Every penny you save by automating and orchestrating IT processes across tools, teams, and domains can be channelized toward serving your customers better. In addition, how quickly and effectively you resolve IT systems delays and outages can get your employees, partners, and customers to move faster through their journeys, individually and collectively. So how do you keep central visibility and control over processes to security to compliance and help your business become resilient to IT disruptions and continue to create real value for its customers and shareholders?

Get answers to the pressing questions:

• • Who are your internal and external customers, and what do they expect from IT?
  • What benchmarks and metrics would keep IT delivery focused on delivering real value?
  • Which tasks and processes should you prioritize and optimize to resolve IT systems delays and outages with minimal disruption and downtime?
  • How to keep a close watch on the shifts and volatility in IT to keep the business running in a smooth, secure, and compliant manner?

Contributors

• • Rowena Yeo, Chief Technology Officer, Johnson & Johnson
  • Rajeev Ravindran, Chief Information Officer, Ryder System
  • Suma Nallapati, Chief Digital Officer, Everbridge
  • Aref Matin, Chief Technology Officer, Wiley

Explore More

• • Bringing Business and IT Together to Deliver Digital
  • Assembling Business and IT Capabilities like a LEGO® Puzzle
  • How to Get More Women in IT
  • Becoming a Business-first CDO
  • CIOs are Connecting the Dots Between Technology and Business Strategy
  • Steps to Effectively Enabling Business Transformation to earn a Partner status for IT
  • Enabling Frictionless Remote Work for Employee Productivity and Business Growth
  • Building Your Digital Business Technology Platform
  • IT’s Role in the Mobile Business Environment and How We Must Redefine Our Place in It
  • Should Business Influence Or Control IT Investments?

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:16]:
Hello and welcome to the CTN webinar. Our topic for today is enabling an efficient and resilient business of it. And we are going to be talking about some fun stuff here with respect to how organizations are trying to use it for the benefit of the business, make the business move forward. But if the it is not efficient, that means there could be a leakage in terms of revenue. If you are not doing things for resilience, then if there is a delay or an outage and you don’t bounce back, you lose revenue and reputation, given where we are. So the topic here is such that we look at what do you understand about the customers? Who are the customers, like internal and external, who you’re serving. Then you are also looking at the metrics and the benchmarks you should follow for efficiency and resilience. Because what you cannot measure, you cannot improve.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:14]:
Then which we are talking about, the tasks and the processes, one should improve and or rethink for you to be able to look at the efficiency and resilience totally differently. And the finally is the security and the smoothness of the operation and the compliance. We cannot get away from doing so. So to discuss this, I have with me Raveena. Yo. Chief Technology Officer Johnson and Johnson. Hey, Rovina, how are you?

Rowena Yeo [00:01:47]:
Hey, Sanju. I’m good. Thanks for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:50]:
Very good to have you. And Rajiv Rabindran from chief. He’s the chief information officer for Rider. Hey, Rajiv, how’s life?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:01:57]:
How are you? Good afternoon, everyone.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:59]:
All right. And we have Suma Nalapati, chief digital officer with Everbridge. Hey, Suma.

Suma Nallapati [00:02:04]:
Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be on this panel.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:08]:
Absolutely. And Arif Mateen, my dear friend, chief technology officer with Wiley. Hey, how are you, sir?

Aref Matin [00:02:14]:
Doing well. Sanju, again, great to be on this panel here.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:18]:
All right, good, good, good. So, yeah, we will start this with like, a workshop format where we’ll go through the challenges from all parties involved, and also we will then look at the solutions that these leaders are facing. And even we will be involving our attendees as well. But before we get started, you know, we are close to holiday season and we know we all like sweets. So I wanted to ask you, how many of you like pastries? Right, right. Okay. I have a one person raising hand on the pastries. Okay.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:52]:
So the reason I bring this pastries part up is because if you look at the type of ingredients you need in a pastry, what do you need? You need patience and attention to detail. Yeah, I mean, while I need flour and sugar and everything else. And if you had to figure out how to build efficiency and resilience in it, guess what you need? Almost like that. So what we have is actually, you are all pastry chefs for me, who have the attention to detail and the patience to be able to do this. Now, what should we do on this forum? We should get started with the top challenges each of the leaders are facing, and then we should also listen to how they’re trying to solve the problem. So, Rovina, why don’t we start with you?

Rowena Yeo [00:03:40]:
Sure.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:41]:
Take two to three minutes. Yeah. And then just share a little background, the context and the top challenge you’re facing, which is preventing you from building efficiency and resilience for it.

Rowena Yeo [00:03:51]:
Yeah. Thanks, Sanjok. And first of all, I’m Robina Yeoh. I’m the chief technology officer, Johnson Johnson, and responsibility for technology services across J and J. And so maybe to answer your question, Sanju, I’d like to give a little bit of a background around J and Jenna and then how that drives to some of the challenges that I’m seeing today. So, as you may know, J and J is the world’s largest and most comprehensive healthcare company in the world. And we have, across our organization, multiple sectors that we support from a technology services perspective. And one of our key goals is about providing access and affordability in terms of healthcare.

Rowena Yeo [00:04:28]:
And our goal is around creating healthier communities. And to put a healthy mind, body and environment within reach of everyone, everywhere is very integral to the way we are shaping and transforming our company to ensure that we continue to deliver on the most urgent healthcare needs of the society. And it’s within that, if you think about kind of what we support from a technology perspective, having to support our pharma business or medical device business, consumer business, and with that, J and J’s global footprint, and we also see a huge exponential of growth in data, in digital advancements and innovation. And therefore, the need to require technology that’s flexible and agile to meet the business needs of our sectors, as well as to ensure that every business is served in terms of the ability to drive business outcomes, to serve our patients and customers across our diverse application data platform and security needs and compliance and regulation rules. And I’m sure many of my panelists are seeing. So when we look at optimizing our technology operations, one of the challenge, I would say, amongst many others, is around how do we drive an efficient and resilient environment, where we are looking at managing this diverse set of applications that we have and all the way from really diverse set of legacy systems that we have today, to modern applications, again, maintaining different applications with different age, different legacy architecture, they come together and we are all, I’m sure, very familiar with the dangers and impact that maintaining multiple systems. And for this specific topic, just legacy environment, legacy systems that it presents. So I’m not just talking about simply the lifecycle of these applications, but really how do we ensure that we are maintaining applications then that are allowing us to be agile? And so many of our issues around, how do we maintain and ensure that these legacy systems, we are operating them in a way whereby we will minimize the challenges of being able to operate in an agile manner? And also how do we ensure that our organization adopt processes that will allow us to be better at serving our businesses and therefore our customers.

