Digital Bulletin - Issue 34 - Nov 21

Issue 34 | Nov ’21

DevOps DEBATE

BRIDGING THE GAP

Industry experts on how companies can instill a DevOps culture

Analysing IBM’s plans to skill 30m people by 2030

THE

GODFATHER The creator of process mining, Professor Wil van der Aalst, on joining Celonis as Chief Scientist and why the technology has only fulfilled a fraction of its potential

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

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ou could forgive Professor Wil van der Aalst for being pretty happy with his lot right now.

Widely recognised as being the man behind process mining - he is known as ‘The Godfather’ - van der Aalst recently joined market-leader Celonis as its Chief Scientist after a decade of advisory gigs across the sector.

Today, process mining is thriving and helping businesses across the industry spectrum improve how they operate, making them more effective, efficient and sustainable.

Speaking to Digital Bulletin, he says that he felt a hunger to get on the inside of an enterprise, where he feels like he can make the most difference and help achieve what he believes is enormous potential.

Some of the world’s leading companies are embracing process mining,

but it wasn’t always so. Van der Aalst recalls how when he began his work in the late 1990s, he was working in a field of one.

“When I was developing tools such as conformance checking that are wellknown today, nobody cared about it.

But gradually I was able to convince researchers in China, Australia and elsewhere that it was something worth working on.”

It just shows the importance of perseverance and having the courage of your convictions.

Elsewhere, we speak to three industry experts about IBM’s plans to skill 30 million people by 2030, while our debate looks at how businesses can best develop a culture of DevOps. For that and much more, read on.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

Contents 06 24 34 50

Month in Review News, regulations, funding and analysis

Data Intelligence Celonis’ new Chief Scientist talks to Digital Bulletin

Case Study NCOC

Digital innovation in Kazakhstan’s energy sector

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Future GreyOrange’s robotics revolution

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Security Securing the IT landscape with Tata Communications

Debate Developing a culture of DevOps

A Life in Tech Award-winning innovator Simon Robinson on his tech lessons

Closing Bulletin Nokia experts write about why 6G is ready

MONTH IN REVIEW

NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS tical industries. “This is about exposure to higher growth markets,” Emerson CEO Lal Karsanbhai said.

Headline: PayPal poured cold water over rumours it is lining up a blockbuster $45bn deal to buy Pinterest.

Info: In a brief statement, the payments giant said: “In response to market rumours regarding a potential acquisition of Pinterest by PayPal, PayPal stated that it is not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time.” In premarket trading, PayPal’s stock price increased by 6.2% to $255.20 after the statement.

Headline: Emerson Electric will merge its software units with smaller rival Aspen Technology in a deal for $11bn.

Info: The agreement will create a larger industrial software player, comprising Emerson’s grid modernisation technology and AspenTech’s software offerings to mining, manufacturing, and pharmaceu-

Headline: McAfee Enterprise and FireEye have announced Symphony Technology Group has closed its sponsored $1.2bn acquisition of intelligence-led security company FireEye. Info: The data integration company has agreed a $700m deal to buy HVR, a provider of enterprise data replication technology, which it says will allow it to “provide breakthrough database replication performance”. In addition, it has also closed a $565m Series D round, which takes its value to $5.6bn.

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FUNDING Headline: Israeli security startup Wiz has completed another round of private financing.

Info: Earlier this year it raised $350m, and now it has secured an additional $250m. This latest investment values Wiz at $6bn and came from the same investors as before, including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Greenoaks and Salesforce.

Wiz’s products are used by 15% of Fortune 500 companies.

Headline: Secure access service edge startup Cato Networks has announced its largest funding round to date of $200m, valuing it at $2.5bn.

Info: The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with the participation of existing investors Greylock, Aspect 8

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Ventures / Acrew Capital, Coatue, Singtel Innov8, and Shlomo Kramer.

Funds will be utilised to drive Cato’s sales, technology, and business growth.

Headline: Cloud-based observability platform Chronosphere has raised $200m in Series C funding, bringing the total raised to $255m.

