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While mobile devices are the symbol of business continuity, they are also the mark of easy prey for cybercriminals. In fact, 75% of companies experienced a “major” mobile-related security compromise in 2022. And that risk brings high costs with it. When remote workers are the root cause of a data breach, mitigation costs rise 20% hiking the price tag up from $4 million to $5 million.

And it’s not just cybercriminals profiting from loopholes in corporate mobile security.

Regulations like GDPR and SOC2, as well as government agencies themselves, have all taken aim at mobile vulnerabilities. In October, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission fined 16 financial firms $1.8 billion after they failed to prevent employees from communicating with clients via their personal devices.

With the proliferation of personal devices used for work, most executives are bracing for impact and recognizing that it’s time to strengthen endpoint security. Whether you are working to avoid federal agents or rising ransomware attacks, here are the best practices for improving the security posture of your corporate mobile fleet.

Remove blind spots to strengthen mobile security 

Widening protections for the entire fleet starts with understanding your devices and where their vulnerabilities hide, as uncovering security blind spots is half the success equation.

Companies are highly reliant on their mobile devices and yet many manage hundreds or thousands of them using poor recordkeeping practices. Comprehensive security starts with a registry that defines what the fleet has, what state it is currently in, and what applications, access methodologies, and services it uses. Devices can include laptops, phones, iPads, watches, scanners, sensors, and a variety of wireless tools.

Gaining visibility is the first step in identifying and managing every device into a known state. Network analytics, usage audits, Shadow IT discovery tools, and IT expense management platforms can be helpful in establishing a working inventory that can be expanded with detailed information about ownership, operating systems, users, their associated applications as well as the security risk of each application in use. A centralized system also helps with overarching insights to prioritize security efforts. For example, you may want to start with high-volume devices or those that use applications bringing the highest security risk.

Consider your mobile strategy and its impact on security

With an accurate assessment of company-owned and employee-owned devices, now is a good time to evaluate how your mobile strategy and device ownership policy uphold security. More devices expand the attack surface for bad actors, and the lack of standardization can make security complex with a broader range of operating systems, device types, applications, and other hardware-based risks for IT teams to manage.

One Vanson Bourne study showed 81% of companies are shifting their corporate policies due to challenges in security and management. At companies with a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy, 65% of devices accessing corporate information are personally owned. This reveals the intertwined relationship between employee devices and the information companies must protect. While today’s dominant approach is to use a BYOD approach with mobile phones and corporate ownership for laptops, tides are shifting as companies better balance security requirements with the convenience of employee devices.

Best practices: configure and secure devices into a known state

Building a foundation for mobile security should start with leading security frameworks, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructures Security Agency’s (CISA) Zero Trust Model for Enterprise Mobility, which includes mobile security techniques as well as tips for using the built-in security features of mobile operating systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework is also helpful in process design.

The act of securing devices requires applying technologies to exert visibility and control over the entire fleet. This way companies can examine the operating system versions, configurations, and firmware, identifying any loopholes or security threats. Moreover, these tools can ensure applications comply with enterprise security standards, detect when system changes have been made, and empower IT teams to take swift action regarding threat investigation and mitigation. Unified endpoint management solutions (also known as mobile device management solutions) package these security tools and services together for ease of implementation and ongoing management.

Particular attention should be paid to:

Cloud-based security compatible across a range of devices, allowing for the widest applicability and the broadest standardization of security across the entire fleet.System updates and patches with real-time, granular insight into device compliance across the operating system, web browsers, and applications in use.Multi-factor and password-less authentication, as compromised passwords are a key cause in mobile device data breaches.Multi-layer security addressing the core, hardware, firmware, and applications.Zero trust network access capabilities on a continuous basis, reducing the attack surface through an identity-based approach to security and access management .Physical separation —whether its network segmentation applied to mobile and IoT devices, secure containerization separating personal information, or data isolation blocking unauthorized communications, separation makes sensitive information more difficult to access.Location tracking and remote controls allow IT teams to digitally control functions from afar, including finding, locking, and unlocking devices, pushing content and applications, and wiping functionality either individually or entirely.Automation and analytics make it faster and easier to manage mobile security.Machine learning and behavioral analytics are best for monitoring threats and accelerating the time to identify malware, ransomware, and zero-day attacks.Process automation eliminates repetitive, manual tasks necessary in maintaining inventories, preparing devices for employee use, and reducing IT intervention when remediation or quarantine actions are needed to bring the fleet into compliance.Dashboards should summarize the active risk exposure including vulnerabilities associated with each endpoint, and automation should prioritize response and remediation based on the likelihood of a breach  .

Often companies have too many devices to secure and too few resources to do the job effectively. That leaves security unchecked at critical moments in the lifecycle of a device, such as during preparation stages, threat mitigation procedures, and employee on- and off-boarding. At these junctures, each device must be protected comprehensively, outfitted with the company’s unique security applications, updated with the latest patches, and enabled with encryption, firewalls, anti-virus, and built-in security features—all before devices are put back into the hands of users.

This explains why many IT teams need to add the support of asset management services to their mobile security software purchase. When IT resources are already overstretched, service providers can handle inventories, orders, service providers, invoices, mobile help desk support, configurations, repairs, and decommissioning and reassignments.

Holistic endpoint security practices

Advanced security capabilities alongside dedication and discipline are necessary in order to configure devices into a compliant state and maintaining that known state is essential as both the business and the threat landscape perpetually evolve.

Mobile security pressures will continue to rise in parallel with more cybersecurity attacks, changing compliance requirements, and more devices to manage. Companies that can make and keep a concentrated effort on mobile security will rise above these challenges by exposing any blind spots inside their fleet, operationalizing a data-driven mobile strategy, and making proactive and ongoing security protections an integrated element of their mobile-first business.

To learn more about mobility management services, visit us here.

Cloud Security

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As a 159-year-old family business, Dutch brewing company Heineken owes its longevity to a steady stream of innovation. Founded by entrepreneur Gerard Adriaan Heineken in 1864, who sought to renovate an old brewery in the center of Amsterdam, the beer company that would later bear his name has become synonymous with Dutch beer, readily recognizable from its green bottle with red star label.

Heineken owns its piece of history, too, from becoming the first brewer to introduce quality control laboratories to the first legally sold beer in the US after prohibition was revoked in 1933. Today, it owns over 300 brands, and is sold in more than 190 countries.

Yet in 2023, the brewer faces new constraints, such as an expected recession, rising barley and energy prices, and aluminum supply chain shortages. The firm must also attract younger customers amid growing competition from microbreweries, higher market prices and new attitudes to alcohol consumption.

