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IT leaders today are facing more challenges than ever before. As you look to shape your winning strategies, the rules of the game keep changing. Environments are more dispersed and dynamic, with attack surfaces and vectors expanding, and new threats emerging. Applications are no longer confined to desktops and devices but are spread across multiple clouds. Work models are evolving as people are more mobile and workplaces become more distributed.

Seeing and protecting people, places, and things in highly distributed and dynamic environments can be daunting. Today’s security stacks have become a complex patchwork of point solutions from many vendors – an issue dubbed, “tool sprawl.”

As you work to overcome these challenges, your users’ expectations keep rising. Assured application performance is a requirement. IT teams must therefore deliver more bandwidth and less latency—against a backdrop of stakeholder demands for service innovation.

At larger organizations in particular, IT functions are split by discipline, such as network operations or security operations. Each of these teams has its own goals, tools, processes, and expertise. This means collaboration is slow, innovation lags, and tackling organizational issues is difficult. According to a recent study, almost half of business leaders (48%) see competing priorities between teams as top roadblocks to collaboration.

For IT leaders, it all adds up to an environment that’s more complex, less predictable, and harder to scale.

Moving beyond silos

The answers to the myriad challenges facing IT teams today cannot be confined to a single technology. The solution cannot be either. It calls for an approach that brings technologies closer together operationally—one that empowers teams to scale up fast, deliver more bandwidth and better application performance, while assuring security everywhere. It’s an architectural evolution based on converging networking and security and enabled by applying the principles of the cloud operating model.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a compelling example of this convergence. We can see its potential in a law firm with 200 employees and multiple offices that was embracing hybrid work but needed to keep its partners connected to the tools essential for serving clients. The firm wanted to move away from on-premises systems because its headquarters is located in a hurricane-prone region. Migrating workloads to the cloud offered more business resilience, but the solution had to meet strict privacy requirements. It also had to be simple to deploy and manage.

The law firm chose a SASE architecture, which converges networking and security into a cloud-centric service to support secure, seamless connectivity for anytime, anywhere access to any user, device, or location. The migration happened in hours and was handled by staff without deep engineering expertise. Now, users can securely access the legal applications they need from anywhere, and onboarding remote workers is ten times faster for their IT teams than it was before.

Convergence drives competitive edge

Converging networking and security in the cloud is a powerful way to help enterprise IT leaders stay ahead of change. But convergence also offers service providers a powerful route to keeping competitive.

Innovations such as routed optical networking mean service providers can converge IP and optical layers for more efficient operations. A major service provider in Ethiopia is using routed optical networking to drive down network costs and simplify network management while delivering high-speed internet to businesses where infrastructure had been lacking.

Routed optical networking means the service provider can fast-track planning, design, and activation to scale out new services rapidly—all while reducing the number of devices in the network to optimize fiber capacity and increase availability and resiliency.

As a result, this service provider will be Ethiopia’s first ISP to offer a single package that includes high-speed broadband internet access, IPTV, and voice services.

It’s time to unlock the potential of convergence

Nonstop change is a given. But today’s IT challenges also create an opportunity to build a simpler, more consistent environment that’s easier to secure and manage. Converging networking and security operations to align more closely with the infrastructure enables IT to respond to disruption more quickly and proactively. It can also provide a springboard for improved innovation, seamless user experiences, and better business outcomes.

With a converged approach to networking and security, enabled by cloud operating principles, CIOs can build a more collaborative, agile organization that will thrive in an unpredictable landscape.

See how to simplify IT and stay one step ahead in an ever-changing world.

Digital Transformation

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These days, to serve the backbone corporate needs for more than 100,000 employees globally means betting big on the cloud.

That’s what James Hannah, SVP and global CIO of General Dynamics Information Technology, has done in partnership with the Reston, Va.-based aerospace and defense contractor’s 10 business units, each of which has its own CIO who works autonomously to make decisions about each division’s use of digital technologies for its unique business.

And the results are truly multicloud, as Hannah has opted to work with all the top cloud vendors to fill the company’s various back-office needs — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud — as well as Workday for HR and other SaaS vendors for specific needs. GDIT is now 100% on the cloud, having closed its final brick-and-mortar data center at the end of last year.  

“We’ve gone through our digital transformation already and migrated all of our application workloads into either an IaaS or SaaS environment,” says Hannah, whose focus is primarily on corporate systems, leaving each of GD’s other business unit open to make their own selections. “They’re free to go to whatever cloud they need to meet the needs of their customers,” he says.

Still, the 10 units are not all islands. Hannah’s IT division collaborates with and serves the needs of its “sister” business units where it makes sense, such as hosting financial applications for some business units. And there are overarching digital technologies that traverse General Dynamics’ business portfolio,  such as security, toward which all units are working to implement zero trust across the board.

But Hannah is clear about his mission, which is to provide critical services to the employees who serve GDIT’s high-level customers within the US government’s military-industrial complex and partners around the globe. It is not a candy store.

And in doing so, GDIT’s full cloud migration, which started pre-pandemic, is paying off nicely.  

Laying the multicloud foundation

When the IT division started its digital transformation, Hannah and his team performed a thorough assessment of General Dynamics’ corporate workloads to determine which cloud would be best based on functionality. As part of that process, integrations with other systems and applications were taken into consideration to avoid workloads “traversing from cloud to cloud” or “bouncing all over,” Hannah says.

“I think that the clouds are quite good. We saw a lot of reduction in cost,” he says. “We were able to get better metrics and reporting. And it increased or strengthened our DR [disaster recovery] posture overall.”

The next move, Hannah says, is to delve deeper into how GDIT can evolve more corporate assets into cloud-native, virtualized applications that can be optimized for the scalability, flexibility, and cost savings of its 100% multicloud infrastructure. Hannah’s team is also constantly learning how to strengthen and shift workloads to optimize performance and, in some cases, move workloads from IaaS to SaaS when it makes sense.

“That’s part of the evolution to the cloud,” he says. “You’re not going to be in a constant state of transformation. For me, it’s more of an evolution, assessing workloads and making sure they are still where they need to be.” 

GDIT has also automated many tasks within its finance systems such as accounts payable for inter- and intra-company transfers as well as for HR and IT business areas.

None of this is surprising for an IT division of a major enterprise these days, and GDIT is big — roughly 30,000 IT employees tend to General Dynamics’ corporate needs.

