Business agility is about adapting services, people, processes and finances to the changes in business environment. But, in many cases, it is attempted in a fragmented and opportunistic way thus undermining its full potential. How can we define and adopt ONE approach to managing data, architecture, security, and customer community across the enterprise towards best outcome?

Contributor

• • John Lambeth, Chief Information Officer, PAE

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Top 5 Learning Points

1. You not only have excellence within each of the process dreams but when they all come together at the end, the overall result is a well synchronized and agile result now.
2. You have to turn data into information, and the information that you create should be directly related to how the business is actually going to make decisions.
3. The fundamental question I think is how that information is going to be used to either measure the effectiveness of the processes that you have put in place or enable a business professional to make decisions about the direction of his or her particular business area.
4. It’s the essence of that central governance process that ensures that they all stay in sync with each other and then a series of process review and governance boards that we have in place against which these different teams check in regularly to make sure that they are staying synchronized.
5. From a systems perspective, when you talk about technical architecture, one of the things I think all organizations are facing now is the fact that our technical backbone is going to be hybrid. It’s going to be a combination of cloud based software as a service, applications and it’s going to be internally hosted.

Show Notes

• From a systems perspective, when you talk about technical architecture, one of the things I think all organizations are facing now is the fact that our technical backbone is going to be hybrid. It’s going to be a combination of cloud-based software as a service, applications and it’s going to be internally hosted.
• Take that with just about any data element that in itself is by simplifying the definitions of what the data means in the systems down to that level of clarity it makes the language with which different departments can talk about data with each other much simpler.
• The fundamental question I think is how that information is going to be used to either measure the effectiveness of the processes that you have put in place or enable a business professional to make decisions about the direction of his or her particular business area.
• But in absence of just a general governance process that interlinks them, you could have well-intentioned major processes that would go off and re-engineer themselves to be completely incompatible with each other.
• It’s the essence of that central governance process that ensures that they all stay in sync with each other and then a series of process review and governance boards that we have in place against which these different teams check in regularly to make sure that they are staying synchronized.

Summary

If an organization is growing up at a fast pace, then keeping up the agility intact becomes key. In such scenarios how do people and processes cope up? Also, how does technological sustenance be possible? This discussion sheds light on these concerns and how.

Explore More

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  • The Cost of Business Agility
  • Will Business/IT Agility Eat Strategy for Breakfast?
  • Architecting for Agility
  • Security and Agility – Tips for Getting the Best of Both Worlds
  • The Agility – Stability Paradox
  • Organizational Agility
  • IT Agility is More Important than Ever Before!

Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Welcome, listeners. This is Sanjog Aul, your host. And the topic for conversation is Steps to Boosting Business Agility. And I have with me John Lambeth, who’s the Chief Information Officer with PAE. Hey, John, how are you? Thank you for joining us.

John Lambeth [00:00:15]:
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:16]:
Oh, great to have you with us today. Now, every organization wants to be agile such that it’s able to adapt services, processes, people and finances to change in changes in business environment. And that’s what we are seeing that’s going on. And however, in many cases, this effort does not deliver desired results, since we are attempting or we have seen many cases where it has been attempted in a fragmented and opportunistic way. So how can organizations take the necessary steps to define and adopt a more holistic approach to boosting business agility? And that’s what we wanted to discuss today. So, John, here’s my first question for you. Business agility is relative and it’s subjective, while it is still about responsiveness and adaptability. So you go to different people in an organization, you’ll get different answers.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:09]:
So with that lack of clarity is what I’ll call it, or lack of benchmarks. How can we ever be on the same path as an organization to become more agile?

John Lambeth [00:01:22]:
One of the ways that PAE has done that, and certainly if you look at PAE over the last several years, we are a government services contractor. We do a variety of things, everything from range support services to aircraft maintenance. And over the years our business has grown, but it’s also diversified in the number of things that we do. And as we’ve grown, like any business as it grows through time, you realize that the sort of the adage of the book what got you here won’t get you there in terms of you have your small business, you have small business processes, and as you grow, and you need to become, in some cases, more complex in your business processes to match the complexity of the business itself. You have to fundamentally step back and look at the ways that you actually run your business. And so PAE has very much been doing that over the last year, undergoing what we call our transformation initiative. And it’s really all about stepping back and looking at those key processes that we actually use to run the company and looking at how we have traditionally done those processes. If our goal is to become a bigger company, which it is, are those same ways of doing things appropriate for a company perhaps twice our size? And if not, what are the things that we need to do to adapt those processes to be reflective of much larger companies.