For Heineken’s global CIO Ing Yan Ong, the journey to keep a historic beer brand relevant starts with simplifying ERP, adopting agile methodologies and rethinking customer and supplier relationships in an age of digital analytics and personalized communications.

Heineken’s ambition to become best in class with connectivity

Heineken has historically excelled at building strong connections with consumers, customers, suppliers and employees, but there’s an understanding that relationships are changing where physical and digital experiences intersect.

As part of Heineken’s 2021 EverGreen strategy to commit to future-proof the organization, adapt to market dynamics, and emerge stronger from the pandemic, there’s the objective to digitally transform the business and its relations with stakeholders. It’s this intention to become the “best-connected brewer” that’s a priority in Heineken’s digital and technology (D&T) organization, and with Ing Yan.

“Becoming the best connected brewer is making sure we strengthen the relationships with our customers, consumers, suppliers and employees in a context that’s fully digital,” he says, who reports into the CDO and was previously senior director for global information services.

Historically, the firm’s route to the consumer was sales representatives going from bar to bar selling orders through paper-based forms. Digital technologies have improved this process, allowing for online and predictive ordering, which would, in turn, offer bars insights and recommendations on what drinks were popular with customers and what other local outlets were ordering.

Such is the proliferation of digital technologies that Heineken sees it as a business in its own right, and is targeting at least €10 billion (USD$10.7 billion) of business through digital channels over the next three years. As of its Q3 2022 trading update, the company achieved €4.3 billion in digital sales value, more than two-and-a-half times against the comparable period the previous year.

Ing Yan says that platforms like SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft are powering such growth, but adds that Heineken has also tapped emerging technologies to derive better insights.

The firm’s connected brewery IoT platform, for instance, is being used for data ingestion and edge computing in breweries, enabling local teams to analyze, adjust, test and optimize production processes, with this in-turn allowing operations to leverage real-time and historical data to support the workers on the shop floor.

Meanwhile, the new AI platform AIDDA (artificial intelligence, data driven advisor, dynamic advisor) gives sales representatives better insight on pricing, stock and promotions. Ing Yan says it’s already helped detect and resolve customer churn, and improve sustainability by reducing sales travel by 30% through optimal routing. Separately, it’s been reported that Heineken has also used AI technologies to optimize the color of the beer to Heineken gold.

“It’s really shifting from a more traditional way of doing business engaging, to making sure we’re now steering the conversation [with customers] and in that way, actually helping the outlets,” says Ing Yan. “Our role is to make sure the outlets are successful, and that works back to our success as well.”

Agility in a federated organization, plus ERP modernisation

Heineken’s size presents opportunity and challenge in equal measure for a digital and technology function tasked with everything from supporting designing new smart fridges, to workshopping with the robotics team and modernising some 45 ERPs and 3,500 applications across 85 operating companies.

Agility has become critical, top-down and bottom-up. Strategically, Ing Yan says there’s board alignment with the launch of a new digital strategy, and close collaboration with his CDO, who sits on the board.

There’s also a growing emphasis on improving team performance. Heineken has embraced flexible working in teams, adopting agile methodologies and introducing two products teams for more than 80 experimentations where people can learn to apply scrum and agile ways of working.

Now proclaiming to be an agile organization, Heineken’s next endeavor is ERP harmonisation, which represents an opportunity to bring together a fragmented IT estate.

This new digital backbone consists of a lean SAP S/4HANA Core with a set of cloud-based business platforms, replacing the existing wall-to-wall ERPs across 80 of Heineken’s operating companies. This backbone, says Ing Yan, will allow the operating companies to provide seamless customer experiences, drive efficient end-to-end processes, and ensure scalability across markets.

“It will allow us to deploy new capabilities across Heineken at speed and maximize the value of data within and across the operating companies,” says Ing Yan. “In 2022, we finished the design and build phase and will pilot the digital backbone in selected [operating companies] this year, and we’ll start industrial deployment in 2024 with the intent to complete the roll-out in the next six years.”

Upskilling teams and balancing the future

Heineken’s growth does, however, require new skills and a change in business ethos. Ing Yan talks about the power of taking people on a journey, and making sure they’re future-fit for the digital age.

The Digifit learning platform, available to D&T teams and external parties, has played an important role to help colleagues understand Heineken’s new direction. Ing Yan says 28,000 training modules were completed in 2022, varying from basic principles of digital to more complex topics.

“Our role is to upskill Heineken on what digital is going to bring,” says Ing Yan. “Digifit is a basic understanding of what digital is, some of the terminology, what it’s going to be and some of the consequences. We also do multiple sessions with the upper management teams, or even regional management teams, to take them on board about how the world is going to be different. I think it helps get the support [for IT] as well.”

The future, he adds, is about balance. On the one hand, Heineken must implement the digital backbone, and navigate the considerable integration and orchestration work. But on the other, it’s approaching a complicated talent market.

“From a technology point of view, getting [the digital backbone] to work is one achievement, but then implementing it in our operating company, changing the ways of working, and changing the task and roles around it to make sure it’s fully operated—that’s huge,” he says. “The focus for me over the next 12 months is to make sure we get live with our first pilot adopters and capture learnings, because we’ll scale this across 85 markets in the next six years.”

Business IT Alignment, Business Process Management, Chief Digital Officer, CIO, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture, IT Leadership, Supply Chain

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Cloud services, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and on-premises infrastructures connected by wired and wireless networks now represent the backbone of modern enterprises. To fully harness the benefits of modern network architectures, network operations teams need a deep understanding of how these systems perform. This visibility is essential if teams are to avoid the downtime that results in lost revenues.

To be successful, teams must enhance their operational awareness and gain comprehensive visibility into the performance of both internal networks and those managed by third parties. Even by making small advances in this IT arena, teams can deliver large business benefits and demonstrable return on investment (ROI). 

Broadcom

Fig 1. Following a maturity model enables IT teams to take achievable steps toward expanding their operational visibility

Eliminating Redundant Network Monitoring Software Yields $1M in Cost Reductions

To move from basic visibility to proactive network operations, teams must meet the following objectives:

Establishing unified contextual awareness across network inventory, alarms, events, fault, performance, flows, logs, and configurations for traditional network architectures.Retiring redundant toolsets and establishing one source of truth for data collection and correlation across multi-vendor technologies.Instituting advanced capacity planning and insights into how bandwidth consumption affects user experiences.