Info: This round was led by previous investor General Atlantic. Other previous investors Addition, Greylock and Lux Capital and new investor Founders Fund also participated. It puts Chronosphere in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS companies to disclose unicorn status, as per Pitchbook.

NEWS UPDATE

PEOPLE Headline: ​​Reddit has announced the appointment of former Google Cloud executive Pali Bhat as its first Chief Product Officer.

Info: Bhat was most recently Vice President of Product and Design at Google Cloud and will report directly to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, according to a release. Before working for Google Cloud, Bhat held senior positions at SAP Labs and McKinsey & Co.

Headline: Facebook is to recruit 10,000 new people in the EU to work on its ‘metaverse’ ambitions.

Info: Mark Zuckerberg has spoken about leading the creation of an online world where individuals could meet and communicate in virtual spaces. The hiring will take place over the next five years

and will recruit into specialist roles such as engineering. “Europe is hugely important to Facebook,” read a statement.

Headline: IBM has announced plans to provide 30 million people with new tech skills by 2030.

Info: To achieve this goal, IBM is announcing a clear roadmap with more than 170 new academic and industry partnerships. “Talent is everywhere; training opportunities are not,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. According to the WEF, closing the global skills gap could add $11.5trn to global GDP by 2028.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com

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CHIPS FOR CHANGE Each month, Digital Bulletin analyses one of the digital policies that countries are enforcing with the goal of regulating the online world. In this issue, we look at the European Union’s Chips Act

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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DIGITAL POLICY

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hips power the world. As technology is increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives, semiconductors have become an in-demand commodity.

From computers to cars and home appliances, chips are fundamental to most people’s day-to-day activities. But what happens when they are in short supply?

Over the past year, there has been a global semiconductor shortage.

The semiconductor industry has been unable to meet the chip demand due to the knock-on effects of the pandemic and the surge in demand for electronics that followed it. Across Europe, production lines in a variety of sectors are now working at a reduced rate because of shortages and delivery delays.

“With the devices and the world as a whole getting connected, as they say, chips are the oil of the 21st century,”

says Madhav Durbha, Vice President, Supply Chain Strategy, Coupa Software.

“This coupled with the pandemic induced disruptions to the semiconductor supply chains explains the interest of the nations in a race towards chip dominance.”

To address this issue, the European Union (EU) has announced a new piece of legislation that aims to reduce the continent’s reliance on Asian manufacturers by increasing Europe’s production of semiconductors. The Chips Act will boost chip research, production capacity and international cooperation, and could establish a dedicated European Semiconductor Fund.

But this is not an ambiguous goal.

The EU has set a clear target of increasing its share of the global semiconductor market to 20% by 2030. In order to reach this goal, the European Commission will provide $160 billion ISSUE 34

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Mark Benson CTO at Logicalis UK&I

Madhav Durbha Vice President, Supply Chain Strategy, Coupa Software

Linley Gwenapp Principal analyst at The Linley Group

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of its COVID-19 recovery fund to tech projects on the continent.

“Semiconductors are at the centre of strong geostrategic interests, and at the core of the global technological race,” says Mark Benson CTO at Logicalis UK&I. “This has led to many global superpowers securing their supply in the most advanced chips as they understand it will increase their capacity and capability to act and drive their nation’s digital transformation.

“This act is projected to propel the EU to the forefront of innovation, with the EU members accounting for at least a fifth of the world market by value of innovative and sustainable semiconductors”.

The EU’s Chips Act follows the example of the US’s Innovation and Competition Act. This bill pledges $54 billion out of the total $250 billion to fund semiconductor production within US borders, pouring money into research, design and manufacturing initiatives, with the goal of outpacing China’s capabilities.

“Both the EU and US are reacting to their declining share of semiconductor production as Asian countries have gained ground with large government subsidies to chipmakers,” says Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “With a more level playing field, I would expect even Asia-based chipmakers such as Samsung and TSMC to consider building fabs in Europe.”

