TRANSFORMING YOUR BUSINESS

CHANGE AGENT

VENKATESH MAHADEVAN, CIO OF DUBAI INVESTMENTS, SHARES KEY ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGY.

How are you driving digital innovation at your company?

Dubai Investments embarked on a digital transformation journey a few years back, and digital innovation has been one of this transformation’s cornerstones.

As an organisation, we realised that to have a sustainable business model and drive growth in our various business segments, we need to embrace the innovation culture internally and in our thinking.

Creating awareness on all fronts and raising it among different levels, starting with the Board, was imperative for this program to get off the ground and succeed.

It is important to speak to different stakeholders and get their views on where they see their businesses in a few years. One thing that unanimously all of them said to us was to be able to manage the new customer demands in the digital age. So for us to move forward, we created awareness in the corridors of our organisation, and

A CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER’S ROLE HAS ALWAYS BEEN CRITICAL, THE WAY I HAVE SEEN IT AND PLAYED IT, AS I HAVE BEEN ONE FOR SEVERAL YEARS WITH GLOBAL MULTINATIONALS. A CIO PLAYS A VERY CRUCIAL ROLE IN THE GROWTH OF AN ORGANISATION BY HELPING THE COMPANY REALISE BENEFITS FROM EFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATIONS.

people started speaking of this or at least asking about it.

We also recognised that we needed someone to drive our company’s innovation culture, so I was tasked to drive digital innovation. We also realised very quickly that we might not have the desired skill set and bandwidth to manage this massive project, so we enabled our partner ecosystem and spoke to wellknown global names in the industry and collaborated with them on this journey.

One of the first things we did was sit with them and come up with a digital landscape by identifying opportunities and then picking a couple of quick wins for the organisation, thereby creating momentum. It was important to do this since transformations, as we all know, are long-drawn and challenging projects, and for people to stay motivated, we realised we needed to demonstrate some quick wins.

We also put process and change management right upfront since they are critical for a thriving digital innovation culture.

What is the secret to getting digital transformation right?

Your customer needs to be the main ingredient in your sauce and one single approach to your digital transformation may not be the right thing.

Having said this, you must realise and recognise that the path is long and winding - and at the outset, it is impossible to know when a digital transformation will end. Hence, remember that digital transformation is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing program that the organisation should always have on its agenda.

Let me start by stating the pitfalls. Starting with technology as a focal point is a recipe for failure. As CIOs and tech leaders, we must avoid falling into the ‘technology trap’.

Digital transformation needs to be focused on the customer and the customer alone. Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind about this. A digital transformation that does not have customers as the center point of its transformation journey is heading toward a brick wall.

I have seen quite a few organisations focus on new and emerging technologies for transformation. While this may not be wrong, focusing on it as the starting point is not right. Look at your organisation’s business and the goals you want to achieve at the end of your phased transformation journey. Once you crystallise this thought, the rest of the elements can then be brought into play.

Your organisation’s leadership needs to re-think the business for the digital age. As a C-suite leader, you must be also part of this discussion. This is important since you must articulate your digital transformation strategy in alignment with the organisation’s goals.

People, process, and change management are Key ingredients to this sauce so that the taste is palatable to the organisation and goes down well. However, please consider the importance of having formal business processes in place for your respective functions and a Key person to be accountable for each function.

Technology will also play a key role in ensuring that your solution is the right fit for your organisation.

However, we also were clear that since we are a very large, complex, and diversified conglomerate with several industry segments, one size will not fit all. So we decided to proactively adopt a multimodel digital transformation programme.

How do you see the CIO role evolving in the future?

A Chief Information Officer’s role has always been critical, the way I have seen it and played it, as I have been one for several years with global multinationals. A CIO plays a very crucial role in the growth of an organisation by helping the company realise benefits from effective technology implementations.

As I have said before, it is not enough for the CIO to be just technically competent, he or she needs to have enough business acumen to be able to have an effective discussion at the roundtable. In fact, I am part of organisations where technology was viewed more at a strategic level and focused on business performance.