Rowena Yeo [00:06:51]:
And when we think about the customers that we support and we serve, we have an expectation that we are going to be delivering innovative solutions. We’re going to be cost optimizing our environment and also drive on time delivery to keep our businesses going. And with the legacy environment that we see, we are seeing increasing operational cost with decreasing systems availability, stability. And we know that the impact of maintaining legacy systems has an impact in terms of how we’re providing data, driving our network security and how do we ensure that we are protecting those areas. So the other part that I’m seeing that’s a potential challenge for us is around our workforce, because how can we continue to build and develop a workforce for the future? And if we have employees that are manually still maintaining and working on legacy environment, at the end of the day, we want to be able to provide a business environment where our talent can also upskill and develop. So I’m sure this is a business issue that many of my panelists here see. But at Johnson Johnson, we are on our journey to modernize this, and I can certainly talk more about the progress we are making in this space. Anjul.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:57]:
Absolutely. So, Rajiv, when you look at your environment, totally different, I’m assuming, from Ravina’s environment, what are your top issues? While you might have similar initiatives going on, but what holds you back?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:08:12]:
So, yeah, let me sort of set the stage about Rider. So, I work for Rider. I’m the CIO there. Excuse me. So Rider is nearly a 90 year old global company. So the main business segments are fleet management, supply chain solution, and dedicated transportation. So we have 800 maintenance locations, 290,000 vehicles, 56 million warehouse space, and over 50,000 customers. And we have nearly 40,000 employees, again, in four different countries.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:08:41]:
So that sort of sets the scale. And while Rider is, you know, it has one large foot in a lot of the newer technologies. We’re in, ev, autonomous vehicles, we have rider ventures that’s investing in technology. We also, being a 90 year old company, you can imagine how much legacy we also have. And so my challenges, very similar to arenas, it’s how do we bring the value that business expects from us? You talked about what do the business and customers want? So if you look at technology in general, look at technology in your everyday lives, you pick up the phone, it’s easy. You do banking with a click. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it’s prevalent. Right.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:09:22]:
Everything that you do, you have your phone now. So the mentality is that when you come to work, even though your systems are much more complicated, they want the same kind of response and same kind of results right away. One example is we took an application that was taking 40 seconds to return data. We turned it to 1 second, and people were really happy. Six months later, it went down to 3 seconds and people are complaining, oh, my God, it’s 3 seconds. As opposed to what it used to be. So people get used to that. So the expectation is constantly growing and how do we keep up with that? So the legacy, and Rowena said it, I don’t want to repeat everything she said, but it’s very true for us, too.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:10:05]:
I think sometimes, even though the legacy systems are not really creating a cost increase for us, it’s stopping the business from modernizing and moving even faster, especially with the data. And another big piece, you said one. What’s the biggest one? Unfortunately, it depends on the day. It’s between security and legacy. So if you look at security, the number of intrusions and I and the bad actors out there has gone up by 60% since last year. It’s a huge drain on resources. It’s a huge rate, you know, resource strain. It’s a huge cost drain, and it’s constantly changing.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:10:48]:
It’s not. We can hit a target because the target is moving constantly too, and we’re running after it. So how do we manage that? Now you can tie that into legacy too, because some of the legacy systems we didn’t want to touch because they were fine suddenly has holes in it that we have to fix. And there’s zero value to the customer to upgrade those systems to a modern technology. So it’s that balance between what’s the right thing to do. So that’s my challenge.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:20]:
All right, so, Suma, in your world, what do you see? Happening.

Suma Nallapati [00:11:29]:
You can hear me okay?

Sanjog Aul [00:11:30]:
Yes, we can. Yes.

Suma Nallapati [00:11:33]:
Thank you, Sanjay, for the question and great, great inputs already on the challenges. I think we collectively are in the IT family and face very similar challenges, even though our domains are maybe a little bit different. So I’m Sumana Lapati, chief digital officer at Everbridge and senior vice president of SaaS operations. And we are in the business of saving people’s lives and helping organizations run faster. We are a 911 company, so right after 911, there was an immediate need for people to be notified during critical events. And so Everbridge is a critical event management company. If there’s a flood, there’s a fire, airports, all of the notifications that you get on your phones is powered by Everbridge. And we are a global company, so we help countries and counties and states across the globe be resilient in terms of the business continuity, minimize disruptions to their operations.

Suma Nallapati [00:12:32]:
When things are going not so well, in terms of the climate around us, in terms of the political issues that are happening, in terms of everything that can go wrong when there’s a flood or a fire or a natural disaster, that’s the business that we are in. So it’s a very challenging environment in that sense because of the kind of events that we face as an organization and for our customers. It’s a fast growing company, and you can imagine the number of events that are happening around us. The nature of that is changing constantly. And our software and our systems and everything have to adapt and adopt to what’s going on in our environment from a physical perspective, a digital perspective, and the political perspective and everything in between. So we do that really well. I think one of the challenges for us is the amount of growth that our company is going through. It’s on a rapid growth path, and the challenges of being on the scale to enterprise and how do we scale our systems in terms of the growing security needs and all of that is the biggest challenge.