Skilling up and battening down

General Dynamics’ overall CTO leadership group is looking at generative AI and the implications and governance around it and how it could be potentially used with customers, Hannah says. But for a defense contractor — which manufactures nuclear submarines, aerospace systems, and combat systems, among other defense units — it is a very complex operation that has just begun, he adds.

Still, the CIO has made use of machine learning models available from one of its cloud providers to train employees for the rapidly evolving digital era and impart upward mobility within GDIT. The initiative is part of GDIT’s Career Hub, which provides employees with training recommendations around skills and certifications to help level up their careers, Hannah says.

“Since going live with that AI modeling capability, we’ve seen about a 30% increase in internal applications driven directly from the Career Hub,” he says.

Employees simply upload their resume or LinkedIn profile to Career Hub and the AI recommends current job openings, similar to the way Netflix makes movie recommendations, the CIO says. It also ties into the company’s learning and development system, providing skills and certification training recommendations that will help employees reach job openings they may not have thought of as suitable because they may presently have only 80% of the required skills.

Hannah is also deploying automation for lower-level repetitive tasks, freeing up GDIT employees to work on more complex tasks, such as rolling out automation within finance to enable speedier metrics, for example. In this way, GDIT’s use of automation helps employees continuously gain skills that not only allow greater efficiencies for the company but greater mobility for IT employees.

But if there’s one thing that keeps Hannah up at night, it’s security, which is pivotal for any enterprise, but especially a defense contractor. GDIT and all 10 business units are waiting for executive orders and guidance as part of a three-year security program currently under way. Still, cybersecurity remains Hannah’s primary focus now and over the next 12 months even as the top brass work on the comprehensive security plan.

“The focus is on transforming and evolving the cyber tools that we have … that’s the primary focus with the threats in this environment,” Hannah says. “We’re always under the watchful eyes of bad actors throughout the world. Being part of a group that always has a target on your back means you need to make sure you’re always looking at all the technologies available to improve your cyber posture as you move forward.”

Gartner analyst Daniel Snyder says the US government and military is relying heavily on partnerships with defense contractors such as General Dynamics to transform. 

“The Department of Defense relies on thousands of networks that are vital to execute its mission. Over the course of the past few decades, the development process has resulted in layers of stove-piped systems that are difficult to integrate,” he says, noting that as part of its digital transformation strategy, the DoD is overhauling its IT infrastructure to leverage the cloud.

“Much of the future success is hinging on the support of its industrial base with systems integrators such as General Dynamics, Leidos, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman,” he says.

Aerospace and Defense Industry, Cloud Computing, IT Strategy, Multi Cloud

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There were a multitude of reasons for Fraport AG, the operating company of Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt, to build one of the largest European private 5G campus networks: automation, autonomous driving, localization of devices, and processing data in real time. Or as Fraport SVP of IT infrastructure Fritz Oswald puts it: “We definitely see 5G as a key technology for digitalization.”

The motivation to set up its own 5G infrastructure came less from the suffering of a legacy installation and more from the desire to enable new use cases during the digitization journey. At the same time, the network coverage will be extended to the entire airport area. This way, the nearly 30km of perimeter fencing could be monitored with cameras via radio. It would also be possible to spare robots or drones inspection rounds if they patrol independently with 5G support.

And according to Oswald, it’s difficult to adequately illuminate the airport’s large open spaces with the WLAN technology used up to now. “In everyday life, there are always problems with WLAN coverage during under-wing operations, for example, when aircraft wings block reception,” he says.

Oswald adds the importance of illumination for operation because when material or equipment have to be transported to an aircraft over long distances, it’s time-consuming for employees since the speed limit on the apron is 30 km/h. Autonomous vehicles controlled by 5G would help to alleviate this. Another use case could be small robots that transport delayed suitcases to the aircraft rather than be driven by people, as it’s done today. 

Another application is video analytics to visually check the condition of the airport’s runways. A task that, despite edge computing, generates large amounts of data through video streams, which are then transferred to the cloud.

New use cases

Even if new use cases such as autonomous vehicles, patrolling robots, and drones are the focus of the 5G introduction at Fraport, the new technology also brings other advantages like being able to standardize its communications infrastructure. So far, Fraport has operated different radio technologies for voice communication, or to network its IoT devices. Plus, long-term evaluations have been used via public mobile networks, with corresponding SIM cards in other end devices. In the future, though, Oswald intends to continue using WLANs in the terminals themselves, but there are plans to migrate to the more up-to-date and powerful WiFi 6.

“Here, we actually get a licensed frequency we don’t have to share with anyone, so there’s no interference,” he says. “And we can have full use of the allocated frequency band so we can also cover mission-critical topics with 5G.” 

Independence through private 5G

Because of this licensed frequency, network slicing offers from mobile operators were out of the question. As far as slicing is concerned, however, Oswald can imagine that Fraport will later offer its own slicing services for its B2B partners, such as airlines or logistics companies. “The bottom line is that having our own 5G network offers the airport more freedom and more security, because the infrastructure is in our hands end to end,” he says. “In addition, there are fewer dependencies and we control it when we import 5G updates. So we’re not dependent on a carrier and their update plans.” 

The project so far had a research and development phase at the start, which is why Fraport didn’t want to tackle the 5G migration alone, but instead brought in Japanese global telecommunications and technology services company NTT as a partner.

“One thing that spoke in favor of NTT was it had already been able to gain experience of best practices in other 5G projects, such as at Cologne Bonn Airport,” Oswald says.

Azure for 5G as software

Fraport and NTT were also open about the chosen technology approach. “Because we wanted to keep the option open of being able to make adjustments during the project phase, we opted for an open standard and chose OpenRAN as the 5G approach,” says Kai Grunwitz, CEO of NTT Ltd. in Germany. In terms of software, they rely on Azure for 5G, and among other things, the close connection with the IoT world spoke in favor of the Microsoft solution. 

Cisco was also chosen for the network hardware, although the partners are observing the market closely, especially when it comes to antennas, since a number of new developments are still expected. Both Grunwitz and Oswald emphasize that these decisions aren’t set, given that the technology is still in its infancy.

The new technology also had another consequence. Fraport quickly realized that a rollout without careful prior checking for interactions with the existing technology would be too great a risk for airport operations. This gave rise to the idea of ​​setting up a test environment in a kind of sandbox to ensure operations aren’t jeopardized.

At the same time, the test environment acts as an innovation hub to evaluate new use cases for 5G and how these can be rolled out later. There was also a third task: making the new technology visible and tangible for other employees in the company in order to reduce any resistance to 5G that may exist. That’s why Oswald deliberately chose an area around the company headquarters to promote the new use cases that are possible with 5G.