DIGITAL POLICY

If that is the goal, it seems to be working. The EU’s announcement has coincided with the opening of chipmaker Infineon’s new €1.6 billion chip plant in Europe and last July TSMC’s chairman Mark Liu told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting that it was considering building its first European semiconductor plant in Germany.

Moreover, last September Intel also announced its intentions of investing $95 billion in European chip-making facilities.

Of course, nothing is as simple as that.

Although these announcements and the EU’s legislation are great news for the chip industry, the target is high, and it will take time and collaboration between all the players involved.

“These things don’t happen quickly – building capability and capacity in Europe will take time,” Durbha explains.

“It will also take a significant amount of capital investment and ramping up tech skills for these regions to truly lead on the production of chips. And the crux

of the matter is that nations such as Taiwan and South Korea already have a formidable advantage in this area and the knowledge of how to do it.

“To ensure the success of these programmes, Europe will also need to find ways to bring together companies within the semiconductor and major customers across the value chain to help launch joint ventures, collaborative R&D efforts and technology partnerships. Government funding and support by ensuring favourable conditions to business growth and investments will go a long way. Collective power is much stronger than any one company or industry fighting it alone. It will take collective intelligence to make meaningful impact.”

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DOUBLING DOWN ON DATA

Neuroblade CEO and co-founder, Elad Sity, speaks to Digital Bulletin about the company’s $83m funding round and growth plans

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FUNDING

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ongratulations on the Series B funding round, what are your initial thoughts on the raise?

We are very proud of this funding round, not only because of the funds that will help us grow further, but most importantly because of the composition of investors that have participated in this round.

It includes a mix of financial VCs and all of our investors from previous rounds, along with highly strategic companies that are either design partners or part of our supply chain, and all are leading companies in their respective fields.

Could you tell us a bit about NeuroBlade and its ambitions?

Data is exploding, stored data doubles itself every 18-24 months. This

presents new challenges to data processing, and on the upside it sets up new opportunities for companies to gain more insights and faster. We built a data analytics accelerator to assist organisations in doing just that. Just as NVIDIA revolutionised the data centre with their GPU for compute bounded workloads, as data becomes more critical, NeuroBlade aims to be the defacto data centre solution for data intensive workloads.

How is the $83 million going to allow NeuroBlade to accelerate what it is doing?

The funding will be used to bring our technology to market, which means expanding our technical team and building a larger presence in the US and world-

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wide, establishing partnerships, and ramping up the mass production lines.

We plan to grow our design teams to enrich the product further. However, we are only scratching the surface of our data analytics acceleration and computational memory technology. Further growth will enable us to bring more of these ideas to life and we look forward to the future It takes the company’s funding to-date to $110 million, are we likely to see any further rounds in the near future?

We have finished the round with quite significant oversubscription, so the options are out there. As we move forward, hitting our target KPIs, we will look into bringing more funding in, to enable faster growth and expansion to more markets and additional workloads.

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What is different about NeuroBlade when it comes to data analytics?

NeuroBlade’s data analytics accelerator is an end-to-end full system solution. We brought our experience from multiple fields; hardware, silicon, software, and algorithms to build the entire system.

Most importantly, NeuroBlade’s accelerator is based on our unique processing in memory technology – XRAM. XRAM can be thought of as “steroids” to build hardware for data processing, and it enables us to reach new levels of performance over other solutions in the market.

Could you speak to us about some of the highlights of 2021 to-date?

Obviously, this funding round is a major milestone, but even more important is shipping our IMPU server solution to our

FUNDING

We are only scratching the surface of our data analytics acceleration and computational memory technology” early design partners. It’s been several years developing the technologies and gathering market insights that this product is built upon. Having customers evaluating this is the fruition of this long and exciting process and marks the shift from a technology company to a product company.

NeuroBlade is growing quickly, but could you outline the long-term vision for the business?