Suma Nallapati [00:13:40]:
But we have great teams that were coming together to help us with the scale and the growth.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:46]:
Okay, Arif, what do you think is happening in your world? Totally different. Suma, you must be having. You have to be on the edge all the time. So, Arif, is your world a little relaxed? More relaxed than Suma’s world?

Aref Matin [00:13:59]:
I wish, but that’s not the case. So thanks for having me on this panel, Sandra, and the remainder of the panelists there. Aref Mattin, I’m EVP, CTO at Wiley. I have been in and around this research and education space for the past ten years. Or so used to be in the same capacity at Pearson. But actually prior to that, without going into all other details, I really kind of, by training, by academic background, I was really a product builder. And that product building focus, I’m not sure, maybe I should clarify myself. That product building focus is something that I think is missing in the overall it industry.

Aref Matin [00:14:56]:
And that focus is necessary because the product builders focus on MVP’s important things to customers, the outcomes. And if they don’t do that, they don’t really have products to sell. And if we looked at the whole of it inside an enterprise such as Wiley, you would basically see that that focus is super important these days for the advancement of the businesses. The challenges that I have are very similar to some of the stuff that Rajiv Rowino spoke about. Rajeev talked about a company that’s 90 years old. We easily beat you there, Rajiv. Right. 214 years, but who’s counting? So the point is that 214 years, you gather quite a bit of legacy in your shop.

Aref Matin [00:15:53]:
And we have actually managed to really figure out what our modernization path is. We are on a seven year program to actually really modernize every aspect of our business and the technology that’s supporting it. We are halfway there in that process during my time here. And we have done, if I can just kind of basically mention, we have done an awesome job in kind of basically the product focus for our customers. Our customers are raving about our user experiences that they have with our products and capabilities that they touch every day. And we do a really good job there where we have actually had many, many challenges in the past where similar to stuff that Rowena was talking about in the back office set of activities and the modernization that needs to take place there. And like I said, I think the technology part of this is actually the easy part of this, right? Because going back to being a product builder, you can kind of basically say, okay, well, what is that product? What’s the shape of it, what color is this and what’s the size? Right. And you know, how to really kind of go building products there.

Aref Matin [00:17:19]:
So we figured out actually how you go about doing that and making good progress on building the product. The thing that is extremely challenging for us, and I think also exasperated by the, by the fact that everybody all of a sudden went to work from home. And also during this pandemic, our company has hired nearly 2000 or so brand new employees, is that many of these employees that joined have never seen a Wiley office or they have not really seen the rest of the colleagues that they’re working with in person, and they were not part of the original conversations that we had regarding the modernization agenda and the decisions that were made during that phase there. And the challenge really is having constant communication with these people and really at points of time, you find yourself really kind of regurgitating history of the projects rather than actually making progress on some of these activities, which is something that I really love to do. But you have to really kind of make sure that you deal with the change management aspects. It is the new people aspects, it is the work from home aspects. It is to ensure that the requirements of this product that you want to build are fully understood, fully documented, and people know how to deal with this. And at the same time, fly the plane while you’re putting the wings on.

Aref Matin [00:18:55]:
Continue to be agile and make sure that, you know, the challenges that I highlighted do not take away from the agility of the delivery here. Right. And so that’s kind of basically what we kind of think about a lot and really practice on a daily basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:18]:
Okay, so before we get into the solution section, you know, I would like to have, whether the attendees or our panelists, if they were to take a word or a phrase which signifies the challenge, you know, so we’ve spoken a lot about a lot of different challenges. Right. So if I were to start putting phrases and words to them, what signifies the top challenge? So we spoke about what legacy, maybe not legacy debt, but legacy application modernization. That is one theme I heard. Then another thing I heard was, RF, you have a interesting issue where the initiative you started, people join after that. So those guys are kind of coming in cold.

Aref Matin [00:20:05]:
That is one, I would call it change management. Right. The change management of this modernization activity is easy to build a modern capability from an older version. It’s very difficult to get people to adapt and use it. Right, exactly. And that change management is a major, major challenge because it’s involving people. If it was systems, it would be easy to connect them to each other. Right?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:20:36]:
Right.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:37]:
Okay, so we will continue our discussion. So anyone from attendees and even from the panelists, if you have a word or a phrase which will allow us to distill the challenges, right, just put it on chat. But that will just allow us to create an inventory out of this. So now coming to you, Rubina, you spoke about quite a few things, right? Of course. You are a large organization doing a whole lot of things. And you did mention about this legacy modernization. Is this just a project which you keep doing the way you’re doing it? It’s going to get solved and life is good, you can go to Hawaii or is it going to be something new, unique or different you are looking for to crack this problem?

Rowena Yeo [00:21:18]:
Yeah, yeah. And definitely this is an area that’s a lot of focus. So to your question about sort of a phrase, I would say it’s almost having to deal with the new and, sorry, deal with the old and accelerate the new. And they have to be in parallel, not sequential. Right. So that’s the challenge that we all have to work today. Listening to Rajiv, Arif and Suma in terms of some of the things that they grapple with. And it’s very similar to what we are seeing too, and especially for us, it’s 135 euro company.

Rowena Yeo [00:21:45]:
So we’re kind of in between Arif and Rajiv yourself in terms of the age of a company. But some of the things that we are looking at, it has to be a journey, Sanjay, because it’s not just about having a project and to get this done is never done. So as a team, we’re working at different areas within organization to rationalize our core platforms, whether it’s in what we call our digital foundation, which is our networking space, the way we look at hosting in cloud, but also in core platform areas like supply chain, commercial and data. And like I said, these are not projects per se. It’s ongoing rationalization and modernization of what it takes us from now to the future state. And they include looking at our 63 ERP systems today and really looking at rationalizing that from not just a technology perspective. But I think you’re spot on. There is a huge part around change management.