Over the years, teams have invested in capabilities for monitoring complex networks that connect employees to a mix of enterprise applications, public cloud environments, and SaaS applications. The end result has been tool sprawl, which costs companies an average of $2.5 million per year. By following a maturity model that advances IT awareness in complex network architectures delivering critical user experience, businesses can expect a 50% reduction in costs over three years, delivering savings of more than $1M.

Avoiding Downtime Yields $2.5M in Revenue Savings

To move from proactive operations to modern observability, teams must establish awareness of modern network technologies like SD-WAN. However, gaining this visibility can’t mean adding more tools to your environment. Today’s teams need tool vendors that offer add-on capabilities, so they can use their current monitoring processes and workflows and apply them to these complex, modern network technologies. This guarantees that teams don’t have to deploy, learn, and administer new tools. Plus, it means teams can more easily apply the operational expertise they already have to the software-defined networking space.

By following these steps, teams can discover opportunities for avoiding downtime. This downtime avoidance can lead to improved network availability for critical business services, which can provide revenue savings of up to $2.5 million over three years.

Realizing an ROI of 160%

The holy grail for network operations is to move from modern observability to experience-driven network observability. Achieving these capabilities requires establishing advanced visibility into the experience of network users.

Research shows that, when following this maturity model for advancing network monitoring capabilities, organizations typically invest around $2.6 million. These investments can deliver business benefits amounting to $6.8 million over three years, resulting in a net present value (NPV) of $4.2 million and an ROI of 160%.

As companies invest in network innovations to support changing business needs, teams need to make commensurate investments in tools to manage their modern environments. However, it’s vital that these investments enable teams to establish unified visibility, including of both legacy and new technologies, and of both networks that are managed internally as well as those managed by external vendors. By leveraging these capabilities, teams can reduce downtime and costs.

Many business leaders still view IT as a cost center, rather than a strategic partner. By delivering significant business outcomes, including sizable cost savings and ROI, IT teams can fundamentally and permanently change this perception.

To learn more, visit Broadcom.

Networking

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Journey Beyond, a part of Hornblower Group, is Australia’s leading experiential tourism group. Headquartered in Adelaide, it operates 13 brands and experiences spanning the country. The company’s overall strategy is to “have a customer experience that’s second-to-none — from the moment they first engage with the company to plan their experience, to when they return home at the end of their travels — regardless of what Journey Beyond adventure you are booking.”

However, the company’s disparate technology systems were proving to be a hinderance in its commitment to consistently deliver unmatched services and experiences to customers. As its business diversified, including its own acquisition by Hornblower Group in early 2022, Journey Beyond inherited a range of disparate technology systems, including six different phone systems and an outdated contact center that was only servicing Journey Beyond’s rail journeys. The remaining brands in the company’s portfolio were using basic phone functionality for customer enquiries and reservations.

Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond

istock

“The different communication solutions were unable to provide an integrated 360-degree customer view, which made it difficult to ensure a consistent, unrivalled customer experience across all 13 tourism ventures, and any other brands Journey Beyond may add to its portfolio in the future. The absence of advanced contact center features and analytics further prevented us from driving exceptional customer experience. Besides, we couldn’t enable work-from-anywhere, on any device capability, for employees,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond.  

These challenges forced the company to transition to a modern cloud-based communication platform.

Multiple communication solutions cause multiple challenges

Because Beyond Journey operates in the experiential tourism market, providing a personalized, seamless customer experience is essential — something its previous communications systems lacked, Mazumdar says.

“For instance, our train journeys get sold out a year prior to their launch. Therefore, when we launch a new season, there is a huge volume of calls from our customers and agents. The existing system lacked callback mechanism, leading to callers waiting in queue for as long as 40 minutes, which adversely impacted their experience,” she says, adding that there was also no way to prioritize certain calls over others.

The existing system also lacked analytical capability to provide any customer insights and it wasn’t integrated with Beyond Journey’s CRM. As a result, representatives interacting with a customer didn’t know whether the customer had traveled with the company before. “The communication between us and the customer was transactional instead of being personalized,” Mazumdar says.

Since the existing systems were very old, they couldn’t be managed remotely. In case of an outage, the company had to send a local person to rectify the on-site phone system, which could take a couple of hours. During this time, customers were unable to call Journey Beyond.

“The IVR was also not standardized across the company. As the IVRs were recorded in voices of employees from different business units, a caller had no idea they were part of the same business,” says Mazumdar.

Incoming calls to Beyond Journey’s toll-free numbers were also adding to the operational cost. “We paid per-minute on the calls received to our toll-free numbers. The high call volumes meant huge costs for us. Even if the call was hanging in the queue, it was costing us every minute,” she says.

Implementing a consolidated communications platform

To overcome the bottlenecks and drive customer engagement to the next level, Journey Beyond launched a contact center transformation, the first step of which was to establish a common unified communications (UC) platform across the business and integrate it with a new contact center (CC) solution. After evaluating several UC and CC solutions, Journey Beyond chose RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms — RingCentral MVP and Contact Center.

“We started evaluating multiple vendors in the first quarter of 2021. The software evaluation process took three to five months after which the implementation started in August 2021. We went live in October 2021,” Mazumdar says. The entire SaaS solution was hosted on AWS.

The company took this opportunity to shift to soft phones and headsets by getting rid of all physical phones. “We purchased good quality noise-cancelling headsets, which was the only hardware we invested in significantly,” says Mazumdar. “Although we had premium support from RingCentral, we decided to learn everything about the solution and take full control over it. So, while the integration and prebuild was completely done by RingCentral, over time we trained multiple people in the team on the solution. In hindsight, this was the best thing we did,” says Mazumdar, who brought in two dedicated IT resources with phone system background for the new solution.

“Different business units within the company work differently. For instance, the peak hours for one business could be different from those of another business, which impacts how you set up the call flows. It’s not one basic standard rule that could be set up for all businesses across the company. With in-house understanding of the solution, we had full control over the solution and were able to make changes, refinements, and complex prioritization rules to it ourselves without depending on the solution provider,” she says.

Cloud-based solution delivers customer visibility and value

Connecting multiple businesses with a common communications platform to deliver consistent customer service across the group has yielded compelling business benefits to Journey Beyond.

A key advantage of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer service operation’s accessibility for the entire Journey Beyond team.

“At a national integrated level, we now have subject matter experts in each of our experiences available to deliver unrivalled customer experience, with economies of scale. So, if one team is under duress in terms of call volumes, the call can be overflowed and picked up quickly by a consultant with secondary expertise in that brand,” says Mazumdar.

Journey Beyond is supporting its customer experience drive by integrating the CC solution with its CRM to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and build towards a 360-degree view of the customer.