NeuroBlade’s primary focus at this stage is speeding up data analytics, building strategic partnerships, and a broad customer base. While doing so, we further develop our data analytics accelerator and processing in-memory

technology, which are both the foundations to build the next “GPU for data,” handling more workloads and more geographies, both on public cloud and the On-Prem markets.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The data centre has been rapidly changing over the last few years, as well as computer architectures. We at NeuroBlade, are proud to take part in these evolutions that will affect us for years to come. And hopefully, by enabling faster analysis of data, we’ll make our contribution towards building a better world for us all.

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Bridging the gap The skills gap is one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry and has led to IBM revealing plans to skill 30 million people in the next nine years. Is it the beginning of a trend?

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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he widening talent gap represents one of the generational issues facing the tech industry. A recent survey from research and advisory giant Gartner reported that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies.

As one of the world’s leading tech organisations, IBM announced that it is taking matters into its own hands in October, revealing plans to equip 30 million people with technology skills over the next nine years. The programme will cover more than 30 countries across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Clearly, 30 million people is more than even a business the size of IBM will need - it employs around 345,000 people -

Poonam Flammarion

and it cannot do it all alone. Key to the plan is establishing a clear roadmap that is underpinned by more than 170 new academic and industry partnerships.

These will include collaborations with universities, governments, and NGOs, particularly those that focus on groups such as underserved youth, women, and military veterans.

“Talent is everywhere; training opportunities are not,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. “This is why we must take big and bold steps to expand access to digital skills and employment opportunities so that more people – regardless of their background – can take advantage of the digital economy.

“This will help democratise opportunity, fill the growing skills gap, and give new generations of workers the tools they need to build a better future for themselves and society.”

The move from IBM is hugely important: for all the talk of the semiconductor shortage the skills gap represents an equally serious and longer-term issue and closing it could add $11.5 trillion to global GDP by 2028, according to the World Economic Forum.

Poonam Flammarion, Head of Talent Academy at cloud consultancy Cloudreach, says the programme is “hugely positive”: “The more that these kinds of initiatives take place, the more people will have access to resources.

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One of the biggest barriers for many people is getting access to programmes like these, so it is fantastic news. The skills gap seems to be an issue that every company is trying to address right now, which is leading to lots of large corporations launching these programmes.”

Cloudreach itself has established its own Talent Academy, albeit not on the scale outlined by IBM, with the aim of developing a new talent pool of skilled cloud experts. It has been set-up alongside the leading player in the cloud game, AWS, and will involve a two-year course of intensive, hands-on learning.

“The main skills that enterprises are looking for are cloud architects and senior resources, the people with extensive experience in cloud,” says Flammarion. “There’s a very

Don Schuerman

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small pool of people with those skills.

Especially because of the pandemic, everyone wants someone who is very experienced, someone who has done it all before or managed a large-scale migration project several times. There’s a shortage of people who’ve done this, though, because cloud technologies are now becoming increasingly mainstream and more widely adopted across industries and companies.”

One of the critical issues that is driving the gap is the breakneck speed at which technology is evolving, making it incredibly difficult to deliver skilled professionals at the same rate.

Addressing the dearth, Don Schuerman, CTO & Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems, says: “One factor is the desperate hunt for specialist skills to update legacy systems. Candidates for this are either on the cusp of retirement, or so rare that the pool of eligible candidates is getting very shallow indeed. Of course, there are other fields like AI where the shortage tracks back to how these new areas of demand have become so important so fast, and in those cases, training of experts will always struggle to keep up with demand.”

One of the emerging trends in the technology space is the rise of low and no-code tools, and Schuerman believes it is one of a handful of solutions that

NEWS ANALYSIS

will play a crucial role in closing the skills gap.

“When skills are so scarce, low code opens the door to a wider range of candidates to be hired or trained into the role of developing software, including those without knowledge of specific code. It also allows the end users of key systems to do their own low coding and develop solutions that resolve issues more directly.

“Low-code software allows for people with basic digital knowledge to run, update and create new business processes. These systems can be used by all employees within the organisation, not only the IT team. The transformative

effect of low coding is often summed up by the term ‘citizen developers’.

“Research from Gartner has predicted that by 2023 there will be four times as many citizen developers at large enterprises than professional developers.