Rowena Yeo [00:22:38]:
How do we work with our business in terms of rationalizing the business process to live into the new world. And so that to me is an ongoing space that we have to continue to grapple with. And reducing the number of systems is one thing, modernizing our core and really finding ways to drive better resiliency, which is I believe, one of the core components of this webinar and driving observability and automation and the human factor cannot be ignored because as we look at just the fact about technology transformation, a huge part is about the culture, as Suma said, it’s also about the change management, about driving new ways of working with our business teams and IT team as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:19]:
So Rovina, when we speak about rationalization, do you think we could get overzealous with the rationalization that we cut to the bones? Because even our business as it’s going on, it’s going to morph something which will say, oh, let’s rationalize it. Let’s clean the house. And you clean the house way too much. And then you say, oh, I should have preserved that investment, or I could have tweaked it. You should not become a hoarder, but you should not become a minimalist in the world that we are living in either. So how do you. How do you kind of even. What’s your philosophy? Or maybe it’s not even a philosophy.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:52]:
It has to have some metric, some methodical approach to have a method to the madness of rationalization here.

Rowena Yeo [00:23:58]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it always starts with the business strategy. Where is the business going? And it always has to start with that. And how do we better serve our customers, our patients that we serve? So if you look at that as the two major spectrum in terms of where we’re driving our modernization or rationalization, it always has to start from there. And you made a really good point. It’s not just about everything that’s old and legacy. You get rid of it.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:21]:
Exactly.

Rowena Yeo [00:24:22]:
From just specific nuances, the way we are serving our customers. We don’t want to mess with the success that we have today. So how do we bring the best of what we have and continue to live into the modern world with some of those? So it is a process that we look at, and to your point, around sort of some of the factors and metrics, business strategy, how do we ensure that we drive the right level of accountability with our business teams? What’s the level of change and maturity they are today? Because it’s not just an overnight change. How do we work with them, with their transformation? And I would say that this is more a journey than a sprint, that we’re looking to make it happen and having really hot wired metrics at the end of the day, to measure business outcomes, to measure the value realization of what we put in place together with the business.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:04]:
Okay, so, Rajiv, I will just come to you in a second. So all the audience members, please feel free to jump in. This is supposed to be an interaction and a workshop, right? So if you have any challenges, raise your hand. I’ll request you to unmute, and then you can talk about it. So please raise your hands or ask questions as you go along. So, Rajiv, when we come to you, you had a different flavor of the challenge Rovina mentioned, but then when you started working on it, are you stuck somewhere? Which is where you need a solution, if you will.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:25:34]:
Not really stuck. Let me backtrack a little bit and use two words that arena used. One is journey, and the second one is methodical. So we know that we need to modernize, and you have to look for opportunities. That’s where you have to get creative. So one of the examples we had had the biggest ERP implementation that I’ve ever done my career, and one of the largest projects writers done was a three year project to completely revamp our ERP, our finance and HR systems at once. And our finance system was on a mainframe, huge, huge initiative, three years, it’s live now. And it went well, thank God.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:26:16]:
And so while doing that, here’s where, as a CIO, I always have to keep my minded. Is this an opportunity to modernize? What can I do to modernize some other things? How can we leverage this? Because it’s a big spend. So one of the things that we did was we built a hub and spoke model. It’s actually writer’s data exchange in the cloud. What this did was our old ERP system on the mainframe talked to a whole bunch of other legacy systems. I didn’t want to go modernize all that, because that would be a six year project. So instead of doing that, we created a hub and spoke model in azure that actually kept all the inputs and outputs of the legacy system as is. So what this enables us to do in future is slowly pick off each of those items and it’ll be plug and play.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:27:05]:
So that’s the goal. So I think my point is that whenever there’s an opportunity, we have to seize it. The challenges again, going back to convince the business that, hey, you know, this is really important for you to do because there’s future potential. And so how do you do that? So every application that you have that’s remaining, you have to rationalize it, right? And it’s not to minimalize, to minimize just the. Every system is to go through and say, what is the total cost of ownership for each of those applications, and what value is it bringing you and what are the risks? So put those three things together and say which one should be done first and what is the cost? So I think it’s not a single dimensional answer. It is multi dimensional. And if you, on top of that, if you put the business strategy, as I think Romana said, the business. Oh, it was Summa that said it.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:27:54]:
The business strategy is critical. That drives everything else. But I think it has to be a methodical process that you have to keep in the back of your mind all the time. So, challenges. Yes, it’s slow because you have to look for opportunities rather than say, here’s $100 million, go do it.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:12]:
Okay. So, Suma, when you work in your environment, it’s like you’re only invited into an organization when there is a trouble and a big trouble and an unknown trouble. Right? I mean, like, isn’t that the environment you guys always live in?

Suma Nallapati [00:28:25]:
Yeah, it’s pretty edge of the seat excitement on a daily basis. Yes.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:30]:
Yeah. So it can be unnerving too, at times, right. Like too much of excitement. Right. On an ongoing basis. So when an organization which has to support, and you’re supporting a bunch of different companies, and we’re talking about efficiency and resilience, imagine you had to go to Wall street and say, I’m a business. And I’m saying for the it department to say I’m a business and I want to show that I’m going to be profitable or I’m going to be providing growth and I’m going to run it pretty cheap or not cheap, basically run it at the lowest cost possible. How are you doing that for yourself? And how, in what way are your customers that you work with, they are able to do so that not only do they say I run pretty lean, but also if I have to bounce back, I’m not going to make the company suffer because I cut too much or I’m spending too little.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:23]:
So it’s a balancing act. But there has to be some way of saying this is the right balance for this kind of company. How do you tackle that?

Suma Nallapati [00:29:31]:
Yep, that’s a very good question. Again, for us, being in the business of saving people’s lives and lives and helping organizations run faster, having that business continuity always in mind when organizations are going through those critical events, if you will. And also I mentioned critical events, but we are also responsible for the COVID vaccine rollouts, the notifications around that. So we are in very life saving things in that sense. So it’s 24 by seven. We need to be always on. And I think using digital strategies like the cloud, making sure that we have enough auto scaling built in, we have enough storage and all of those things. And the business continuity frameworks established within our technology stacks is the way we respond quickly to these events at any given place.