With over 75% of companies looking at deploying the digital-first strategy over the next 3-5 years, a CIO’s role becomes even more centerpiece. Of course, with the increased advancement and embracement of technology by organisations, a CIO will also be required to play the role of a CDO or a CTO combined into one.

Building effective partnerships, a collaborative ecosystem, leveraging on industry relations, and being a thought leader are some of the key competencies that a CIO will need to possess or Imbibe. As we advance, think of our role as more transformative in nature. Remember that as transformation agents, or catalysts, our actions and initiatives for the business with the technology vehicle will result in revenue growth.

THE RISE OF OBSERVABILITY

ROHINI KASTURI, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER AT SOLARWINDS, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY’S RECENTLY LAUNCHED CLOUD-NATIVE OBSERVABILITY PLATFORM CAN HELP TACKLE RISING IT COMPLEXITY

Why do enterprises need observability today?

If you look at any IT organisation, you’re running your business services and applications. For example, if you’re a financial services company, you have different finance applications that you expose to your customers. Then you will also have applications and services for your internal customers. First and foremost, you want to ensure these applications and services are always available and performing, and their security posture is good. You want to manage all the aspects of application and service lifecycle. It would help if you had visibility to understand what’s happening across your application and service stacks.

Is it a full-stack visibility platform?

Yes, we have created a full-stack visibility platform. We call it observability because we can monitor your network infrastructure, applications, databases, cloud services, and the integration surrounding it. We can monitor the whole distributed IT estate and see how they are interconnected as a service.

Historically, SolarWinds has been focused on on-prem solutions. Is the focus now shifting to the cloud?

We are trying to cover on-prem and public clouds as an entire data estate. In the traditional world, applications were on either on-prem or private cloud. So we were only monitoring that. Now applications are distributed across public and private clouds. Sometimes, you have the database in a private cloud, while the app tier is hosted in a public cloud. All sort of combinations exists today. What we’re doing with our SaaS strategy is ensuring we cover the entire public cloud and private cloud estate together so customers can decide where their applications and business services are, and so on.

Is this observability platform available on all public cloud environments?

We have launched our first version on AWS and another version on Azure, both natively available. The reason is that our retail customers may want to run only on Azure, not on AWS, because of competitive reasons. Or if you already have contractual agreements with other cloud providers. So we want to support the cloud of their choice so that their consumption becomes easy and the purchasing process becomes easy. We also plan to launch our version on Google Cloud in 2023.

Many enterprises have invested in monitoring tools over the years. So why would they want an observability solution?

Customers can solve point problems with these monitoring tools. For example, if you ask a customer about network or database performance, they might have an answer. But when there is an outage in a business service, it becomes tricky to find the root cause. Typically, when troubleshooting an outage, the DevOps team will start triaging and figuring out it is an application problem after two days. Then, the application team may find it is a database problem and reach out to the database team. So this navigation of multiple products and tools makes diagnosing root causes very difficult and time consuming.

What we can do with our observability solution is in a single pane of glass, you can see how the entire service stack is performing. And when there is an outage, you can drill down and find out which node is causing the problem in almost real-time and remediate it automatically because we are leveraging AI/ML technologies.

So you are leveraging AI/ML in this platform.

This is an AIOps-driven platform. Essentially, we have created a unified data telemetry platform, meaning we can ingest logs, metrics, traces, different types of queries, and configurations. So we can consume lots of data across networks, infrastructure, databases, applications, and cloud services into a common platform. Then we start correlating the data by leveraging AI and ML to get to the root causes quickly.

Is this based on elastic pricing?

One thing we did as part of the launch was to make pricing available on our website and it is based on the type of service. You can purchase application observability per app instance or database observability based on how much data is stored and so on. But if you want to have the whole service observability, it is a different price point. We made this flexible because every customer is trying to determine where they want to start the journey on observability.