“We are building up our ‘Know You Customer’ strategy, which starts with our customer service agents knowing who you are when you call any of our Journey Beyond brands,” says Mazumdar. “Callers who have travelled with us before, have their phone number in our CRM. When they call, their records pop up. The executive can look at the customer’s history with the company and the communication between them becomes a lot more personalized. The integrated view of the customer also helps to cross sell. For instance, if a person is booking a train journey from Adelaide but our executive knows that he is coming from Sydney, he can sell him another trip in Sydney.”

The other major advantage is the scalability and remote capabilities of the cloud-based platform. The solution allows Journey Beyond to run operations 24×7 with centralized administration and distributed users, working from anywhere, on any device. This has also given Journey Beyond the opportunity to recruit for talent in other locations outside the market around its Adelaide office.

Journey Beyond has also rolled out the solution’s workforce management functionality to better align agent availability with customer demand. The advanced feedback capabilities allow Journey Beyond to measure customer net promoter scores (NPS) right down to the consultant level. That NPS functionality will then be integrated into Salesforce, enhancing the 360-degree view of the customer experience.

The solution’s quality management functionality is providing Journey Beyond with a level of automation to ensure the contact basics are being completed, allowing leaders to focus on scoring the more complex or intangible components of customer engagements — delivering a recording of both the call and what is happening on screen at the same time. “Quality analytics completes the picture in terms of everything we need to see from a skills gap perspective,” says Mazumdar. Journey Beyond has deployed the UC solution to all businesses nationally. The CC solution has been rolled out at the company’ rail division and Rottnest Express while onboarding for the other businesses is in progress.

Unified Communications

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When you think about people entangled in organizational politics, terms that come to mind include manipulation, self-serving, turf battles, power plays, and hidden agendas. Not terribly uplifting. But Neal Sample, former CIO of Northwestern Mutual, sees it a different way. “I think of a different set of words like influence, diplomacy and collaboration,” he says. “In reality, politics aren’t good or bad. It’s just how things get done in organizations.”

So how should we be more cognizant about office politics versus organizational politics now that the pandemic has shifted the former to the latter? Managers approach it in different ways but for tech leaders, it can be particularly challenging, something Sample calls the physics of IT.

“I think politics is really about getting a positive outcome when there is scarcity,” he says. “That’s what you’re trying to work for. That clinical definition has the idea of advancing one of your ideas, which I think is okay, as long as it lines up with a positive outcome whether it’s for shareholders, customers, clients or patients. Not every idea can’t be implemented, and that’s when politics comes into play. You have different groups with different ideas of what positive outcomes look like, and then it’s navigating those potentially choppy waters especially as an IT professional.”

Sample, whose career also includes roles at Express Groups, American Express, eBay, and Yahoo!, knows that ethically building critical mass of support for an idea you believe in is a textbook description of those who are politically savvy. But equal empathy for dissenting positions goes a long way to achieve beneficial outcomes.

Tech Whisperers podcast’s Dan Roberts recently spoke with Sample about the evolving nuances of organizational politics. Here are some edited excerpts of that conversation. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On leading equity: I think a lot of the old definitions of politics had to do with the physical space in the office, with relationships, tenure and a notion of favoritism: who had been around before, who had achieved before, who seemed to be in favor versus out of favor. And a lot of that goes away with online equity. But a virtual environment is complex for gathering a diversity of ideas. For example, we remember the first time we saw ourselves in little boxes outside the office in the early editions of Zoom, and there was a certain level of equity associated with it. We all had the same size real estate. On the other hand, people noticed an asymmetry in airtime. Unless you were very intentional about pulling people into a conversation, there was a chance that people who were otherwise shy or part of a marginalized group would be even more shy or more marginalized. It was actually easier to get lost in the conversation. People didn’t talk over each other or sidebar in a way that might have happened in a face-to-face meeting.

On the physics of IT: IT is a unique element of a business. In the notion of resource scarcity, we might want to get something done but then halfway through the year, even with an annual plan, a new idea comes up, or some M&A or a competitive threat emerges and we decide we need to change something. Inside of information technology, sometimes there are these tradeoffs—the physics of IT. You have one particular team that knows a system. They’ve been working on Problem A, and now they’re going to work on Problem B. Or you have a certain amount of capacity and throughput that’s sitting in a data center or in a legacy installation, and you can’t magically grow that by a factor of 10 because of your historical application services. In any way, IT has this notion of physics. There is a limit that happens sometimes with subject matter experts or resources. Other areas don’t have that conundrum. Sometimes you can solve the problem with money, but there are other elements of the workplace that aren’t constrained by the same set of resources, the same physics problems that IT have. Because of that intrinsic scarcity, IT is where the conflict often shows up.

On negotiation: As an IT professional, I’ve spent time learning from the world of business about how to be a good negotiator. One thing that was new to me years ago was the notion of a BATNA—your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If you find yourself in negotiation, the first thing you have to figure out is what the best alternative is, which tells you what it’s like if you lose. It also tells you what your leverage is with a vendor, let’s say. You have to think about your pricing negotiation. Having that in mind, starting with seeing what it looks like to lose this negotiation, or not end up with the price you want, is incredibly powerful because then instead of talking about it like it’s an all or nothing, it’s really the difference between 100 and 80, but 80 at a lower price. You figure those things out. That is really powerful. What’s also interesting are contracts between IQ and EQ. I think folks used to be happy to be IQ-oriented professionals in technology. And a lot of time, we were thought of as sort of back-office cost control. But that switched to the notion that technology is the product or the experience, or powers the supply chain, is true just about everywhere now. The big difference, from a negotiating perspective, is because of the physics of IT and that tradeoffs happen in technology a lot, you have to be good with your EQ. Not even just dealing with a single partner but somebody who wants something from you. Sometimes, the battleground is two different business divisions or maybe two functions that both want something and suddenly, your job is to now be Switzerland.

On the good fight: We should all be fighting to win for the company, enterprise, organization. But politics is when we have different ideas, when there is scarcity and we can’t do everything. There has to be a tradeoff. If you fight to win, you’re going to set yourself up as an adversary. There’ll be an outcome that’s positive and negative—the classic win-lose. But if you fight to lose, the first thing you do is adopt the opposition idea, philosophy, product or approach—whatever you feel is competing with your proposal or idea. So then you adopt it as your own and spend time figuring out why the other side is right instead of doing research to back up your own position. For example, if you think going to Agile from Waterfall is the right thing to do, spend time trying to figure out why Agile doesn’t work. Then I guarantee two things will happen. You’ll either become more effective and persuasive with your own argumentation because you better understand the alternatives, or you might find yourself changing your mind. And from an office politics perspective, this is one of the best things that can happen for a long-term relationship, coming to a partner with humility. You demonstrate you have empathy and are a good partner because you are willing to compromise.