This fosters collaboration between different teams within a company and enables processes to be streamlined to increase productivity.”

As well as low code, much stock is being placed in AI becoming more accessible and agile, making it easier to obtain and analyse data.

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increasing profits. In time to come, all employees may need to become more familiar with AI solutions working alongside them,” says Schuerman.

“But that also means organisations need to bring in new skills beyond just data science: they need to be able to think about how data is secured, and have AI governance in place to ensure that AI is used in a way that is transparent, ethical, and empathetic to customers and employees.”

With the skills gap more pronounced than ever, the pressure is on for all stakeholders to come together to find viable solutions and set out a realistic roadmap to ensure the tech skills 22

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needed currently and in the future could be provided to industry.

Alan Hiddleston, director of corporate learning at D2L, says: “As IBM’s new P-TECH Programme confirms, greater collaboration is needed among policy-makers, government leaders, and businesses if we are to navigate this hurdle and propel our economic recovery. The skills gap needs to be addressed on two fronts. The education sector and corporate learning and development have a joint responsibility to prepare individuals for both the jobs of today and tomorrow.

“To instil a culture of lifelong learning, students will need to be taught early on

NEWS ANALYSIS

that learning does not stop after tertiary education. Similarly, the demand for training programmes and opportunities will continue to grow after the pandemic, so the workforce must accept that lifelong learning will remain a constant feature of their working lives.”

Looking ahead, Flammarion says that the rate of technological advancement means that any disconnect between the need of businesses and what is being taught by academia is likely to endure, with enterprises having to pick up the slack.

“Almost every university offers a data science or computing course, yet are lacking in teaching soft skills, such as presentation or other skills that are

Alan Hiddleston

essential for customer-facing roles in IT and consulting,” she says.

“Increasingly, companies like Cloudreach are almost taking on the role of a university themselves, and taking the initiative and the responsibility for continuously training staff on the latest technologies. This is one of the reasons why we created the Talent Academy, because we have to act ourselves and we can’t always rely on universities to meet our needs or teach the skills that seem to be missing.

“The demand for talent is only going to increase - it’s not going away.

Hopefully initiatives like IBM’s and Cloudreach’s Talent Academy will lessen that gap but who knows if the gap will ever be fully closed.”

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TRUST THE PROCESS Twenty years ago, Professor Wil van der Aalst found himself alone in the pursuit of process mining. Today, a thriving ecosystem of process mining exists in enterprise and academia alike. Speaking to Digital Bulletin, he reveals why he’s giving up a number of advisory positions to join Celonis as Chief Scientist, why process mining has only scratched the surface of its potential and being known as ‘The Godfather’

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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CELONIS

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hen it comes to computer science, there can be very few people walking the earth with the credibility of Professor Wil van der Aalst.

Van der Aalst is widely credited as the inventor of process mining and the first to coin the term in academics and in business. He is also seen as one of the world’s leading experts in business process management, workflow management, simulation, concurrency, and process modeling.

For the uninitiated, process mining is an analytical discipline for discovering, monitoring, and improving processes as they actually are, by extracting knowledge from event logs readily 26

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available in the existing IT systems. It offers objective, fact-based insights, derived from actual data, that help companies audit, analyse, and improve their existing business processes by answering both compliance-related and performance-related questions.

Over the past decade, van der Aalst has juggled his academic work - he is a professor at RWTH Aachen University in Germany leading the Process and Data Science group - with a number of advisory and board positions at companies in the process mining space.

He has somehow also found the time to be one the most cited computer scientists in the world, publishing over 250 journal papers, 22 books (as author

CELONIS

or editor), 550 refereed conference/ workshop publications, and 80 book chapters. All of which has led to van der Aalst being given the moniker of ‘The Godfather of Process Mining’ - more on that later.

As the biggest player in the process mining market (approximately 60% market share), van der Aalst has spent much of his time over the last 10 years advising Celonis. “We go a long way back,” he tells Digital Bulletin. “If you look at the market share, then it is clearly the leader so if I was going to join one company working in process mining on a full-time basis then it’s very obvious which one I’d have chosen.”