John Lambeth [00:02:56]:
And your assessment is absolutely spot on. In absence of sort of a central approach to this, those kinds of efforts can very quickly become fragmented. Now, at pae, what we’ve done is we’ve actually created a single governance function that has ownership at the executive team level. So it’s very much a tone from the top sort of an approach, has the organization stepping back and looking at its business processes holistically and say for us to become more agile as a large company, we need to not only look within each department at how those departments need to adapt their processes, but also, more importantly, also focus on the interdependencies between departments because certainly when you talk about especially back office functions like HR and payroll and finance, they’re all intertwined and they all have interrelationships with each other. And so it’s the essence of that central governance process that ensures that they all stay in sync with each other. And then a series of sort of process review and governance boards that we have in place against which these different teams check in regularly to make sure that they are staying synchronized.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:21]:
Now, with what you just mentioned that you have a tone being set from the top. So there are organizations who are still facing this problem where things are fragmented, or there’s an opportunistic approach taken to improving the business agility. So are we in a way directly saying that, okay, maybe the tone is not right, or is there chaos at the top? Or there could be somewhere in between, whether the stone was set right, but something did not happen in terms of going in the right direction to take it holistic. There could be other issues as well. Right. Which could be causing this issue besides voice at the top?

John Lambeth [00:04:53]:
Absolutely. Yeah. And in some cases it’s just a synchronization question. You can have, for example, in our organization, some of the key processes that we are looking at are things like our process for hiring to retiring, a process from the time that we take an order to the time that we collect cash. And each one of those processes, there may be tone from the top and a clearly understood message from that department owner that we need to adapt that process. But in absence of just a general governance process that interlinks them, you could have well intentioned major processes that would go off and re engineer themselves to be completely incompatible with each other. And so tone of cop is certainly an important part of it. But having a structure in place that ensures that as you’re doing it, you actually are.

John Lambeth [00:05:52]:
You have these teams checking in with each other. And that you have a central function that is heightening the interdependencies and is managing the many Microsoft projects that are ongoing as a portfolio, ensures that everything stays synchronized with each other and that you not only have excellence within each of the process streams, but when they all come together at the end, the overall result is a well synchronized and agile result.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:23]:
Now let’s bring up this topic of data. So as more and more organizations are becoming more data driven, and they essentially should be, given the way we are transforming our respective organizations, we also see that the volume, the variety and the velocity of data is increasing at a maddening pace. Do you think we can realistically manage all of this data which is coming and which we don’t know what’s going to come next proactively and holistically? And if you were to tackle this problem, what do you think would be the related costs and challenges and would you see, say, silver lining in the cloud, if you will, in terms of ROI?

John Lambeth [00:07:00]:
Well, I think one of the key things you talk about the role of data and both can, I guess you could say could both hamper and contribute to the success of an agile organization. It all gets down to, in my view, two fundamental precepts. One is that you have to turn data into information. And the information that you create should be directly related to how the business is actually going to make decisions. So a classic challenge I think all IT professionals have when we go to create tools that turn data into information. To your point, we have volumes of data and we have data of different types that you start collecting customer requirements and you’re going to have a very wide distribution of need. And the phrase boil the ocean sometimes comes to mind when you start to try to figure out what you’re going to deliver. The fundamental question I think is how is that information going to be used to either measure the effectiveness of the processes that you have put in place or enable a business professional to make decisions about the direction of his or her particular business area.

John Lambeth [00:08:27]:
It I think again, as a cio, one of the things that I have experienced over time is, wow, I’d really like all series of reports on every aspect of my particular domain. And what I try to do is I try to go back to that function and say, as you’re measuring the effectiveness of your business, is the particular life of information that you’re asking for going to directly play a role in your, in your business decisions or is it nice to know and to actually sort of prioritize that information and get at the heart of what is useful business information first and then sort of go from there. It’s the adage of you can have an adequate source of information that will help you to make a business decision with the 80% accuracy or 85% accuracy. Is it worth the opportunity cost to the organization to improve the fidelity of that decision by 5% or 10%? It may be, it may not be, depending on the particular organization. And so agility can be directly impacted by whether or not the organization, as it attempting to turn data into information, is really trying to target the key decisions with the appropriate and succinct set of data that will allow an organization to make effective and quick decisions.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:07]:
Let’s talk about the architecture we seek over complication or over complicating architecture, over engineering of processes, and even overloading our workforce as we go about boosting business agility. And if we do that, we are essentially shooting ourselves in the foot and undermining what you could have otherwise accomplished. How do we prevent that?