Push-to-talk in the network

So far, the airport operator has used several radio systems with corresponding radio devices, but maintenance is quite complex, which is why Oswald wants to map voice communication via the private 5G network in the future as well. 

“However, our employees in the operations area didn’t want to do without the familiar user experience of the radios because they’re used to just pressing a button and speaking immediately,” he says. What initially sounds insignificant is actually relevant and important in airport practice. And in tricky situations, it can be crucial from a safety perspective whether communication is established within milliseconds, or whether you have to wait for a phone call to be set up. Oswald wants to solve the problem by introducing a modern 5G-capable push-to-talk solution.

Division of labor

Considering the division of labor between Fraport and NTT, Fraport will act both formally and practically as the operator of the 5G network. “Ultimately, it’s also important to us that 5G isn’t seen somewhere as an isolated technology in the future, but is fully integrated into our operational processes,” says Oswald.

Also, Fraport, as a critical infrastructure company, has to ensure security across the entire process chain, from the end device to the backend systems. That’s what Oswald and his team already do by provisioning public 5G SIM cards themselves in the private network to ensure complete documentation. 

NTT also plans to continue their involvement in later operations and to support Fraport as part of a service concept with managed services, or to take over component maintenance. And according to Grunwitz, labor is divided based on a series of levels. “Topics that happen on the apron, such as the question of where and how antennas are operated or the end devices, are our responsibility, while NTT is responsible for the backend area, such as the cloud components, because at Fraport, we take a cloud-first approach,” says Oswald.

Project end 2024

A 2024 end date is understandably ambitious, considering how badly the pandemic crisis hit the airline industry, and Fraport specifically. As a result, the Private 5G project had to be put on hold. But when project work resumed in spring 2022, like many other companies, the company was confronted with supply chain problems of hardware manufacturers. Oswald, therefore, assumes that the entire 5G network won’t be fully expanded until the end of 2024. However, the rollout to the apron should already take place this year.

Cloud Management, Digital Transformation, IT Leadership, Private 5G

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Digital transformation is at the forefront of every modern business strategy, whether it’s adopting the cloud, improving and updating IT infrastructure, or developing data and analytics strategy to drive decision-making. Companies are interested in hiring seasoned pros who have a strong working knowledge of the skills they need to accomplish technology and business goals.

According to the latest 2023 Dice Tech Salary Report, there is a growing demand for IT pros who have mastered skills aimed at wrangling big data, developing cloud-native applications, processing data streams, architecting software systems, leveraging DevOps, or orchestrating cloud workloads — and they’re willing to pay top dollar to recruit them.

IT professionals already earn some of the highest salaries in the job market, but there are certain in-demand skills that can help boost your salary. Whether you already have these skills on your resume, or you want to learn a new skill to help improve your chances of a higher salary during a job hunt, these skills can help secure your IT career. Here are the 10 highest-paying IT skills of 2023, and how much they’ve increased in value since 2021.

1. MapReduce          

MapReduce is a programming model utilized in the Hadoop framework to access data stored in the Hadoop File System (HDFS). It was originally developed to be used by the Google search engine but has since grown to be adopted widely within the tech industry. MapReduce helps users analyze large datasets that span across different servers and networks, dividing it into smaller modules of data that can be distributed to computer clusters for parallel processing. The name references the Map and Reduce phases of this process, the map phase being when the data is input into the system and mapped, while the reduce phase refers to the process of analyzing and consolidating that data for output.

Average salary: US$146,672

Increase since 2021: +9.3%

2. Go/Golang            

Go, also referred to as Golang, is an open-source programming language developed in 2007 by Google as a user-friendly programming language to assist in the development of high-level software systems, web applications, and cloud and networking services. It’s designed to be efficient and easy-to-use, with simple syntax and features, including garbage collection, memory safety, and concurrency support. It’s become increasingly popular as for cloud-based programming due to the fact that it is adept at handling parallelism and concurrency. But you’ll also find it used in distributed systems, web development, machine learning, and network programming.

Average salary: US$145,672

Increase since 2021: +18.2%

3. Elasticsearch                    

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene that enables users to store, search, and analyze large data sets in real-time. It’s become a popular tool for organizations with large amounts of data to sift through, allowing users to quickly search through complex data sets stored across different servers. Elasticsearch is valued as a highly scalable and distributed tool that offers real-time search and analytics, full-text search, geospatial search, and structured search.

Average salary: US$143,619

Increase since 2021: +4.5%

4. Chef                       

The Chef automation tool is commonly used in DevOps and IT operations to manage and deploy software applications across different systems, servers, containers, and cloud resources. For large-scale computing environments, Chef is a valuable tool that enables organizations to become more operationally efficient by streamlining infrastructure management processes. Chef minimizes a lot of the backend work on automation, allowing companies to minimize downtime and errors, while also freeing up workers to focus on more high-level tasks. 

Average salary: US$143,188

Increase since 2021: +8.8%

5. Apache Kafka                    

Apache Kafka is a powerful tool for real-time data processing and analyzing, using a distributed streaming platform design. Kafka also makes it possible for organizations to handle large data sets, with high throughput and low latency, and provides a scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure for data streaming. And with Kafka, it’s possible for several different systems to exchange data in real-time. It’s a popular tool in finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce, among other industries as well — it’s typically used along with other tools including Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Storm.

Average salary: US$142,764

Increase since 2021: +8.4%

6. Service-oriented architecture (SOA)                 

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural framework that focuses on software applications and systems as independent services. Each service is broken down and categorized by its own specific set of functions into a standardized interface that allows those services to interact and access one another. Breaking services down this way makes them easier to maintain, update, and monitor without impacting other parts of the system and creating unnecessary downtime. SOA gives companies the framework to organize software and services and to manage flexible, scalable, and reusable services across different applications throughout the organization.

Average salary: US$142,459

Increase since 2021: +1.6%

7. Teradata                

Teradata is a company that offers several enterprise data warehousing and analytics tools that help organizations analyze and manage large and complex data sets. One of the company’s most notable products is the Teradata Database, a relational database management system designed for large-scale data warehousing and analytics. Teradata’s offerings focus on enabling organizations to integrate data from different sources, performing advanced analytics, creating business intelligence reports, and building data warehouses.