So when Celonis came to van der Aalst over the summer with the suggestion that he join full-time as the company’s Chief Scientist, he had an important decision to make. With process mining having moved on from a concept to a proven technology, he wanted to have a more direct impact on the next stage of its evolution.

“Process mining is now widely adopted, it’s not a novel idea. Previously, you were able to answer a question by developing a new algorithm in a lab in an offline setting. But today the real interest is applying processes and mining at scale, where there are millions of events taking place. That is the type of thing you can only really

Today the real interest is applying processes and mining at scale, where there are millions of events taking place” Professor Wil van der Aalst

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do if you’re inside an organisation. It’s also true that if you’re only working on the fringes or just at a university, you’re not going to have thousands of people using your software. I felt I wanted to change my focus.”

With the move to Celonis rubberstamped, he will now step away from advisory board positions with other technology vendors. He will support Celonis in accelerating its leadership in the process mining and execution management space and will work closely with the Celonis product and engineering organisation, as well as the Celonis Academic Alliance to advance process mining innovations in both the commercial and academic sectors.

His history with Celonis is well-documented but he admits to not being bowled over by its tech offering in 2011.

However, he says, Celonis’ founders were able to pull ahead of their rivals because they recognised that the company’s software needed to be understood beyond the narrow community of data scientists.

“They saw what I and other companies did not, which was that the results of process mining needed to be visible to everyone. If you take the example of Siemens or BMW, you’ll find thousands of people consuming process mining results, rather than just one analyst sitting in a corner thinking about how 28

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processes can be improved - that was a key differentiator.”

Van der Aalst says that advantage has been pressed home by the company’s Execution Management System, a platform that was launched in 2020 and sits on top of processes and systems, unlocking capacity in real time. It leverages Celonis’ process mining core to draw data from underlying systems and identify and measure capacity barriers.

As Chief Scientist at Celonis, he will combine a role at the strategic level with working alongside departments to improve algorithms and techniques, he reveals.

“So for example, within Celonis there is the core engine team, which is the heart of our system, so we are constantly looking at how we can make our process discovery better and more scalable. Those are really some of our core capabilities and I’ll be helping to improve them. At the same time, I’m also working with a team that is adding simulation capabilities, so using process mining to discover what the process is.

Once you have defined that, you can use digital twins and similar technologies to simulate situations and make decisions based on those outcomes.

“The third part of my role is in the Academic Alliance and being active at conferences and events to make people aware of what Celonis is doing. We’ve

CELONIS

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The Celonis EMS platform already put together a completely new course which explains how the Celonis system works to extract data from SAP. You only really trust something when you truly understand it and I can bridge that gap between the practical aspects of process mining and the theory behind it. And it’s not just students, I think there are many people within the industry who would like to have a better level of understanding.”

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Clearly, part of van der Aalst’s mission is to pass on his knowledge of process mining and the benefits it has for enterprise to the next generation of data scientists, engineers and technologists.

Process mining is a field that emerged directly from academic research, “there are very few examples where the connection is so direct,” he says.

“Nobody ever asked for process mining and that sounds strange

CELONIS

because it is quite obvious now that companies should be using it. I spent a decade persuading people of the possibilities and often they’d say, ‘Wow, we did not realise this was possible, this is something we should have,’ and then never use it anyway.

“So the readiness to implement these techniques can often take some time.

But process mining is reaching a stage of maturity where research has provided a number of algorithms which can only be tested and utilised in the field at real scale. We are working with datasets that would not have seemed possible 20 years ago.”

Celonis, clearly, is a company that has grand plans suitable for one of the world’s highest value tech startups.

A supersized IPO seems inevitable “Celonis is clearly in a great position but it is not my job to make any statements about an IPO” - while the company’s co-CEO Alexander Rinke has also stated his ambition to achieve carbon neutrality by the turn of the year.

Van der Aalst doesn’t address the carbon neutral point directly, instead focusing on how process mining can be utilised by businesses to improve their own carbon footprints.