John Lambeth [00:10:28]:
Well, you’re absolutely correct that an overly complicated architecture is it can directly produce a negative impact in an organization. And that extends not only to the, if you want to talk about the infrastructure, but also to the metadata. I think a couple of key precepts that an organization can adopt if you start at the systems level. One is that you have to have a consistent understanding of what a data element is and what it means across the entire organization. So of course you can go to three different departments and talk about what does a customer mean to you, what does revenue mean to you, what does cost mean to you? And you can get three different answers by establishing an effective metadata layer that says no matter where you go in the organization, as soon as someone says the word customer, everybody is focused on the exact meaning of what a customer is to the organization. And take that with just about any data element that in itself. By simplifying the definitions of what the data means in the systems down to that level of clarity, it makes the language with which different departments can talk about data with each other much simpler from a systems perspective. When you talk about technical architecture, one of the things I think all organizations are facing now is the fact that our technical backbone is going to be hybrid.

John Lambeth [00:12:02]:
It’s going to be a combination of cloud based software as a service applications, and it’s going to be internally hosted. And for those systems to be effective, they all are going to have to interrelate with each other and we’ve sort of settled in on two fundamental precepts as we talk about how, from an architecture standpoint, those systems will talk to each other. We have adopted and purchased a very specific enterprise information broker, and the two rules that we have for systems development in PAE are if system A needs to talk to system B and either one of those vendors has written an API or a connector, all data transfer between those systems is happening using that connector. If there is no connector developed between those systems, we will use the same information broker tool for any interrelationship for systems and we’re going for ideal state that with the exception of those direct APIs, all systems communicate with each other through a common information broke. The second extends to the idea of workflow. When we create workflows that will certainly leverage multiple systems.

John Lambeth [00:13:25]:
Every system in our environment has some degree of workflow built into it that is organic. For any step along the way. In a complex workflow where we are using where it’s going to interact with a system that has workflow, rather than rewrite that workflow, we’ll use the organic workflow built into that tool and then for any steps that involve just general workflow that aren’t interacting with a particular system, we’re going to use the same exact workflow tool set for all workflows through the organization that people become used to not only a common way of seeing how systems interrelate with each other, but a common tool set that all workflows are written. So I think that combination of starting to develop a very strict set of integration standards in the midst of this very heterogeneous systems environment and a common understanding of data definitions really help to simplify that technical architecture quandary that certainly we have at PAE and that I think most organizations have.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:30]:
That’s a great response. So let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back. And John, you did mention about cloud based software and let’s go dig a little bit more into it because we definitely can see that cloud based software can help with increasing business agility. And with so many cloud delivery models, there could be potential where we could go wrong in selecting the appropriate one for our organization. So what is that approach to selecting the right model and what do we do in terms of using the cloud software, cloud based software or SaaS model in such a way so that we can simplify it. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:47]:
Welcome back listeners. So John, here cloud based software we know can help with increasing business agility, but we have so many different cloud delivery models. Where do we go wrong in selecting the appropriate one for organization? That is what many people struggle with.

John Lambeth [00:16:04]:
Well, I think question of what cloud applications are appropriate for organization are going to be driven by multiple factors and there are benefits and as you said, there are risks to selecting the appropriate applications for the environment. In our case we’ve tried to do is we look at things like human capital management for example, which translates usually into HRIF systems. That is a domain where irregardless the particular industry that an organization is in, there are certain hard and fast requirements that all organizations has to worry about. Benefits, eligibility verification and the maintenance of people’s entitlements in their relationship to the firm. I mean all those are all things that are to a certain degree standardized. And as a result there are packages for example that are focused around human capital management that have very quickly adapted to the cloud. Organizations also look at things like their selling processes. So they’re structured selling mechanisms that BD and sales organizations use out there that are just proven methodologies for effective sales cycles.

John Lambeth [00:17:32]:
And many tools looking at salesforce automation tools for example, have adapted their structure to map around these best in class processes. And so one of the ways I think that an organization can really take advantage of cloud based tools is the mission of the IT organization to maintain competency around the core business of the firm or is IT able to stretch and also provide all kinds of administrative support to these tools that maybe isn’t their core bread and butter? You know I look at our government agencies for whom we provide services and many of them look at their own internal staff and they say they exist to perform the mission of that agency and in cases where they don’t, a business process that is part of their organization isn’t part of that core mission. They often outsource those and so from an IT person’s perspective, I can look at my staff and say do I want my team to specialize in maintaining HR systems or salesforce automation systems when there is a very strong SaaS based offering out there that can do that and I can focus on things like warehousing and logistics management solutions or range support solutions or work order solutions that are part of what we do on a day to day basis and I think one of the ways that an organization can really assess the fit for those kinds of things specifically using SaaS packages is does it fit with their core mission or does it free them up to focus on their core mission within the IT department? So I think that one of the things that is always a risk that an organization moves to cloud without being able to crisply define how it fits into their overall systems architecture. Organizations even within our customer base of the federal government are very strategically challenged to make sure that they are thinking about the cloud as the first option. And many of them have pre existing systems that go back for quite some period of time