Average salary: US$141,515

Increase since 2021: +14.7%

8. Redis                      

Redis is an open-source data storage and management tool designed to be fast, efficient, and powerful. It enables users to cache and store data, making it quick and easy to access, while also keeping it backed up to a hard drive. As an IT tool, it’s known for being helpful for managing data structures, handling data in a distributed environment, and offering a high-performance and scalable solution for data storage and caching.

Average salary: US$140,290

Increase since 2021: +1.6%

9. PaaS                       

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides users with an environment for developers to build, test, and deploy applications without impacting other systems and networks in the process. PaaS tools are typically third-party services that companies use to help improve the development process with a variety of development tools, scalability and resource management features, database and storage options, and tools for deployment and management. PaaS is touted as offering businesses reduced costs and a faster time-to-market, allowing for better efficiency and speed when releasing new products and services.

Average salary: US$139,858

Increase since 2021: +3.2%

10. Kubernetes         

Kubernetes is an open-source automation tool that helps companies deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications. Originally developed by Google, but now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes helps companies automate the deployment and scale of containerized applications across a set of machines, with a focus on container and storage orchestration, automatic scaling, self-healing, and service discovery and load balancing. Features include the ability to automatically detect and recover from errors and failures, built-in load balancing to manage traffic, and the ability to automatically scale applications while accounting for demand, resources, and cost.

Average salary: US$139,167

Increase since 2021: N/A

The next 5

Other skills associated with IT pros earning higher annual salaries include:

11. Containers

Average salary: US$138,559

Increase since 2021: +9.5%

12. Amazon Route 53             

Average salary: US$137,928

Increase since 2021: +3.4%

13. Rust

Average salary: US$137,153

Increase since 2021: N/A

14. RDBMS                 

Average salary: US$137,104

Increase since 2021: +8.5%

15. HANA                    

Average salary: US$136,789

Increase since 2021: +2.1%

Careers, IT Jobs, IT Skills, Salaries

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India-based Games24x7, a digital-first company, believes that “the best gaming experiences are created at the intersection of entertainment and science.” With a portfolio spanning skill games (RummyCircle), fantasy sports (My11Circle), and casual games (U Games), the company banks firmly on technology to build a highly scalable gaming infrastructure that serves more than 100 million registered users across platforms.

In a conversation with CIO.com, Games 24×7 CTO Rajat Bansal throws light on the importance of hyperpersonalization in gaming and how the company is manifesting creative ideas for gamers by leveraging cutting-edge technology, including data science and AI.

The success of a game hinges on meeting the players’ needs and expectations. How do you ensure this through technology?

Bansal: We believe that the most important thing is to understand the users as early as possible in their gaming lifecycle. The success of a game depends on two factors: content and the delivery of that content. This is where hyperpersonalization assists in meeting player needs and expectations. The concept of hyperpersonalization is picking up pace across the globe. In a diverse country like India, there are multiple demographic factors, like region, age, and more, that affect users’ preferences and consumption behavior. When this variation is combined with a player’s individual preferences, a totally different level of hyperpersonalization is achieved.

The personalization journey begins from the moment a user enters the game. When players are served offers based on their profiles and preferences, our data science models help us identify their inclinations and preferences. For instance, two players from the same demography may have significantly different skills and so their expectations from the game will be different.

We leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to offer a hyperpersonalized, immersive, and entertaining gameplay experience to our users at every stage of their gaming journey in real-time.

Given that the player load can fluctuate greatly, how do you ensure your platforms are able to handle sudden spikes in player load?

Bansal: Games24x7 has a highly scalable gaming infrastructure that serves more than 100 million registered users across platforms. With a strong passion for cricket in India, user engagement on fantasy sports platform My11Circle is high, especially during the IPL [Indian Premier League]. However, our focus on technology and the models we spoke of earlier, allow us to preempt and prepare. For managing increase in workloads and user base, we have created a complete science-driven automated scaling pipeline. Given the nature of business, there are spikes for special events like IPL. To take care of such situations, we leverage data science for forecasting load at match-level and using this forecast to proactively scale up/down our fleet in a completely hands-off-the-wheel way.

There are safety risks associated with gaming. What tools/solutions have you deployed to offer a safe and immersive experience?

Bansal: We also use AI to assess gameplay patterns. Our sophisticated models can identify a deviation from the right gameplay at any given stage of the game. Such deviations are immediately flagged.

Some of the AI tools that we integrate to deliver an immersive, safe, and entertaining game play include data ETL and feature preparation pipeline for capturing user behavior for responsible game play; explainable AI for actions based on the results; domain expert-based rule engine for checking behavior patterns over time, money, and urge to play; local expert for wallet recharge patterns and game entry fees; counselling process for reporting accurate gameplay status; cognitive neuroscience for mapping telemetric data; sequential modelling for journey and evolution of users; reinforcement learning for hyperpersonalization; procedural content generation for generating content as per level; and computer vision for art, design, content, and creatives to make games exciting. 

Data is the key for making informed decisions and building customer experiences. What’s your strategy for democratizing and managing data?

Bansal: For any data-driven organization like us, the consistent and reliable flow of data across people, teams, systems, and business functions is crucial to an organization’s survival and ability to innovate. At Games24x7, we see data management as all disciplines related to managing data and it includes collecting, processing, governing, sharing, analyzing it — and all of this in a cost-efficient and reliable manner.

Depending on the use cases, we are using two platforms for data management. We have adopted Databricks as a data management platform for all our hourly/daily data processing, analysis, and reporting. Generally, this covers most of our current data consumption and analysis and it is very mature. We use Tableau as our visualization tool on top of Databricks for all business users to make informed decisions on the fly.

We have also built a data-as-a-service (DaaS) platform for all our real-time/near real-time data processing and inferencing needs for hyperpersonalization use cases. This platform is built and managed by our own data engineering team.

This free-flowing access to data results in providing customized user journeys at every step. For example, it enables the marketing team to provide offers based on customer preferences, the product team to come up with new, innovative meta games, and the science team to provide responsible game play models.

What are your future business and technology plans? 

Bansal: We are continuously investing in new technologies and business intelligence systems to analyze players’ behavior, customize their gameplay, and provide them with the most intuitive and safe gameplay experience. We are also working on developing fresh and unique content revolving around casual gaming business. We are looking forward to diversifying our skill gaming portfolio and building new and robust gaming platforms for our users. As we grow our technological capabilities, we will invest in other synergistic platforms to facilitate increased accessibility of online gaming in India.

Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation

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Kevin Hart was named chief executive officer of Segra, one of the nation’s largest independent fiber network companies, following an 11-year tenure as executive vice president and chief product and technology officer for Cox Communications. Hart’s journey from CIO to CEO is a story of intention and grit, with an equal focus on lifting others as he’s climbed. It’s also an example of the unique strengths technology leaders bring to the top job when they combine their technical, operational, and transformational expertise with strategic, innovative leadership to grow the business.

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Hart, who also served as CIO at both Clearwire and Level 3 Communications, shared his journey to the CEO role and the leadership principles and mindset that have served him so successfully along the way. We also discussed his dedication to elevating those around him by developing and mentoring countless CIOs and technology leaders over the years.

After the show, we spent some more time talking about why he is so intentional about growing leaders, his advice for building a world-class IT leadership team, and how he sustains a high-performance, high-engagement culture. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: With 50 CIOs who’ve been through the program you put together called CIO University, and the countless other leaders who’ve benefitted from your mentoring and teaching, you have a proven track record when it comes to developing successful leaders. What core values or key pillars guide you?

Hart: First is having clarity of vision. You have to paint the vision — and realize that different people connect with different forms. Some of it’s going to be verbal, but some could be graphical, some could be experiential. It’s about illustrating the vision for people in ways that they can connect with.

You also have to understand what business you’re in, how your company makes money, how people thrive, and how they connect with their communities, their customers, and employees — and then translate that down to individual people’s roles. How do they help the company be successful? Too many people don’t understand what makes your company tick, and that’s a problem. So that’s always been a big part of CIO University, and it’s just my philosophy in general. Get people up to speed, give them a little mini-MBA on how your company operates.

Teamwork is another pillar. Everyone says it, but you have to actually enable it. You have to reward people for teaming. You have to provide them feedback if they’re not teaming to make sure they’re collaborating and sharing best practices, because more likely than not, these functions are interdependent. They’re codependent on one another upstream or downstream. So you’ve got to have a passion for teamwork.

You’ve also got to believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t, then stop doing it because it’s not worth the effort. You’ve got to believe you’re doing something good, and you have to have the passion to do it. Coupled with that is perseverance. You’re going to have some tough days and setbacks. You’re going to have some outages. You’re going to have some vendor failures. You’re going to have some stakeholders who don’t believe you can get the job done. But you have to overcome until you get there.

Honesty and trust are also essential, and you build them by being transparent. Tell people what you know. Tell people what you don’t know. And then go find out what you don’t know. And then go make it happen.

Last, but not least, pay for performance, or help individuals achieve their professional success, because it’s not always about money. Sometimes it’s about recognition, new opportunities, or just feeling like a valuable part of the team.

Those are some of the values that guide me that I share with my team. I’m sure I’m not perfect, but I try to put those into motion, because I think your behavior and your actions speak a lot louder than a poster on the wall.

When it comes to teamwork, what’s your advice to CIOs who have a team they need to turn around? Where do they begin?

First and foremost, as the leader, you have to believe. You have to set the tone around optimism. And you get people to continue to believe when you interject realism: ‘Guess what, folks, we’re not as good as we think we are in certain areas, and to become best in class, we’re going to have to improve. We’re going to have to make investments. We’re going to have to get the CEO of that vendor on the phone once a week until we get that solution put in place.’

You have to recognize even minor victories along the way but not get too distracted, because you’ve got more to accomplish, and there are going to be some steep hurdles to overcome. And you need to get your team and your leaders to believe. Build that strong sense of belief that we can become the best, we can do it, and we’re going to build on our success. Even if you don’t believe 100%, you have to act like you believe 100% until you get there.

Do that and the next thing you know, you’ll be beyond where you set your goals because of that belief, the force multiplier effect of the optimism of the team, the collective talents of the team, and just that passion, perseverance, and winning culture that celebrates success along the way. Because success breeds success.

What are some of the things you do as a leader to make sure people are able to do their best work every day? How do you create that culture and sustain it?

We have a weekly cross-functional meeting with the top leaders in the company where we go through every major function, every major KPI, and we talk about our successes, and we talk about our challenges. I’m able to learn a fair amount from that and ask pretty decent questions and also bring solutions to the team.

I think when the leadership is modeling the behavior, it shows that we are a team. We’re going to do whatever it takes to get to where we need to be, and we’re going to help each other out. That breeds camaraderie and teamwork and a can-do spirit as opposed to people feeling like they need to cover their bases or just look out for themselves.

What motivated you to invest time and money into leadership development and CIO University? What’s the ROI on that?

As every good team leader or coach knows, you’re only as good as the players on your team. If you go back 10 or 20 years ago, a lot of the really proficient technology leaders weren’t necessarily as astute in terms of business acumen, so they got a lot of pushback from CFOs around the cost investments. I thought, why don’t we build a bridge between our stakeholders and educate our teams on things like what it means to hit your quarterly revenue or EBITDA numbers, what it means when you’re trying to generate free cash flow, etc., so that we can walk in their shoes and, in turn, do a better job delivering to benefit them and us.

A lot of it was around communication, personality types, and business acumen. I started getting feedback from my stakeholders like, ‘It’s working. Your team is actually listening and they’re compromising to find win-win solutions that can move the business forward.’

I also created something called the value meter that captures revenue growth, cost reduction, and vendor cost optimization. I had one instance a few years ago that generated $1.4 billion in cost savings, cost avoidance, or revenue enablement. When you sit down with the CFO or stakeholders and talk about the financial problems of the company, and you deliver solutions that contribute to the financial success of the company, that gets their attention. You can only do that if you have a team that understands how the business operates and can communicate, connect, and deliver to benefit the growth of the company. Those are just a couple of examples of how I know that the investment in your team pays off.

You’re also trying to build a great workplace. I’ve taken over teams in the past with engagement scores and employee NPS scores that were below average for the company. Because of the communication skills of the leaders that we were fostering and investing in, those scores, in most instances, had increased to be at par or at the top of the company. Employees like to communicate with their supervisors and be heard and provide input.

Fundamentally, most of technology is about people, so investing in your leaders to help them enable others to rise to the occasion is definitely a worthwhile value proposition.

Your CIO, Rose Chambers, told me that one of your biggest assets is that you listen before speak. Does that come from your consultant training?

I think so. When you show up as a consultant, you’re not there to tell them how great you are; you’re there to help them solve their problems. You’re asking, what problems do you have, what are you trying to solve, and then you can start pairing up your particular solutions or scenarios that might be a fit for what they need. At the end of the day, they’re only going to hire you or engage you if you can actually help them be successful in their roles.