CIO, IT Leadership, IT Management, IT Strategy, Remote Work

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Cybersecurity threats and their resulting breaches are top of mind for CIOs today. Managing such risks, however, is just one aspect of the entire IT risk management landscape that CIOs must address.

Equally important is reliability risk – the risks inherent in IT’s essential fragility. Issues might occur at anytime, anywhere across the complex hybrid IT landscape, potentially slowing or bringing down services.

Addressing such cybersecurity and reliability risks in separate silos is a recipe for failure. Collaboration across the respective responsible teams is essential for effective risk management.

Such collaboration is both an organizational and a technological challenge – and the organizational aspects depend upon the right technology.

The key to solving complex IT ops problems collaboratively, in fact, is to build a common engineering approach to managing risk across the concerns of the security and operations (ops) teams – in other words, a holistic approach to managing risk. 

Risk management starting point: site reliability engineering

By engineering, we mean a formal, quantitative approach to measuring and managing operational risks that can lead to reliability issues. The starting point for such an approach is site reliability engineering (SRE). 

SRE is a modern technique for managing the risks inherent in running complex, dynamic software deployments – risks like downtime, slowdowns, and the like that might have root causes anywhere, including the network, the software infrastructure, or deployed applications.

The practice of SRE requires dealing with ongoing tradeoffs. The ops team must be able to make fact-based judgments about whether to increase a service’s reliability (and hence, its cost), or lower its reliability and cost to increase the speed of development of the applications providing the service.

Error budgets: the key to site reliability engineering

Instead of targeting perfection – technology that never fails – the real question is just how far short of perfect reliability should an organization aim for. We call this quantity the error budget.

The error budget represents the total number of errors a particular service can accumulate over time before users become dissatisfied with the service.

Most importantly, the error budget should never equal zero. The operator’s goal should never be to entirely eliminate reliability issues, because such an approach would both be too costly and take too long – thus impacting the ability for the organization to deploy software quickly and run dynamic software at scale.

Instead, the operator should maintain an optimal balance among cost, speed, and reliability. Error budgets quantify this balance.

Bringing SRE to cybersecurity        

In order to bring the SRE approach to mitigating reliability risks to the cybersecurity team, it’s essential for the team to calculate risk scores for every observed event that might be relevant to the cybersecurity engineer. 

Risk scoring is an essential aspect of cybersecurity risk management. “Risk management… involves identifying all the IT resources and processes involved in creating and managing department records, identifying all the risks associated with these resources and processes, identifying the likelihood of each risk, and then applying people, processes, and technology to address those risks,” according to Jennifer Pittman-Leeper, Customer Engagement Manager for Tanium.

Risk scoring combined with cybersecurity-centric observability gives the cybersecurity engineer the raw data they need to make informed threat mitigation decisions, just as reliability-centric observability provides the SRE with the data they need to mitigate reliability issues.

Introducing the threat budget

Once we have a quantifiable, real-time measure of threats, then we can create an analogue to SRE for cybersecurity engineers.

We can posit the notion of a threat budget which would represent the total number of unmitigated threats a particular service can accumulate over time before a corresponding compromise adversely impacts the users of the service.

The essential insight here is that threat budgets should never be zero, since eliminating threats entirely would be too expensive and would slow the software effort down, just as error budgets of zero would. “Even the most comprehensive… cybersecurity program can’t afford to protect every IT asset and IT process to the greatest extent possible,” Pittman-Leeper continued. “IT investments will have to be prioritized.”

Some threat budget greater than zero, therefore, would reflect the optimal compromise among cost, time, and the risk of compromise. 

We might call this approach to threat budgets Service Threat Engineering, analogous to Site Reliability Engineering.

What Service Threat Engineering really means is that based upon risk scoring, cybersecurity engineers now have a quantifiable approach to achieving optimal threat mitigation that takes into account all of the relevant parameters, instead of relying upon personal expertise, tribal knowledge, and irrational expectations for cybersecurity effectiveness.

Holistic engineering for better collaboration

Even though risk scoring uses the word risk, I’ve used the word threat to differentiate Service Threat Engineering from SRE. After all, SRE is also about quantifying and managing risks – except with SRE, the risks are reliability-related rather than threat-related.

As a result, Service Threat Engineering is more than analogous to SRE. Rather, they are both approaches to managing two different, but related kinds of risks.

Cybersecurity compromises can certainly lead to reliability issues (ransomware and denial of service being two familiar examples). But there is more to this story.

Ops and security teams have always had a strained relationship, as they work on the same systems while having different priorities. Bringing threat management to the same level as SRE, however, may very well help these two teams align over similar approaches to managing risk.

Service Threat Engineering, therefore, targets the organizational challenges that continue to plague IT organizations – a strategic benefit that many organizations should welcome.

Learn how Tanium is bringing together teams, tools, and workflows with a Converged Endpoint Management platform.

Risk Management

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Cybersecurity threats and their resulting breaches are top of mind for CIOs today. Managing such risks, however, is just one aspect of the entire IT risk management landscape that CIOs must address.

Equally important is reliability risk – the risks inherent in IT’s essential fragility. Issues might occur at anytime, anywhere across the complex hybrid IT landscape, potentially slowing or bringing down services.

Addressing such cybersecurity and reliability risks in separate silos is a recipe for failure. Collaboration across the respective responsible teams is essential for effective risk management.

Such collaboration is both an organizational and a technological challenge – and the organizational aspects depend upon the right technology.

The key to solving complex IT ops problems collaboratively, in fact, is to build a common engineering approach to managing risk across the concerns of the security and operations (ops) teams – in other words, a holistic approach to managing risk. 

Risk management starting point: site reliability engineering

By engineering, we mean a formal, quantitative approach to measuring and managing operational risks that can lead to reliability issues. The starting point for such an approach is site reliability engineering (SRE). 

SRE is a modern technique for managing the risks inherent in running complex, dynamic software deployments – risks like downtime, slowdowns, and the like that might have root causes anywhere, including the network, the software infrastructure, or deployed applications.

The practice of SRE requires dealing with ongoing tradeoffs. The ops team must be able to make fact-based judgments about whether to increase a service’s reliability (and hence, its cost), or lower its reliability and cost to increase the speed of development of the applications providing the service.

Error budgets: the key to site reliability engineering

Instead of targeting perfection – technology that never fails – the real question is just how far short of perfect reliability should an organization aim for. We call this quantity the error budget.