Suma Nallapati [00:30:23]:
And it’s 24 by seven. And because it’s global, there’s not a real downtime, if you will. So the fact that I’m in charge of the operations, it’s again my sacred duty, if you will, to ensure that business continuity is always first. And we are always looking at ways to minimize the cost and also making sure that our messages during these critical events are delivered on time in a most reliable fashion. So having that operational resilience thread built throughout our systems is very critical and we have the right focus on that. I know Rajiv and Arif mentioned not exactly to the point of what we do at Everbridge, but I was the state CIO for the state of Colorado a couple of jobs earlier and talk about transformation, talk about culture. These are employees that are tied to their mainframes and we had to move them to the cloud or anything and talk about culture. There was protests in front of my office because we wanted to move away from mainframe to the cloud because they’re so used to the green screens and they have these keystrokes figured out and they don’t want to change.

Suma Nallapati [00:31:33]:
These are the DMV clerks. And, you know, we know all the jokes about the DMV and all of that, it being slow. So the things that resonated a lot with my very respected panelists is that culture and the transformation is not about technology. Right? We have the technology established, but how do you get these employees that have been at the public sector for such a long time? And again, they’re there for the right reasons, but they don’t understand the cloud. And for us to go to the joint budget committee, joint technology company and ask for the cloud investment was like pulling teeth, right? Because they’re like misses. You’re making this up. There’s no such thing called the cloud. And so I’m like, actually there is.

Suma Nallapati [00:32:11]:
So it was very interesting. So getting people along for the ride, making sure that they understand the value of these digital tools, I think is very critical. And Everbridge, because we are not as legacy, we are a 20 year old system, right? So we’ve been able to incorporate some of these strategies and the leaders that have gone through the wounds in the back, right. Like all of us on this panel, bringing them to the table has helped a lot in terms of bending the curve and leveraging the latest and the greatest technology, whether it’s AI, machine learning, data pipelines, as well as being able to use those technologies to the fullest because lives are dependent on it. I know, Rovina, with your, you know, sector, which is healthcare, you are on 24 by seven and same thing with supply chain and all of that, right? And all the things that are the nuanced versions of what we need to do to keep our business continuously running is all about leadership and all about thinking forward, looking beyond the just now and making our people understand the value of why we are investing in these and having the buy in very early on is the key to success. And it’s a constant, constant game.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:31]:
Arif, in your case, I mean, I cannot forget that whole scenario that towards the end you mentioned where the people are just brought in in the middle when there’s pandemic, not the best time for somebody to be oriented and only to know they’re coming when you are running a bunch of different projects. And you mentioned exchange management and Suma also mentioned culture. So is it still always to be considered as a fuzzy science, if you will, fuzzy art or a science for you to be able to do this?

Aref Matin [00:34:01]:
No, I think this is a science for sure. And people really need to get their heads around that because of the fact that there are evidence, there are evidences that you can actually do these types of activities even during pandemic, even with new employees joining, you can actually do this and you can actually deliver on these missions and actually measure to ensure that you are demonstrating a whole lot of progress here. The couple things that I have kind of learned in this process is, is that there’s a need for empathy and there’s a need for executive resolve in these types of projects and the large scale of activities that are required to really kind of reach a successful end game. And the product builder in me says, hey, you do a lot of agile and safe practices and you want to become efficient with everything that you do. But agile also, the product builder says, requires certain other roles, such as a product manager, such as a product owner. Because if you want to treat all of your projects like an agile project, that you better have spent the time and really gotten yourself the appropriate product management skills and the appropriate product owner skills so that they can actually define what are these big changes that you want to make in your back office during your modernization, right? Because like I said, it’s not about the technologies, it’s about really process reengineering and really kind of basically shifting from a older system to a newer technology, be it sas or something that you built yourself or your bot, right. And integrate. So if you’re taking on a big mission like that, if it’s important enough for your company and your businesses to invest in a big mission like this, then it’s important enough to have somebody who is the product champion for this activity.

Aref Matin [00:36:23]:
And if there’s no product champion, it’s almost guaranteed that many of these projects will end up failing for these areas. Right. So we focused specifically on ensuring that we have product champions, product managers for each one of these critical topics, who can actually kind of define a roadmap and help the rest of the agile team and the safe practice to essentially implement this roadmap here. But the empathy is important, right? You have 2000 new people that showed up during the pandemic, and you have to take the time to essentially make sure that the relevant people are updated on where you’re headed with your strategy and keep repeating it. Make sure that you listen to them, make sure that you understand what their concerns are. Are they coming up the ramp fast enough? What else do they need to really do their job better and stuff like that? And then executive resolve, which I mentioned, that you have to really be extra special attention. Executive need to provide extra special attention these days on these big projects that are going on right now in the current mode of operation to ensure that these projects are nurtured properly and they’re taken care of and they are executing well and continuously measure and improve the process. Because like I said, you know, it’s not so much about the technology.

Aref Matin [00:38:05]:
It’s really a huge amount of process re engineering that’s required in these projects where change management is always difficult. Right. And when you combine change management with process re engineering activities, you know, it takes quite a bit of an effort to get things organized. And we pay a lot of attention to those details in this process.

Rowena Yeo [00:38:29]:
Hey, Sancho, may I just jump in on that? Yes, please. That’s a really relevant point in terms of change management. I also want to add to the point that when you have a crisis happen, so one of the things I’ve seen just with the pandemic happened, and for us in J and J having to enable 135,000 employees to work remotely, suddenly overnight, you just see that sense of purpose of people coming together to do that for the enabling part of it, but also people coming together very quickly to form a crisis management team to make sure that, hey, we’ve got to be able to continue to deliver our products to our patients, our supply chain got to be running super well, we’ve got to be responsive to the business requirements. That part of it. Having that common purpose is another element I saw in terms of getting people together to drive to a common outcome. So really good point, Arab. And I love the point about empathy too, because it’s also about keeping employees safe during this point in time and making sure that we allow for that opportunity for them to provide feedback, that experience they may have, whether they are boarding new employees or, you know, continuing with that day to day job and continue to get the business running. So, yeah, at that point.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:41]:
So one thing which I want to build on, what are you mentioned, you said every initiative which is worth working on should have a champion, right?