In general, I’m a lot more analytical than otherwise, so I’m trying to listen and process information. I look for patterns and solutions before speaking. I also try to keep in mind that when I, as the leader, say something, people will start to line up around that, and it might not be the best outcome. I’ll caveat things by saying, ‘Here’s an idea. It doesn’t have to be this way, but let’s start with this and then see if we can make it better.’ I want to avoid a situation where people just say, ‘Well, he said this, so that’s what we have to do,’ because I’ve seen that a lot and it doesn’t tend to end up that well.

Dan Roberts: From your vantage point as CEO, what advice would you offer CIOs and IT leaders about how to make the biggest impact?

Now that I’m the CEO, I look at the CIO role and think, wow, that was a lot harder than I could ever imagine it being. When you’re in the middle of it, you just do what you have to do. But when you’re observing the situation, she or he is supporting every function in the company. Everybody wants something, everybody wants it yesterday for low cost or free, and it just doesn’t work that way. So you need to be able to navigate, be a consultant, and put financial priorities in place, because you have to protect your team, too — you can’t just burn them out. You basically have to be an international ambassador of goodwill to try to keep the peace with everybody and keep the progress moving for the company.

At the end of the day, you need to stay focused on, what business problem are we trying to solve? Is it revenue? Is it EBITDA? Customer experience? It sounds like an easy question to ask, but in too many meetings, people have no idea what they’re trying to solve. Ask that question. Get focused in on the solutions, and as a CIO or technology leader, translate the tech talk into business speak. Then be a partner and a consultant and you’re going to end up in a good spot.

For more insights from the leadership playbook of CIO-turned-CEO Kevin Hart, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.

IT Leadership, Mentoring

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In the face of structural change and rampant crises, the world—and the technologies reshaping it—is experiencing a drastic shift. Even the very nature of disruption is evolving, with challenges such as talent gaps and inflationary pressures frequently demanding our immediate attention. To outpace these events, CIOs need to leverage resilience capabilities as a competitive advantage. Seizing opportunities to differentiate the business through financial, supply chain, the business ecosystem, and sustainability can help them thrive in this new digital era.

With this outlook, some may expect IT spending to shrink drastically. Yet this hasn’t seemed to be the case. On the contrary, spending on digital technology is set to grow by 3.5 times the economy in 2023. It’s clear that more organisations are looking to establish a foundation for operational excellence, competitive differentiation, and long-term growth.

A handful of businesses are already doing so as they transition from just adopting digital transformation to embodying what it means to be a digital business. Whereas digital transformation in its earliest iteration—digital transformation 1.0—focuses on driving mobility and tapping on the then-nascent Internet of Things, the subsequent phase prominently features technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and ways to extend their use across every aspect of the business.

Digital businesses are the next step in this evolution; they are staunchly digital-first and are hyper-focused on delivering business value and outcomes through digital innovation. This will become a crucial transition for businesses. After all, 40% of total revenue for Global 2000 organisations will be generated by digital products, services, and experiences by 2026.

Understanding the successes of past IDC Future Enterprise Awards winners

Amidst the disruptive forces in the business landscape, forward-looking digital businesses are leveraging digital technologies to optimise their operations and performance.

We look at Midea Industrial Internet (MIOT), the recipient of the Future Enterprise of the Year at the IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2022. The company is actively deploying AI and advanced digital technologies to enhance the user experience while empowering their employees and partners with the right digital tools. This has resulted in a flexible and efficient supply chain that has reduced their delivery cycle by 56% and enhanced the way they collaborate with partners. At the same time, they also increased the inventory turnover of finished products by 125%, paving the way for other enterprises in the manufacturing industry to become the next digital business.

Visionary leaders, too, play a significant role in every digital business as they are instrumental in leading the business toward an ambitious vision. Suresh Sundararajan, the recipient of the CDO of the Year Award (Singapore) in 2022, is the then-Chief Officer and now CEO of Olam Ventures and Olam Technology Services.

Sundararajan has redefined the company’s purpose of reimagining global agriculture and food systems, and this is buoyed by his beliefs in good leadership: the ability to manage ambiguity and look at things through an experimental framework, which can open doors to more possibilities for the business. This is in line with his advice for future leaders, which is to invest in people without putting constraints on their suggestions and ideas. At the same time, transformation is dependent on using the right technologies for the problems a business is solving. According to Sundararajan, businesses should not be led by the most current technologies to embrace transformation. A better approach is to identify what the issues are, and then look into the technology that can be deployed to solve them.

Taking risks with emerging, cutting-edge technologies is another approach of many digital businesses. This is what Zuellig Pharma did which it to becoming the recipient of the Best in Future of Intelligence and Special Award for Digital Resiliency in 2022.

The pharmaceutical company wanted to build an ecosystem of solutions that will better connect patients and their pharma clients. That’s why Zuellig Pharma had invested heavily in data and data analytics, becoming a pioneer in the use of blockchain as part of their solution on traceability. These technologies are used to develop eZTracker, which helps bring their pharma clients and customers together by delivering data-driven insights, such as ensuring that healthcare products being delivered are from an authorised source. Zuellig Pharma has also created eZRx, a B2B eCommerce platform for buying and selling healthcare products, and eZHealth, an app that offers patients access to comprehensive healthcare services.

Recognising the next digital business for Asia Pacific Japan IDC Future Enterprise Awards

To recognise the next generation of digital businesses and leaders, the 2023 Asia Pacific Japan IDC Future Enterprise Awards is now open for nominations. Any end-user organisation can nominate their project or initiative, or be nominated by a 3rd party organisation—agencies, associations, and IT suppliers—to gain recognition in the execution of the initiative in one of the categories.

The IDC Future Enterprise Awards follows a two-phased approach to determine country and regional winners. Each nomination is evaluated by IDC’s country and regional analysts against a standard assessment framework based on IDC’s Future Enterprise taxonomy. All country winners will then qualify for the regional competition, where a regional panel of judges comprising IDC Worldwide analysts, industry thought leaders, and members of the academia, will determine the regional winners.

Entries will be judged based on the eight building blocks organizations need to successfully close the digital gap and become Future Enterprises in a digital-first world: Connectedness, Customer Experience, Digital Infrastructure, Industry Ecosystems, Intelligence, Operations, Trust, and Work.