The error budget represents the total number of errors a particular service can accumulate over time before users become dissatisfied with the service.

Most importantly, the error budget should never equal zero. The operator’s goal should never be to entirely eliminate reliability issues, because such an approach would both be too costly and take too long – thus impacting the ability for the organization to deploy software quickly and run dynamic software at scale.

Instead, the operator should maintain an optimal balance among cost, speed, and reliability. Error budgets quantify this balance.

Bringing SRE to cybersecurity        

In order to bring the SRE approach to mitigating reliability risks to the cybersecurity team, it’s essential for the team to calculate risk scores for every observed event that might be relevant to the cybersecurity engineer. 

Risk scoring is an essential aspect of cybersecurity risk management. “Risk management… involves identifying all the IT resources and processes involved in creating and managing department records, identifying all the risks associated with these resources and processes, identifying the likelihood of each risk, and then applying people, processes, and technology to address those risks,” according to Jennifer Pittman-Leeper, Customer Engagement Manager for Tanium.

Risk scoring combined with cybersecurity-centric observability gives the cybersecurity engineer the raw data they need to make informed threat mitigation decisions, just as reliability-centric observability provides the SRE with the data they need to mitigate reliability issues.

Introducing the threat budget

Once we have a quantifiable, real-time measure of threats, then we can create an analogue to SRE for cybersecurity engineers.

We can posit the notion of a threat budget which would represent the total number of unmitigated threats a particular service can accumulate over time before a corresponding compromise adversely impacts the users of the service.

The essential insight here is that threat budgets should never be zero, since eliminating threats entirely would be too expensive and would slow the software effort down, just as error budgets of zero would. “Even the most comprehensive… cybersecurity program can’t afford to protect every IT asset and IT process to the greatest extent possible,” Pittman-Leeper continued. “IT investments will have to be prioritized.”

Some threat budget greater than zero, therefore, would reflect the optimal compromise among cost, time, and the risk of compromise. 

We might call this approach to threat budgets Service Threat Engineering, analogous to Site Reliability Engineering.

What Service Threat Engineering really means is that based upon risk scoring, cybersecurity engineers now have a quantifiable approach to achieving optimal threat mitigation that takes into account all of the relevant parameters, instead of relying upon personal expertise, tribal knowledge, and irrational expectations for cybersecurity effectiveness.

Holistic engineering for better collaboration

Even though risk scoring uses the word risk, I’ve used the word threat to differentiate Service Threat Engineering from SRE. After all, SRE is also about quantifying and managing risks – except with SRE, the risks are reliability-related rather than threat-related.

As a result, Service Threat Engineering is more than analogous to SRE. Rather, they are both approaches to managing two different, but related kinds of risks.

Cybersecurity compromises can certainly lead to reliability issues (ransomware and denial of service being two familiar examples). But there is more to this story.

Ops and security teams have always had a strained relationship, as they work on the same systems while having different priorities. Bringing threat management to the same level as SRE, however, may very well help these two teams align over similar approaches to managing risk.

Service Threat Engineering, therefore, targets the organizational challenges that continue to plague IT organizations – a strategic benefit that many organizations should welcome.

Learn how Tanium is bringing together teams, tools, and workflows with a Converged Endpoint Management platform.

Risk Management

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As CIO at The Hut Group (THG), the British ecommerce firm behind such brands as Lookfantastic and Myprotein, Joanna Drake has been navigating some serious headwinds.

Responsible for global operations and technology services across company and customer websites, staff technology, and THG’s direct-to-consumer Ingenuity service and hosting business, Drake has looked to support the rapid growth of the Manchester-based firm through IPO, a global pandemic, supply chain instability, and the onset of recession.

Speaking at the CIO UK 100 awards ceremony at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London, Drake explained what it meant to be ranked the top CIO in the UK, how her tennis background shaped her leadership, why automation is freeing up her IT team, and how THG is supporting engineers relocating from war-stricken Ukraine.

CIO 100 winner, sports leadership and being ‘too friendly’

Having featured in the CIO 100 in 2021 and 2020 prior to topping this year’s list, Drake says the award is for her team, not just her.

“If this was about me, as an individual, I’d struggle to do a [CIO 100] submission,” she said. “So it’s about the team and I’m blessed and honoured to work with some amazing people every day, with so much grit, determination and creativity.” She also added that it was also an opportunity to stop and reflect on how far they’ve come in the last year, and how she fell into IT after a career in tennis failed to materialise, first starting out in help desk support before progressing into service management and engineering positions.

As she climbed the ranks, taking on more senior technology roles at Diageo, Accenture, Yahoo, Betfair, BBC and Skyscanner before joining The Hut Group in 2018, she realised that her sports background could shape her leadership style.

“Sports taught me about teamwork, putting players in the right positions, team formation, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, practice, hard work, discipline and how and when to apply coaching or mentoring,” she says, adding that she continually analyses the ‘ingredients’ of her team, to find details that can make big differences.

This isn’t to say that Drake’s ascension to the higher echelons of business leadership has come without difficulty. In particular, throughout her 20-year career, Drake has often been chastised for being too friendly, an unfamiliar quality perhaps in a results-driven business world.

“A lot of times in my career I’ve been told I wouldn’t make it as a senior tech person,” she said. “Actually, I think it’s about being my true authentic self because it’s exhausting if you can’t be yourself. I’ve learned through being me that actually, that’s okay.”

Digital workplace, automation and ‘IT as consultants’

Drake highlights THG’s digital workplace and automation initiatives as her team’s most notable achievements over the last year, alongside its Ingenuity Compute Engine (ICE), through which THG is hoping to build ‘hyperscaler experiences’ across more than 50 data centres.

As part of the ‘infrastructure reimagined’ programme, ICE provides a software-defined, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform where teams can run containerised applications on Kubernetes, ultimately speeding up infrastructure procurement and deployment. Drake says THG has built the platform in four of its data centres so far, allowing developers to build new platforms on ICE, and migrate existing THG workloads onto it.

Speed and simplicity have also been the essence behind THG’s digital workplace initiatives.

The e-commerce firm has also rolled out zero-touch device provisioning, built app stores for Microsoft and Mac-based devices, offered technology drive-through and click-and-collect services, as well as numerous enhancements to the office environment from digital signage, wayfinding screens and universal desk set-up for hot desking, to meeting room technology, video editing suites, device lockers and digital packing benches in warehouses.

Automation, meanwhile, has been introduced to free-up IT team members to become consultants to the business, removing their operational toil while empowering their line-of-business peers to focus on more strategic work.