Aref Matin [00:39:50]:
That’s right.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:51]:
So that’s great. I mean, like, of course I would love to see that happen, but there are a lot of initiatives that we are picking up right now, which I would not say is a knee jerk reaction. We still want to plan it, but they are also moving into the unknown. How would you get someone from a journey to say, okay, get involved, to take, you know, active participation to becoming a champion? Right. It doesn’t happen overnight for somebody to become a champion. So this is a question to all of you. Is there, is there some, you know, you take them to a bar and get them to drink and then they become a champion or no.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:40:26]:
What do you do?

Aref Matin [00:40:26]:
I think, I think I mentioned, right, I mentioned executive resolve is required here, right. You need to kind of keep back going to we are building this product or we are not building this product. Right. If, if we are seriously building this product, you really need to make sure that every component of this product has got a champion so that they can actually say that, well, build it like this, in this color, in that shape, in this size. Right. And if they’re not really, if they’re not really specifying this, all of a sudden you’ll end up with a product that nobody needs and nobody can use and they have not participated in the definition of the process, re engineering of this process, and you end up with a end product that’s really not useful for too many people. Right. And therefore they don’t end up using.

Aref Matin [00:41:15]:
Right. So, and you end up wasting a lot of time, a lot of money, extremely inefficient and it defeats the entire purpose. This is why I said it is a science, right. The science says that if you’re agile, you’re practicing this, there’s a need for a product manager and you have to ensure that that core team, product manager, architect, quality assurance person, head of development and project program management is present as a part of this core team so that you can actually start the core team activity to ensure that the stakeholders are really proactively supporting the definition of the outcome, the requirements, roadmap participation. And once you nail this, I think from there it is just basically science of agile and you can deliver it, but you have to get it organized properly and you have to ensure that there is executive resolve supporting this across the business and you continuously basically need to synchronize and follow through and measure the progress and help the teams to come along on whatever it is that they need to get the job done.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:41]:
So, Zuma, I want to. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:42:43]:
Rajiv, on what Ari said, the critical things, and I talked about the total cost of ownership as well. That product manager is critical. And I also find that the product manager being in the business is equally important. One of the mistakes we made was early on, I tried to talk through the whole organizational structure and how a product team should be, and getting a c player that has no idea of how to manage a product was hard. So completely. I think the product manager has to understand the business, have to understand what managing a product is and have that. That collaborative spirit between it and the business to drive some of these things. This, I think is critical.

Aref Matin [00:43:31]:
And understand the requirement of the end user.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:43:35]:
Absolutely. From building things that no one’s going to use. As you said, some engineers have the.

Suma Nallapati [00:43:43]:
Tendency to just keep building without looking at why we are building on what value it’s serving. So we need to get that balance between engineering and business outcomes.

Rowena Yeo [00:43:53]:
And I think test and learn is really important, too. So you can show early signs of successes. And that, to your point, drive further affirmation about what this brings. So I think that’s really important. But I really echo the point about having a very strong product manager. The business from the business is super critical to, in fact, a lot of the programs that we’ve seen as well. Not just product manager, but the strong support and sponsorship and championship that we need.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:44:17]:
And the other piece that’s I think is sort of missing is that. And this is, can be, you know, interspersed every, in every part of the conversation is automation. Right. I think if you talked about the business process for engineering, I’m a huge believer in that. If before you even start a project, look at your as is and to be right, and then what parts of it can you automate? And that’s critical. So I’ve stood up a complete automation group. Not in it, in the business, it’s central. And so they’re looking across the board and my team supports them from a technology standpoint.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:44:51]:
And so that ties in with the whole process reengineering piece, too. And I want to create that group at the corporate level as well, not an it. So, a lot of good points that you brought up.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:02]:
So, Suma, I remember you mentioned that you had the people given a cool looking application, and since they were so used to the green screen, it was tough to get them adopted. So I wanted to take what the science. Part of it are, if you mentioned and even Ravine and Rajiv, you mentioned, and I said, I would say that, okay, you build it and you try to do all the right things, but eventually the adoption could be dependent on those very people. So even if you say, I’m going to take you along, but there’s a lot of inertia, and then they are in this. If I were to still say pandemic to some extent has settled down, but you still have people who have got their own issues, if you will. They are dealing with. They don’t want to unnecessarily rock the boat on the work front. So what do you do differently than you put in or structure in place? You put the process in place for these people.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:54]:
Even if you’re empathetic, they say, okay, great, I love you because you’re empathetic, but I don’t want to adopt your application that you built. Right? That can happen. Yeah.

Suma Nallapati [00:46:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. It can happen. And I think it’s very, very important to speak their language and meet them where they are. Right. If you try to shove this change management down their throats, it’s going to backfire big time. So I think we do it with empathy, but you do it with a lot of understanding and being in their shoes on why they’re resisting the change. So we created a lot of customer advisory groups. I went and sat in the DMV myself and showed them instead of the green screen, which is taking you seven minutes.

Suma Nallapati [00:46:32]:
And I think Rajiv had a similar transaction where we cut down on the times and showed them the value in that sense, where this business process reengineering and this speaking that language. Right. I’m not speaking about the cloud and automation and all of them to them, but speaking in their language on how it’s going to cut down transaction times. The wait times at the DMV will be reduced by 20%, starting with that kind of business language and sitting down with them, doing the advisory groups very early on, and bringing them along the journey and also taking their feedback along the way. We are, we are not those extremely smart people. We think we are because they have, like, 30 year old knowledge of the system. So taking their inputs along the way and showing them how they’re incorporating their feedback into our design, thinking into our process journeys into our customer journeys, was very helpful. And you build it in a very authentic way.