John Lambeth [00:20:11]:
and one of the key architectural considerations is how does that now fit into the overall fabric systems because guaranteed you will have systems internally that need to talk to those external cloud systems. For example, our internal accounting system needs to talk to our external HRIS system, our external contract subsystem. And the risk that organizations have and the mistake they can make is making those kind of decisions and being too focused on the rapid deployment of a SaaS package without thinking through those details. Because I think almost every organization saved lucky few are going to have a hybrid infrastructure that is going to have both internal and external systems. And so my, I guess my lessons learned in words of caution would be that organizations are making that assessment about how the functionality of cloud applications fit within their architecture. Certainly they need to focus on the functionality of the application, but they also need to focus on things like their change control processes which don’t go away just because you move to sas and then of course the more practical things like how those systems are going to talk to internal systems.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:38]:
So in a way you’re saying, and could you confirm that for me is that if we are working towards simplifying it and as long as we take due care of the architectural consideration and the change control, would you say that going to a pure SaaS based model would be one of the best approaches?

John Lambeth [00:21:57]:
It is certainly one of the major approaches that I would take, yes. And there’s another benefit to certainly to many organizations. The key concern many folks have I think with cloud applications is security. In this world of heightened information security, are cloud applications safe? And I would point to the just tremendous investment that the cloud service providers have made in information security and even organizations like again our customer base, the federal government who have adopted standards that are Very stringent, like the FedRAMP standard for information security. They certainly to my view, supersede the level of security and investment many of us CIOs could actually make internally around information security. I think that one of the ways that this certainly makes us more agile is that it certainly they can expand their infrastructure much more quickly than an organization that has an extensive internal infrastructure. In terms of if my business doubled in size tomorrow, it’s much easier for me to be agile leveraging a cloud infrastructure that I’m not directly running and go to my vendor provider and say I need twice the horsepower tomorrow morning and they’re able to deliver that.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:28]:
And to that end you’re saying that if we suppose went with this pure SaaS based model and cloud applications or cloud delivery models, we are able to make sure that security can stay as a forethought and it is not going to be a crippling effect which will prevent us from going agile with our business.

John Lambeth [00:23:47]:
Absolutely. Yeah. I definitely believe that. You look at where the cybersecurity community is today around cloud versus even five years ago, the tremendous advances that we have, certainly in terms of security, of virtualization, security of data transport, and just in general the awareness, the robustness I think of security in the cloud today. I certainly myself provided that the same forethought around security happens with my cloud based applications have little concern about the security of cloud based applications.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:30]:
So let’s talk about the very leadership. Right, so we started with the first question is that we are trying to get people at the top to set the tone and the rest of them will follow suit or at least there will be a commonality of intent as you go along. But when we take business agility as a core objective or would say the very underpinning of an organization, what would be the role that IT leaders can take in enhancing that business agility? Are we still thinking IT leaders as enablers or could we take that strong position? While we may have seat at the table, but can we take a strong position as a driver of business agility and if, yes, if that’s possible, what support and sponsorship do you need from the organization to help you accomplish it?

John Lambeth [00:25:21]:
First of all, I think an IT leader who positions themselves as an enabler is limiting his or her role in the organization as a key business leader. The IT leader today has got to be a strategist. Enabling is take well understood intent and well understood vision of how technology could be applied to solve business problems and making it happen effectively. The role that a truly effective IT executive plays in an organization is being the person who comes to the leadership team with the technical knowledge that is probably not amongst his or her peers and has the ability to listen to the CEO’s intent for what he or she wants to do to the business and then be able to take that business mandate back and use it to define the overall technology strategy for the organization and also to be a source that can advise the leadership team about what the technology limitations might be of that particular business goal and or the investment that needs to be made to make it happen. I think that as I’ve talked to some of my peers, the peers that I think are in my view most effective are ones that can go back. And often if there is a stated technology goal coming from the business partner, what the business partner is doing is based on their knowledge of how technology could be applied. They’re coming back and asking for a very specific piece of functionality versus stating, hey, I have this business problem and you apply technology to make that business problem go away. And I think organizations where the IT leader is participating in the overall business strategy, they may be able to go back and say, well, I know you’re asking for a particular type of technology or a particular system.

John Lambeth [00:27:40]:
You’re asking for only part of the solution. What you really need is the following and so I think that my answer to your question then is that certainly being an enabler is important. Having a positioning as a strategic contributor is where it is really going to get the most opportunity and have the biggest impact toward impacting the agility of the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:08]:
Once again, thank you John for sharing your thoughts and insights about how organizations can define and adopt a holistic approach to managing data architecture, security and even customer community to boost business agility. Thank you so much and listeners. I invite you to find related conversations on our website@cio talknetwork.com #Road to Agility.