Leveraging a combination of RPA, low-code and no-code technologies, THG has sought to streamline processes, particularly in HR such as joiners, movers, leavers and role-based access control.

“Automation has been about [IT] almost automating themselves out of the jobs they had, so they could go on to more interesting roles,” says Drake. “Where they’ve removed a lot of operational toil, we’ve had to re-skill our engineers and this is great for retaining talent.” So instead of churning or doing tickets, engineers go out as consultants in the business and speak to different departments about processes. “They follow things that hold them back, how they could do more, so they can actually remove their operational toil,” she adds.

Stalking talent and supporting Ukrainian staff

Despite such technological innovation, Drake is adamant that people remains her top priority, and she’s taking to stealthy methods to find prospective talent.

“I do a lot of stalking on LinkedIn,” she says. “I think about the sort of people and skill I want, and I go and hunt them out. I’ve got to build the team and I want the best players so I’ve got to go out there and find them. And when I’ve got them, I need to make sure they’re successful and making a difference. And if they’re successful, we’re all happy.”

Yet she recognises that the ongoing recruitment challenges, cost-of-living pressures and deepening mental health concerns mean the focus must be as on talent retention and attraction in equal measure.

To further help with the former, Drake oversees a series of stand-ups during the week to keep the team engaged. There’s a Monday session that tackles how the IT team plans to ‘win’ that week, a Tuesday one is called take-over Tuesday, Wednesday’s focuses on wellness and development, and Friday offers an opportunity for team shout-outs and general updates.

The Hut Group has also looked to help engineers get out of Ukraine at the onset of the war with Russia, helping to evacuate them and their families to Poland, paying for accommodation and providing homeware, toys and jobs at a local warehouse.

“For a lot of our staff in Ukraine, work has helped them lead as normal life as possible in these circumstances,” says Drake. “Ensuring they are very actively involved in and heard every day is a really important part of supporting them.”

Financial strife puts the CIO’s focus on efficiency

Much of last year’s progress has been about laying the technological foundations for the next 10 years, yet Drake acknowledges that the next 12 months could be a bumpy ride.

The Hut Group has seen its growth stunted in recent times by rising raw material costs, cost-of-living pressures on customers, declining shares (down 86% year-on-year), and a market valuation that recently plummeted from £5bn to £600m amid market headwinds.

In October, Japanese investor SoftBank announced it was selling its 6.4% stake to company founder Matthew Moulding and Qatari investors for just £31m, having bought the stake in the shopping group for £481m in May 2021.

Such uncertainty means Drake’s focus is now on efficiency.

“[My priority is] continuing with all of that efficiency stuff—ICE, composable compute, which means we can deliver more, more quickly.”

Drake is also spearheading THG’s ‘match-fit programmes’, looking at ways the group can improve customer service, operational efficiency and team development for when some semblance of normality returns.

She says THG is consolidating toolsets, decommissioning legacy technology and migrating customers to the latest platforms, as well as making sure the firm gets the best ‘bang for buck’ when working with suppliers.

“We thought of using it as an opportunity to get in really good shape, ready for the fight when the world turns the right way up again.”

CIO, CIO 100, IT Leadership

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Decision support systems definition

A decision support system (DSS) is an interactive information system that analyzes large volumes of data for informing business decisions. A DSS supports the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization in making better decisions by assessing the significance of uncertainties and the tradeoffs involved in making one decision over another.

A DSS leverages a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to help users make decisions. The data sources used by a DSS could include relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, electronic health records (EHRs), revenue projections, sales projections, and more.

The concept of DSS grew out of research conducted at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s, but really took root in the enterprise in the 1980s in the form of executive information systems (EIS), group decision support systems (GDSS), and organizational decision support systems (ODSS). With organizations increasingly focused on data-driven decision making, decision science (or decision intelligence) is on the rise, and decision scientists may be the key to unlocking the potential of decision science systems. Bringing together applied data science, social science, and managerial science, decision science focuses on selecting between options to reduce the effort required to make higher-quality decisions.

Decision support system examples

Decision support systems are used in a broad array of industries. Example uses include:

GPS route planning. A DSS can be used to plan the fastest and best routes between two points by analyzing the available options. These systems often include the capability to monitor traffic in real-time to route around congestion.Crop planning. Farmers use DSS to help them determine the best time to plant, fertilize, and reap their crops. Bayer Crop Science has applied analytics and decision-support to every element of its business, including the creation of “virtual factories” to perform “what-if” analyses at its corn manufacturing sites.Clinical DSS. These systems help clinicians diagnose their patients. Penn Medicine has created a clinical DSS that helps it get ICU patients off ventilators faster.ERP dashboards. These systems help managers monitor performance indicators. Digital marketing and services firm Clearlink uses a DSS system to help its managers pinpoint which agents need extra help.

Decision support systems vs. business intelligence

DSS and business intelligence (BI) are often conflated. Some experts consider BI a successor to DSS. Decision support systems are generally recognized as one element of business intelligence systems, along with data warehousing and data mining.

Whereas BI is a broad category of applications, services, and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and accessing data for decision-making, DSS applications tend to be more purpose-built for supporting specific decisions. For example, a business DSS might help a company project its revenue over a set period by analyzing past product sales data and current variables. Healthcare providers use clinical decision support systems to make the clinical workflow more efficient: computerized alerts and reminders to care providers, clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, and so on.

DSS vs. decision intelligence

Research firm, Gartner, declared decision intelligence a top strategic technology trend for 2022. Decision intelligence seeks to update and reinvent decision support systems with a sophisticated mix of tools including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help automate decision-making. According to Gartner, the goal is to design, model, align, execute, monitor, and tune decision models and processes.

Types of decision support system

In the book Decision Support Systems: Concepts and Resources for Managers, Daniel J. Power, professor of management information systems at the University of Northern Iowa, breaks down decision support systems into five categories based on their primary sources of information.

Data-driven DSS. These systems include file drawer and management reporting systems, executive information systems, and geographic information systems (GIS). They emphasize access to and manipulation of large databases of structured data, often a time-series of internal company data and sometimes external data.

Model-driven DSS. These DSS include systems that use accounting and financial models, representational models, and optimization models. They emphasize access to and manipulation of a model. They generally leverage simple statistical and analytical tools, but Power notes that some OLAP systems that allow complex analysis of data may be classified as hybrid DSS systems. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters provided by decision-makers, but Power notes they are usually not data-intensive.

