used, and it’s a free. The only thing is it relies on what the vendor gives us. We get contact information, we do get information from it, but the vendor can say that we do all these things and there’s no way for us to prove it. We did look at some third party risk management software and we did purchase one beginning of this year, and it is working very well. The only thing is that it is not cheap doing these third party risk management software to look at these vendors to do this, and we’re managing with it, but we’re looking at better ways to streamline the process because it is quite labor intensive. We are working with procurement, so we made sure we got in the procurement cycle.

David Yasenchock [01:03:05]:
In the procurement cycle, if anything’s it related, they got to run it through the cybersecurity department. But if someone has a grant or they use something we call P cards, which certain people have, purchase cards, credit cards. They can go out and buy just about anything they want and say, hey, you know, Dave, it’s not working right. You know, we’re reaching out to cybersecurity. You know, why isn’t this working? Right? We’re like, well, who approved this purchase? And it presents a lot of problems. I’m sure a lot of you have that too. You have stovepipe it, that creatures on your network. But it’s a problem because it’s a big hole for cybersecurity.

Sanjog Aul [01:03:46]:
So would you like specific inputs on how to handle those 1300 vendors and third party risk management at that scale? Is that what you’d say? You need pointed input.

David Yasenchock [01:03:58]:
What are you doing to manage it? Is there any magical thing out there that you’re doing to manage all your third parties?

Sanjog Aul [01:04:05]:
Okay, Rajiv, you have some magic pill you could offer?

Rajiv Rao [01:04:09]:
I wouldn’t call it a magic pill, but certainly it is a challenge that almost all of us on this call are facing. Vendor management and risk managing risk registers is a full time job. And not only is it a full time job, it is a full time job of a highly skilled professional. Not enough to say, I got a grade 18 or, you know, $50,000 a year salary person. Maintaining that risk register, it’s not as simple as that, right? There’s a lot of processes and background checks that have background processes that have to be done to have a valid risk register. In the context of your business, getting a generic risk register is not the same as saying, David, in my context, this vendor is in this security posture is a risk to me. Maintaining all that is not a trivial thing, and it’s the same challenges for all of us. And a little bit about what I am doing today, I just joined zones about a month ago, a little over a month ago, and it’s one of those practices that I’m very, very focused on is cybersecurity.

Rajiv Rao [01:05:12]:
And GRC is becoming a central thing. Risk assessment, vulnerability management, and business continuity are all big pillars, but very little attention is given to by most entities in this space to risk registers and maintaining third party relationships. You don’t have to be the one at fault. Somebody else could be vulnerable and or at risk or even exploited, and you are now all of a sudden at risk and liable as well. So these are not things to be taken lightly. A lot more focus needs to be paid to this, to risk registers and governance. People tend to sweep that under the carpet because it’s a hard thing to do. I’m not trying to sugarcoat it.

Rajiv Rao [01:05:53]:
Need to find a good business partner that can help you maintain that risk register. And not only that, it has to be on a very tight cadence. It’s not enough to say I did it once a year, you’ve got to every three months or something say, hey, are we still in good standing? What’s going on here? Building those processes and we can talk about that outside of here. There are some ideas that I could share around where you could start there.

David Yasenchock [01:06:24]:
Great, thanks. And you can delegate authority, but you can’t delegate responsibility. At the end of the day stops.

Rajiv Rao [01:06:31]:
With you, my friend.

Rajiv Rao [01:06:33]:
No responsible.

Rajiv Rao [01:06:35]:
You got it.

Sanjog Aul [01:06:36]:
Beautiful. All right.

Aslam Mohammad [01:06:37]:
Aslam and our challenge is we are a, from an organization perspective, decentralized. Every area has over the years have done things on their own. And at this time we are looking at how do we bring it all together, how do we build a standardization across the board, which means different viewpoints and overcoming those different viewpoints and coming to a consensus decision that how we move forward.