Individual awards for CEO and CIO/CDO of the Year will also be handed out, as well as Special Awards for Digital Innovation, Digital Resiliency, and Sustainability. New in 2023, Special Awards for the best Digital Native Business as well as Smart Cities initiatives for Citizen Wellbeing, Connected City, and Digital Policies will also be given out.

Learn more at IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2023.

Register for an account at IDC Future Enterprise Awards Platform to submit an entry.

CIO, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Architecture

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Access to artificial intelligence (AI) and the drive for adoption by organizations is more prevalent now than it’s ever been, yet many companies are struggling with how to manage data and the overall process. As companies open this “pandora’s box” of new capabilities, they must be prepared to manage data inputs and outputs in secure ways or risk allowing their private data to be consumed in public AI models.

Through this evolution, it is critical that companies consider that ChatGPT is a public model built to grow and expand off use through advanced learning models. Private instances will be leveraged shortly where the model for answering prompted questions will arise solely from internal data selected – as such, it’s important that companies determine where public use cases will be appropriate (e.g., non-sensitive information) versus what mandates the need for private instances (e.g., company financial information and other data sets that are either internal and/or confidential).

All in . . . but what about the data?

The popularity of recently released AI platforms such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard has led to a mad rush for AI use cases. Organizations are envisioning a future in this space where AI platforms will be able to consume company-specific data in a closed environment vs. using a global ecosystem as is common today. AI relies upon large sets of data fed into it to help create output but is limited by the quality of data that is consumed by the model. This was on display during the initial test releases of Google Bard, where it provided a factually inaccurate answer on the James Webb Space Telescope based on reference data it ingested. Often, individuals will want to drive toward the end goal first (implementing automation of data practices) without going through the necessary steps to discover, ingest, transform, sanitize, label, annotate, and join key data sets together. Without this important step, AI may produce inconsistent or inaccurate data that could put an organization in a risky gambit of leveraging insights that are not vetted.

Through data governance practices, such as accurately labeled metadata and trusted parameters for ownership, definitions, calculations, and use, organizations can ensure they are able to organize and maintain their data in a way that can be useable for AI initiatives. By understanding this challenge, many organizations are now focusing on how to appropriately curate their most useful data in a way that can be readily retrieved, interpreted, and utilized to support business operations.

Storing and retrieving governed data

Influential technology, like Natural Language Processing (NLP), allows for the retrieval of responses based on questions that are asked conversationally or a standard business request. This process parses a request into meaningful components and ensures that the right context is applied within a response. As technology evolves, this function will allow for a company’s specific lexicon to be accounted for and processed through an AI platform. One application of this may be related to defining company-specific attributes for particular phrases (e.g., How a ‘customer’ may be defined for an organization vs. the broader definition of a ‘customer’) to ensure that organizationally agreed nomenclature and meaning are applied through AI responses. For instance, an individual may be asked to “create a report that highlights the latest revenue by division for the past two years: that applies all the necessary business metadata that an analyst and management would expect.

Historically, this request requires individuals to convert the ask into a query that can be pulled from a standard database. AI and NLP technology is now capable of processing both the request and the underlying results, enabling data to be interpreted and applied to business needs. However, the main challenge is that many organizations do not have their data in a manner or form that is capable of being stored, retrieved, and utilized by AI – generally due to individuals taking non-standard approaches to obtaining data and making assumptions about how to use data sets.

Setting and defining key terms

A critical step for quality outputs is having data organized in a way that can be properly interpreted by an AI model. The first step in this process is to ensure the right technical and business metadata is in place. The following aspects of data should be recorded and available:

Term definition

Calculation criteria (as applicable)

Lineage of the underlying data sources (upstream/downstream)

Quality parameters

Uses/affinity mentions within the business

Ownership

The above criteria should be used as a starting point for how to enhance the fields and tables captured to enable proper business use and application. Accurate metadata is critical to ensure that private algorithms can be trained to emphasize the most important data sets with reliable and relevant information.

A metadata dictionary that has appropriate processes in place for updates to the data and verification practices will support the drive for consistent data usage and maintain a clean, usable data set for transformation initiatives.

Understanding the use case and application

Once the right information is recorded related to the foundation of the underlying data set, it is critical to understand how data is ultimately used and applied to a business need. Key considerations regarding the use case of data include documenting the sensitivity of information recorded (data classification), organizing and applying a category associated with a logical data domain structure to data sets (data labeling), applying boundaries associated with how data is shared, and stored (data retention), and ultimately defining protocols for destroying data that is no longer essential or where requests for the removal of data have been presented and are legally required (data deletion).

An understanding of the correct use and application of underlying data sets can allow for proper decision-making regarding other ways data can be used and what areas an organization may want to ensure they do not engage in based on strategic direction and legal and/or regulatory guidance. Furthermore, the storage and maintenance of business and technical metadata will allow AI platforms to customize the content and responses generated to ensure organizations receive both tailored question handling and relevant response parsing – this will ultimately allow for the utilization of company-specific language processing capabilities.

Prepare now for what’s coming next

It is now more critical than ever that the right parameters are placed around how and where data should be stored to ensure the right data sets are being retrieved by human users while allowing for growth and enablement of AI use cases going forward. The concept of AI model training relies on clean data which can be enforced through governance of the underlying data set. This further escalates the demand for appropriate data governance to ensure that valuable data sets can be leveraged.

This shift has greatly accelerated the need for data governance – which by some may have been seen as a ‘nice to have’ or even as an afterthought into a ‘must have’ capability allowing organizations to remain competitive and be seen as truly transformative in how they use data, their most valuable asset, both internally for operations and with their customers in an advanced data landscape. AI is putting the age-old adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ onto steroids, allowing any data defects flowing into the model to potentially be a portion of the output and further highlighting the importance of tying up your data governance controls.

Read the results of Protiviti’s Global Technology Executive Survey: Innovation vs. Technical Debt Tug of War 

Connect with the Author

Will Shuman
Director, Technology Consulting

Data Management

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If you believe the hype, generative AI has the potential to transform how we work and play with digital technologies.

Today’s eye-popping text-and-image generating classes of AI capture most of the limelight, but this newfangled automation is also coming to software development.

It is too soon to say what impact this emerging class of code-generating AI will have on the digital world. Descriptors ranging from “significant” to “profound” are regularly tossed around.

What we do know: IT must take a more proactive role in supporting software developers as they begin to experiment with these emergent technologies.

Generative AI Could Change the Game

Many generative AI coding tools have come to the fore, but perhaps none possesses more pedigree than Copilot, developed by Microsoft’s GitHub coding project management hub.