“I’m from a town in Germany which flooded for the first time in history this summer, so it is very clear that something has changed and something

We are working with datasets that would not have seemed possible 20 years ago” needs to be done - it’s undeniable at this point. What process mining can do is introduce real efficiencies that have a direct impact on the environment. That impact will become a driver of digitisation in the same way we consider time, money and quality.

“I often speak about the Pareto principle [The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes] because there might be the thought that why do you care if only 20% of your processes are not running smoothly?

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But it is the 20% that is causing a lot of friction and if you can improve that 20% you usually ignore, there is huge potential for improvement, not just in terms of money but also the use of resources.”

By van der Aalst’s reckoning, we have utilised perhaps 1% of process mining’s potential applications - “it can be applied in practically any organisation that has operational processes,” he says - and there is confidence that the scope of its use is about to grow rapidly, beyond sales and procurement where it is typically utilised currently “At the same time, many small and medium-sized businesses are not using process mining and that threshold will

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be lowered. If you look at the amount of data companies are producing, that is just a no-brainer, we will see the need for more data to be tightly connected and of better quality.

“There is also the need to collect and understand data in real-time. When a nurse in a hospital is making notes on paper and then entering it into a system, that data is not a true reflection of what is happening, which is why there is a move towards smart boards and such. All of these factors will lead to a wider adoption of process mining.”

As our time with van der Aalst draws to a close, there is only one question left to ask: how does he feel about his nickname?

CELONIS

It sometimes feels like a big family where many things are related to my original work so being known as the Godfather is okay with me”

“Well I did also read a newspaper article that called me the Pope of process mining recently. I have four children so I don’t think I would be a very good Pope,” he laughs.

“The way I look at it is that when I started this work in the late 1990s, I was the only person doing it, and after that my research group was the only one in the world working on process mining. When I was developing tools such as conformance checking that are well-known today, nobody cared about it. But gradually I was able to convince

researchers in China, Australia and elsewhere that it was something worth working on.

“Today, the process mining community is very vibrant and I’m connected to so many people within it, whether that’s because someone did a PhD with me, or worked with me in the first process mining companies or one of the later spin-offs. It sometimes feels like a big family where many things are related to my original work so being known as the Godfather is okay with me.”

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CONNECTING

KAZAKHSTAN Digital transformation is a fundamental piece in the growth plans of many Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan. The team at North Caspian Operating Company, the largest offshore oil and gas producer in the country, takes Digital Bulletin behind the scenes of its new innovative initiatives

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía PROJECT DIRECTOR: Jack Walsh

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NORTH CASPIAN OPERATING COMPANY

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he past two years have forced the world to adapt, and Kazakhstan has been no exception. Faced with the national lockdown and historically low oil prices that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, the country set its sights on digital transformation as the way forward, a process that will bring more than $30 trillion in revenue to the global economy in the next decade.

Three years before COVID began, Kazakhstan had already launched its first major digital initiative. The Digital Kazakhstan programme is focused on accelerating the development pace of the country through the implementation of digital technologies in key sectors of its economy with the goal of becoming one of the top 30 global economies by 2050.

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The programme has a clear protagonist: North Caspian Operating Company (NCOC), the Operator under the Production Sharing Agreement in respect of the North Caspian Sea dated 18 November 1997 (the “NCSPSA”) and the largest offshore oil and gas producer in the country.

Change is a key part of NCOC’s DNA. The shareholders of NCOC are seven companies (including National Company KMG, Agip CS, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total Energies, China National Petroleum Corporation and Inpex). In 2009 North Caspian Operating Company B.V. becomes a new Operator under the NCSPSA, with Agip KCO, NCPOC, EMKI and SDK as agent companies, replacing Agip KCO which had acted as Operator since 2001. In 2015 NCOC N.V.

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becomes a single Operator for the North Caspian Project. The transition to virtual work provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic was just another step in the company’s transformative journey.