Knowledge-driven DSS. These systems suggest or recommend actions to managers. Sometimes called advisory systems, consultation systems, or suggestion systems, they provide specialized problem-solving expertise based on a particular domain. They are typically used for tasks including classification, configuration, diagnosis, interpretation, planning, and prediction that would otherwise depend on a human expert. These systems are often paired with data mining to sift through databases to produce data content relationships.

Document-driven DSS. These systems integrate storage and processing technologies for document retrieval and analysis. A search engine is an example.

Communication-driven and group DSS. Communication-driven DSS focuses on communication, collaboration, and coordination to help people working on a shared task, while group DSS (GDSS) focuses on supporting groups of decision makers to analyze problem situations and perform group decision-making tasks.

Components of a decision support system

According to Management Study HQ, decision support systems consist of three key components: the database, software system, and user interface.

DSS database. The database draws on a variety of sources, including data internal to the organization, data generated by applications, and external data purchased from third parties or mined from the Internet. The size of the DSS database will vary based on need, from a small, standalone system to a large data warehouse.DSS software system. The software system is built on a model (including decision context and user criteria). The number and types of models depend on the purpose of the DSS. Commonly used models include:
Statistical models. These models are used to establish relationships between events and factors related to that event. For example, they could be used to analyze sales in relation to location or weather.
Sensitivity analysis models. These models are used for “what-if” analysis.
Optimization analysis models. These models are used to find the optimum value for a target variable in relation to other variables.
Forecasting models. These include regression models, time series analysis, and other models used to analyze business conditions and make plans.
Backward analysis sensitivity models. Sometimes called goal-seeking analysis, these models set a target value for a particular variable and then determine the values other variables need to hit to meet that target value.
DSS user interface. Dashboards and other user interfaces that allow users to interact with and view results.

Decision support system software

According to Capterra, the popular decision support system software includes:

Checkbox. This no-code service automation software for enterprises uses a drag-and-drop interface for building applications with customizable rules, decision-tree logic, calculations, and weighted scores.Yonyx. Yonyx is a platform for creating DSS applications. It features support for creating and visualizing decision tree–driven customer interaction flows. It especially focuses on decision trees for call centers, customer self-service, CRM integration, and enterprise data.Parmenides Edios. Geared for midsize/large companies, Parmenides Eidos provides visual reasoning and knowledge representation to support scenario-based strategizing, problem solving, and decision-making.XLSTAT. XLSTAT is an Excel data analysis add-on geared for corporate users and researchers. It boasts more than 250 statistical features, including data visualization, statistical modeling, data mining, stat tests, forecasting methods, machine learning, conjoint analysis, and more.1000minds is an online suite of tools and processes for decision-making, prioritization, and conjoint analysis. It is derived from research at the University of Otago in the 1990s into methods for prioritizing patients for surgery.Information Builders WebFOCUS. This data and analytics platform is geared for enterprise and midmarket companies that need to integrate and embed data across applications. It offers cloud, multicloud, on-prem, and hybrid options.QlikView is Qlik’s classic analytics solution, built on the company’s Associative Engine. It’s designed to help users with their day-to-day tasks using a configurable dashboard.SAP BusinessObjects. BusinessObjects consists of reporting and analysis applications to help users understand trends and root causes.TIBCO Spotfire. This data visualization and analytics software helps users create dashboards and power predictive applications and real-time analytics applications.Briq is a predictive analytics and automation platform built specifically for general contractors and subcontractors in construction. It leverages data from accounting, project management, CRM, and other systems, to power AI for predictive and prescriptive analytics.Analytics, Data Science

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An organization depends on its financial institution to complete a major transaction, but a glitch holds up funds, negatively impacting cash flow. Meanwhile, regulators fined a different financial institution for failing to catch fraudulent transactions.

In both situations, better business transaction monitoring could have helped prevent negative, costly outcomes. In the former, more seamless monitoring would have ensured the bank client’s transaction was completed faster, maintaining and even boosting customer satisfaction. For the latter, it could have prevented regulatory fines.

Today, especially, as modern applications and systems have become more complicated and IT infrastructure more complex, seamless business transaction monitoring is crucial. Enterprises need the proper tools to detect incidents early, automate wherever they can to make processes more efficient and free up IT workers for more complicated tasks, and be able to automatically solve any issues quickly.

“Business transaction monitoring is transitioning from a support function to a critical element in any organization’s operations,” says Digitate CEO Akhilesh Tripathi.

French utility company ENGIE, for one, needed a solution that could monitor its workload automation processes across its extensive IT infrastructure and business applications, and reduce dependency on manual issue resolution.

One of the world’s largest independent power producers, ENGIE conducts some two-million meter readings and generates over 150,000 invoices nearly every day. ENGIE approached Digitate for help to digitally transform its billing and payment process. The company wanted to move away from manual monitoring and remediation, which were both inefficient and risk-prone, increasing the operational cost and often leading to inaccuracies and delays in revenue generation.

Within 18 months, ENGIE was able to transform its workload process through a closed-loop solution that uses intelligent automation to automatically identify and solve any issues, further cementing its transformation into a digital enterprise. Digitate collaborated with ENGIE to provide a layered solution for monitoring workload processes to create a “blueprint” of the company’s entire batch system.

Now, ENGIE spends less time and effort on manual monitoring. It has reduced impacts to downstream processes like billing and payment communications by 80%, realized a 95% reduction in customer complaint tickets, and prevented €5 million per day ($4.87 million) in revenue loss. For its successful digital transformation, powered by Digitate, ENGIE was named Order-to-Cash winner in the Hackett Group’s 2022 Digital Awards.

With better business transaction monitoring as a part of their digital transformation, companies find business processes are well supported to generate cash, while transparency increases enterprise-wide. Financial institutions completing tens of millions of transactions daily can feel confident they can detect high-risk and suspicious activities.

Regardless of industry, business transaction monitoring has a critical impact on enterprises with tangible results. For instance, utility companies monitoring hundreds of thousands of bills have peace of mind that delays can be quickly remedied or prevented from happening at all. Yet, to be successful, organizations working to become digital enterprises must have the right technology.

“With the complexity of more and more systems in place, companies need tools to create visibility and confidence in IT to execute fast and protect the business,” Tripathi says.

With its closed-loop solutions, Digitate helps companies monitor all events across their IT infrastructure to create an integrated view. Tools detect anomalies, investigate, and self-heal to correct. Routine activities are automated, doing away with repetitive manual tasks and freeing up valuable IT workers’ time.

“We close the loop and we resolve problems to create value proposition for our customers,” Tripathi says. “They’re able to do this in one-tenth of the time it would otherwise take them.”

To learn more about better business transaction monitoring and how Digitate’s products can help you, visit Digitate.

IT Leadership