Suma Nallapati [00:47:28]:
You can fake this. And I truly believe in a very authentic leadership where we stand for what’s right and also doing the balance, the delicate dance between what they want versus what you want to achieve and meeting halfway.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:44]:
So we spoke about projects to some extent, or initiatives, which you could call them as a start and an end, right? That is also one aspect of what you do in it and that you need for efficiency gain as well as resiliency. That’s understandable. But then when it comes to really running the operations in the way you’re running, you’re taking care of operations, you’re running projects, you’re dealing with people, you’re hiring and firing people, you’ve got all of that going on. Should there be some way of measuring things on a consistent basis? And for that, should there be some benchmarks and metrics that should be established which we use as a way for us to say, hey, I’m running 100 miles in an hour, even a one degree difference would take me off track. Am I going in the right direction? And when I keep the efficiency and resiliency of it in place, or take that as a context, what benchmarks or metrics, one an organization should put in place so that you’re watching it like a hawk. And everything that you do, people, process, technology, applications, culture, leadership, policies, processes, politics, you name it, right? So that you stay on track and you’ve got something that you’re aspiring for. Are there any benchmarks and metrics that you guys are using to stay on course?

Aref Matin [00:49:02]:
There are lots of things that are available, lots of tools, lots of capabilities to do this. Of course, you have a way of monitoring the size of the organization, the scale of the organization, the budgets, your burn rate of the activities. You have access to the agile metrics and you understand how the product development process is making progress. If you go to the other side of the it where you’re talking about infrastructure and desktops, right, you kind of measure things by number of tickets and activities. But one way that we are actually kind of doing and kind of part of the more of the modern product development process is that we are using a tool, a capability called flow metrics. And flow metrics is an amazing capability. There are many other things out there. And flow metrics is an amazing capability that basically teaches and supports all the agile teams to determine their own productivity.

Aref Matin [00:50:12]:
From sprint to sprint, nobody knows what they don’t know. If people don’t understand the productivity of their overall team, the best thing that they can do is to have a capability to measure what is the productivity. How are we doing? Can we actually do things better? Can we change some setup of our team? Can we add some process to our product development. Can we have more interaction with our product managers? Can we add a few more resources to ensure that our productivity actually increases here? And it’s one thing for me to really kind of monitor these things. It’s completely different thing for the teams to monitor this themselves. Right. Because they’re the ones that, regardless of whatever I say, they’re the ones that are going to need help to really kind of understand where they are and how they can improve themselves. And you’d be surprised how people actually started updating these things right when, when they see that.

Aref Matin [00:51:21]:
Oh, okay, well, now I see what’s going on, right in this team. You know, if we had one more, one more member added to this team, we could really kind of move some mountains by really kind of assigning this, prioritizing this, reprioritizing that. And we can move some mountains here if we did this right. And that productivity, understanding of the productivity of each one of these agile teams is important, not that you want to basically have. Okay, well, how’s this team doing as compared to that team? Yeah, you can’t help it because the data is available and you do that, but that comparison is a bit meaningless because that agile team is that agile team. They need to learn how to become productive and go forward. So flow metrics is a very, very modern way of really enabling the agile team productivity progress there, I think building.

Suma Nallapati [00:52:20]:
In that observability and telemetry within the product suite I think is pretty significant.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:28]:
So, Suma, question regarding the resilience side of the business. Yes, you can build effectiveness metrics and efficiency metrics, et cetera, but resilience is about the delay and the outages. So not every delay and every outage is based on your past knowledge base that you’ve created. Right. That’s the fun part of every time an outage happens or a major event happens, in your case, you might end up scratching your head to say, where did this come from? Which did not have a precedence? And that’s what typically happens. And not every part of our business, while we talk about business continuity, disaster recovery, pull the plug test and all that. But you cannot have pulled the Prac plug test for all types of issues that we are going to face or we are likely to face given the volatility that we are seeing. So have you seen companies do something to prepare to minimize the downtime or outages and that way they can really consciously working towards this resilience mantra?

Aref Matin [00:53:32]:
Yep.

Suma Nallapati [00:53:33]:
No, we call at Everbridge this new program that we’ve initiated. A lot of fortune finded companies are actually taking advantage of that. And it’s called best in enterprise class resilience. And it’s actually a badge that companies get when they implement it. And it’s a framework, it’s all these tenants that make up the enterprise resilience in terms of your cybersecurity posture, in terms of business continuity, resilience in terms of how quickly things are going to happen. But how quickly can you respond and how quickly can you bring your operations back in place? So this framework, I would love for all the team members here to look at it and look at this enterprise class resilience certification, best in enterprise resilience. Dove Jones and a few other companies have already taken advantage of it and are using it within their framework because it’s hard to quantify it all. As an organization.

Suma Nallapati [00:54:30]:
We all have our day jobs, but then there’s all these hackers and everybody else that, that have a lot more flexibility in terms of how they get to our systems and things like that. So we’ve actually created this program for enterprises so that they go with a very established framework in terms of that resilience. And Everbridge is leading that space and it’s called best in enterprise resilience index.

Rowena Yeo [00:54:55]:
Yeah, definitely take a look at that. I think one of the other things that we’ve found to point about just resiliency is similar to what Rajev mentioned about automation. I think we’ve taken a step around just driving intelligent automation because one of the things we have found is that if you look at what contributes to a lot of the issues that we have today, human errors are still, number one, would cause for a lot of SEP one incidences around, well, at least in Johnson Johnson, we have 5000 applications across our ecosystem and our interoperability is very complex. So I think that’s one area. And we have found that a lot of manual steps are required to do that. Now, when we put in place an automation process, an intelligent automation, whereby we incorporate some of the artificial intelligence and machine learning around predicting some of these root causes, we actually saw significant reduction in human errors because we are automating those processes and also provides us with that increased visibility and control. So that’s a space which we found to be helpful in our resiliency. And we’ve seen that, we’ve seen our, in fact, number of incidents gone down by 50% year on year, just because of the fact that we are automating our processes.