A type of virtual assistant, Copilot uses machine learning to recommend the next line of code a programmer might write. Just as OpenAI’s ChatGPT gathers reams of text from large corpuses of Web content, Copilot takes its bits and bytes insights from the large body of software projects stored on GitHub.

Although it’s early days for such tools, developers are excited about Copilot’s potential for enhanced workflows, productivity gained and time saved. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests it can shave anywhere between 10% and 55% of time coding, depending on who you listen to.

Today Copilot is targeted at professional programmers who have mastered GitHub and committed countless hours to creating and poring over code. Yet it’s quite possible that Copilot and other tools like it will follow the money and migrate downstream to accommodate so-called citizen developers.

DIY AI, for Non-Coders

Typically sitting in a business function such as sales or marketing, citizen-developers (cit-devs)  are non-professional programmers who use low-code or no-code software to build field service, market and analytics apps through drag-and-drop interfaces rather than via the rigors of traditional hand-coding.

If the low-code/no-code evolution has come to your company, you may have marveled at how this capability freed your staff to focus on other tasks, even as you helped these erstwhile developers color within the governance lines.

Considering their all-around efficacy, self-service, do-it-yourself tools are in-demand: The market for low-code and no-code platforms is poised to top $27 billion market in 2023, according to Gartner.

Now imagine what organizations will pony up for similar tools that harness AI to strap rocket boosters onto software development for non-techie coders. In the interest of catering to these staff, GitHub, OpenAI and others will likely create versions of their coding assistants that streamline development for cit-devs. GitHub, for example, is adding voice and chat interfaces to simplify its UX even more.

It’s not hard to imagine where it goes from there. Just as the API economy fostered new ecosystems of software interoperability, generative AI plugins will facilitate more intelligent information services for big brands. Already OpenAI plugins are connecting ChatGPT to third-party applications, enabling the conversational AI to interact with APIs defined by developers.

One imagines this AI-styled plug-and-play will broaden the potential for developers, both of the casual and professional persuasion. Workers will copilot coding tasks alongside generative AI, ideally enhancing their workflows. This emerging class of content creation tools will foster exciting use cases and innovation while affording your developers teams with more options for how they execute their work. This will also mean development will continue to become more decentralized outside the realm of IT.

Keep an Open Mind for the Future

The coming convergence of generative AI and software development will have broad implications and pose new challenges for your IT organization.

As an IT leader, you will have to strike the balance between your human coders—be they professionals or cit-devs—and their digital coworkers to ensure optimal productivity. You must provide your staff  guidance and guardrails that are typical of organizations adopting new and experimental AI.

Use good judgment. Don’t enter proprietary or otherwise corporate information and assets into these tools.

Make sure the output aligns with the input, which will require understanding of what you hope to achieve. This step, aimed at pro programmers with knowledge of garbage in/garbage out practices, will help catch some of the pitfalls associated with new technologies.

When in doubt give IT a shout.

Or however you choose to lay down the law on responsible AI use. Regardless of your stance, the rise of generative AI underscores how software is poised for its biggest evolution since the digital Wild West known as Web 2.0.

No one knows what the generative AI landscape will look like a few months from now let alone how it will impact businesses worldwide.

Is your IT house in order? Are you prepared to shepherd your organization through this exciting but uncertain future?

Learn more about our Dell Technologies APEX portfolio of cloud experiences, which affords developers more options for how and where to run workloads while meeting corporate safeguards: Dell Technologies APEX. 

Business Intelligence and Analytics Software

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This May, Thoughtworks is proud to celebrate 30 years of helping their clients across the world to build the modern digital businesses of the future through the application of strategy, technology and design. Since launching in 1993, Thoughtworks is now over 12,500 people strong with 50 offices in 18 countries.

Thirty years of leadership in any industry is a remarkable accomplishment. But especially in the rapidly changing technology industry, it demonstrates a relentless, company-wide commitment to innovation and client impact.

“It’s about more than just luck for us,” said Chris Murphy, Thoughtworks’ CEO of North America. “We’ve built into our culture this ability to proactively stay ahead of the industry, by attracting, growing, and retaining the passionate, diverse technologists who want to bring that thought leadership to our industry, to our clients, and to society.”

Murphy, who’s been with Thoughtworks for almost 20 years, has seen much of this growth firsthand. Thoughtworks was an early pioneer of agile software development, and has been fundamental to multiple industry innovations including CI/CD, microservices, evolutionary architectures, infrastructure as code, lean portfolio management, and data-mesh. They have helped hundreds of businesses to use technology to build leaner, more responsive, and more adaptive organizations.

“We’re constantly asking ourselves, ‘Are we still relevant? Are we still innovating? Are we still continuing to bring unique, differentiating value to our clients?’” Murphy said. “And I’m proud to say that as long as we’re asking ourselves those questions, we’ll be able to see over the next 30 years the success we’ve seen over the last 30.”

Most recently, Thoughtworks launched its Engineering Effectiveness solution, which helps businesses empower their software engineering teams to deliver more customer value, more efficiently and more effectively.

“Since the pandemic, many organizations have invested in top-notch engineering talent but they’re seeing dwindling productivity,” Murphy said. “Now, how can they empower and retain that talent while delivering more customer value, more quickly, and with less wasted time? How can they improve the developer experience? These are just a few of the areas where Engineering Effectiveness can help.”

In Thoughtworks’ experience, some organizations utilize as little as 30% of their engineering function’s optimum capacity. Engineering Effectiveness helps developers to spend more of their time delivering value, while reducing friction and waste in their workflows. “This, to me, is really the next evolution of agile,” Murphy said. “It’s this systematic, scalable way of increasing productivity, so you can be nimble and get to market faster.”

Murphy now looks forward to the next 30 years — and beyond — of Thoughtworks industry innovation and thought leadership. As he said, “There’s no room for complacency. With the industry changing so quickly, organizations like Thoughtworks must continue to innovate and adapt.”

Of course, no one can predict exactly what the future will bring. But Thoughtworks plans to be there for it — continuing to innovate and lead technology-led business transformation.

“Thoughtworks has a 30-year history of providing a curated understanding of technological evolutions and applying them in real, practical terms to get real, practical outcomes,” Murphy said. “Our continued focus on that will give us the best opportunity to be at the forefront of embracing new technological changes as they come. And I think that’s very exciting.” Learn more about how to accelerate business-wide transformation with Engineering Effectiveness.

Digital Transformation, Innovation