Sanjog Aul [01:07:16]:
All right, specific areas which you try to do to fix things.

Aslam Mohammad [01:07:22]:
Aslan so where we have been successful is cybersecurity. Everyone was on board in terms of picking the tool, strategies and all that. So that has been a success. Areas where you talk about networking or some back in infrastructure, on enterprise database or integration platform, those are the areas where our data lake or bi infrastructure is where we have inconsistencies.

Sanjog Aul [01:07:55]:
All right, so yeah, any inputs from the team, Rajiv, you have something to share?

Rajiv Rao [01:08:02]:
Yeah. And not to monopolize the conversation, but where we are right now, Aslam is talking about, I started a process of consolidating 50 exec agencies in 2012. So 50 state agencies with disparate technologies consolidated into one single IT organization. We moved 5400 people and a billion dollars of it budget into a new organization and told the agencies, you don’t have any more control over your it. This new organization is going to run. And what it ended up being is inheriting a system that had 29 email systems, 29 different email platforms, 180,000 desktops that were 15 or 16 different variants of Microsoft operating system, 25,000 servers that were at various levels of security, raised flow data centers, 22 network platforms and 64 active directory domains inherited. And today that organization sits with one identity platform, one data center, one email platform, and consolidation of all the infrastructure all the way up to the appstack, to the application level as a single shared platform. It’s not an easy task.

Rajiv Rao [01:09:32]:
I’m going to tell you this. It’s not easy, but at times having the ability to establish a tech standard and saying this is the tech standard for the company because it benefits the company and such, just like you did with the cyber side, will start allowing you to slowly lift the standardization all the way from the ground, all the way up to a level where it supports the business with uniformity. Below a certain level, like the appstack, you may have nine different apps that nine companies are using, but they all run on an operating system, they all run on infrastructure. You can start there and start to get a lot of ROI there. That itself is a huge win. Rather than trying to go for the holy grail of saying why can’t we get all of them nine to use the same application? Over time it will come, but you can easily decouple all of the backend stuff from the what the user sees and start consolidating them.

Rajiv Rao [01:10:27]:
Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [01:10:28]:
Go ahead.

Rohit Agrawal [01:10:29]:
Yes, on the similar lines, right? I mean, the topic of standardization versus flexibility is always comes to mind when, when you talk about harmonizing technology platform, whether you mentioned like enterprise database or network or whatnot. Right? So I would suggest that you start really with a why? Right? Why do you want to standardize? Because that will help you define how much you want to do it. You may spend a lot of effort achieving that hundred percent, but is that really needed? And will all that effort to transform provide value to your organization? So just that as, let’s say, word of caution, to achieve balance between standardization and the value or the flexibility of it, because I’m sure there are reasons, right, there are good reasons why you have different solutions for different, let’s say, groups, target groups within the organization and to understand what is that commonality, right? Or like what Rajiv mentioned, if you are able to abstract that with something on top, then that is anyhow beautiful.

Sanjog Aul [01:11:35]:
What a fantastic conversation, folks today. Thank you so much to our panelists. Jeff can, Robert Dixon, Rohit Agarwal, Michael Roberts, Rajiv Rao, Raj Palanki, David Yasid shock, and Aslam Muhammad. Thank you so much for contributing. I guess there was a lot of different challenges, variety of challenges that were discussed and of course, equally good nuggets of knowledge and wisdom and experience that was shared. I’m sure this will be very helpful for all people who consume it. And of course, it was helpful for all the panelists who participated. And thank you so much, zones, for being our sponsor.

Sanjog Aul [01:12:11]:
You helped us made this possible, and hopefully this input will be serving the whole world as they consume this content. So thank you so much have a lovely day ahead. Take care.

Rajiv Rao [01:12:21]:
Thank you, guys.

Michael Roberts [01:12:23]:
Thank you.

Rajiv Rao [01:12:26]:
Bye.