Rowena Yeo [00:56:04]:
We are creating opportunities for self healing, just intensity around monitoring. And I think as we talk about metrics and measurement. It’s okay to have so much metrics and measurement, but how do we drive the insights from those to be able to then support things and actions that we got to be doing? I think that, to me, is a key element we got to be looking at.

Suma Nallapati [00:56:25]:
Absolutely. And I think you mentioned the automation aspect, but then also there’s that human aspect where we can take that human power and apply it on top of all that intelligence and create that bionic company where we use that superhuman abilities to orchestrate even more of value for our customers. When we have the machines and the humans come together and you take away the human error aspect, but put them on the more intelligent workflows and things like that, that can help us be much more resilient.

Rowena Yeo [00:56:56]:
Yeah, spot on.

Aref Matin [00:56:57]:
So basic practices here also that are, that are important to pay attention to. I see that Suma has on her background, the global operations center. Right. Such things are necessary to increase the observability of the, of the applications that are running and are in front of the customers and so that you can actually monitor how these applications are doing and. And really understand what is their status there. Right. Especially in shops where there’s a lot of legacy. Also, there are, in my opinion, product guy.

Aref Matin [00:57:41]:
Again, there’s some, some really bad practices where. Where a group builds the application, but another group is maintaining the application. And that. I don’t like that. That’s a no no in my science. Right. Because of the fact that if you’re building it, you’re responsible for it. Right.

Aref Matin [00:58:03]:
And you can’t really kind of throw it over the wall to somebody else to go fix something that you have built that they don’t know anything about. Right. And you’re responsible for it. If you, if you do a good job in building it, great. You don’t get the wake up calls. If you don’t, then you end up getting the wake up calls. And you learn that in that process. And you learn that.

Aref Matin [00:58:28]:
Okay, well, I better build it correctly for the next time so that I don’t get the call. Somebody else gets the calls. Right. And trying to basically throw it over the wall to a maintenance group is a bad part of a practice in design.

Suma Nallapati [00:58:43]:
And this is my favorite screen. I’m so glad you noticed that. But this is monitored 24 by seven. By seven.

Aref Matin [00:58:49]:
I have one of those so I can. So I can notice it.

Rowena Yeo [00:58:54]:
I like that.

Sanjog Aul [00:58:57]:
Okay, so we will close it. But then, you know what? Nothing can be completely done without the right kind of a leadership mindset. The muscle that you got to have, right. In your perspective. I always like to ask this question. So if there was one thing that you would fix in yourself as an individual, don’t think it. Don’t think your respective companies, you. What would that you would fix in you so that you are best positioned to help your organization achieve the most efficient and the most resilient business of it.

Sanjog Aul [00:59:32]:
It can be ten words or less, for that matter, just to make it simple.

Aref Matin [00:59:39]:
So or less. I need to be more patient.

Sanjog Aul [00:59:44]:
Okay. And you should not repeat, by the way. Don’t worry, too many cannot say, oh, I like that, too. Right. So what else? Summa or Rovina or Rajiv, take it.

Suma Nallapati [00:59:55]:
I would say I want to be more business focused and less technical. You know, constantly fine tuning my business abilities is going to be helpful for me as a leader, and I am. I need to learn patience. If I’m a pastry chef, everything is not going to be.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:11]:
I like that you bring that back.

Suma Nallapati [01:00:14]:
I am impatient.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:16]:
All right.

Rowena Yeo [01:00:17]:
Definitely. Number one, I think I wish I have more time, and I wish there’s a digital twin somewhere that can help do so many things at the same time.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:26]:
So you are saying that you would like to get things done yesterday, but is there something that you’re trying to fix in yourself to say, okay, Roena will be a better leader tomorrow if I do this?

Rowena Yeo [01:00:36]:
I think, like, prioritization time.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:38]:
Right.

Rowena Yeo [01:00:38]:
And same as RF and Sima, you know, any more patience as well.

Sanjog Aul [01:00:42]:
All right, good.

Rajeev Ravindran [01:00:43]:
So, Rajiv, I wish I had a crystal ball. So what I think, again, since I can’t repeat everything, it all resonates with me. Just to be. Just to understand that, you know, things will seek its own level. Right. Sometimes you just have to step away, because when I. We all are, right, we’re all problem solvers. When there’s a problem, you want to just dive in and fix it.

Rajeev Ravindran [01:01:12]:
That way you can check out. Check the box and get out. Right? Go on to the next thing. So sometimes just let it go. Just sit back and really observe and then come back at it from a different angle. Like, when we talk about metrics, everything that you guys said is true, but I’m using metrics to drive energy in the future. It’s on a dashboard. It’s on, you know, it’s on everyone’s phones, and we are actually measured by it, and they get paid by it, too.

Rajeev Ravindran [01:01:37]:
So everyone’s in on it. So I’m looking at the human element, too, and I wouldn’t have gotten there with that idea if I just started to solve the issue with metrics, so I need to learn. I’m very bad. I just want to go fix everything and just move on. So it’s. I’m a work in progress. What can I say?

Sanjog Aul [01:01:56]:
All right, so what a great conversation today. Thank you. All of you, Ravi Nayu, Rajiv Ramindran, Suman Alapati, and Arif martin, thanks so much again. And all our attendees who took the time to participate. And thank you so much, everbridge, for being our sponsor, thanks so much. And we should keep in touch and keep doing a good work. Thanks so much. And for all the attendees, thank you.

Suma Nallapati [01:02:20]:
So much for your time.

Sanjog Aul [01:02:21]:
Definitely. Thank you.

Suma Nallapati [01:02:22]:
Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [01:02:23]:
Take care now. Bye bye.

Aref Matin [01:02:31]:
Hey.