“A company’s ability to transform and change is becoming more and more important,” says Adam Lowmass, a former Company’s employee who was NCOC’s Transformation Manager when COVID-19 begun and therefore became the man tasked with the responsibility of overseeing the company’s digital transition.

“NCOC’s ability to transform and its history of successfully going through these transformations gives it a competitive advantage over other companies,” Lowmass says.

Before the spring of 2020, the majority of the NCOC staff relied on office desktops and in-person meetings to access and share information. Overnight, that disappeared. Projects that the company had had in the pipeline for months had to be implemented in a matter of weeks.

“It showed that a digital transformation can be very quick,” Lowmass says. “It doesn’t have to take years or months to put something in place. Previously, a lot of people were sceptical that it could be done, but COVID really showed the durability of the digital strategy.”

In less than 15 days, NCOC completely transformed its operations and transitioned to online work. In an era when oil prices often fluctuate, NCOC’s digital

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NCOC’s ability to transform and its history of successfully going through these transformations gives it a competitive advantage over other companies” Adam Lowmass

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+ Adam Lowmass transformation strategy has been designed to ensure that the company can extract maximum value from its business by improving its efficiency, processes and output quality.

“There are opportunities to introduce new digital/IT technologies to get better insights, to extract more value, and to enable new ways of working,” says Roelant Kas, the company’s Technical IT Manager. “The automation of the processes has really helped to increase efficiency, reduce costs and to make life easier for our people.”

As part of this commitment to transformation and digitalisation, NCOC created for the first time the role of Head of Digital, a position now held by Natalya Taylor.

She explains how the pandemic provided NCOC with the final push to implement a series of projects that had been a long time coming, such as automating

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internal and external reports and developingdata visualisation tools for the production management.

“We are growing and developing and realising what’s most important for our business,” Taylor says Over the years, NCOC has established a solid digital/IT Service Foundation, through its data centres, striking the right balance between on-premise and cloud computing; reliable & secure operations for field telecoms, IT infrastructure, end-user computing services; professional information, data & analytics capabilities; mature application & platform services to support specific business process automation.

This transformation has allowed the company to create real-time dashboards and analytics platforms that will help NCOC better understand its business, and how to improve it to future-proof the organisation.

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“Data is at the heart of digital,” Kas says.

“Access to quality-assured data, and building analytics capabilities is key to enabling any digital transformation.

“With the digital foundation that we have in place, a fair amount of our NCOC business processes are digitised and automated.

This has tremendously increased the efficiency of our employees and reduced our costs. For example, we recently introduced our HR end-to-end platform and we have also introduced mobile solutions for field operations to make life easier for them.”

These new capabilities are completely transforming NCOC’s ways of working.

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However, in order to ensure that NCOC could implement them effectively and leverage its full capabilities, the company relied on its trusted partnership ecosystem, rooted in deep and collaborative partnerships with suppliers and vendors. When the world ground to a halt, these partnerships prove to be crucial.

Cisco has provided the backbone of all IT network infrastructure and connectivity for NCOC. As one of the leading technology companies, Cisco is committed to realising the vision of Digital Kazakhstan and has been part of many initiatives to help its businesses flourish in the new digital era,

“Cisco brought its vast experience to NCOC and helped make the company’s transformation and journey successful” Adam Lowmass, NCOC’s former Transformation Manager

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Data is at the heart of digital. Access to quality-assured data, and building analytics capabilities is key to enabling any digital transformation” Roelant Kas

including NCOC. The company’s expertise and technology know-how have powered NCOC’s transition and helped the company adapt to new ways of working.

“Cisco brought its vast experience to NCOC and helped make the company’s transformation and journey successful,” Lowmass says.

But the transition to remote work could not have been successfully implemented without one key player: Microsoft.

As a long-term partner of NCOC, Microsoft has been fundamental to

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NCOC’s digitalisation journey. Similarly to many businesses around the world, NCOC relied fully on Microsoft Teams as its main platform for virtual collaboration during Kazakhstan’s lockdown and leveraged Azure Virtual Desktop to successfully transition to remote work. In addition, NCOC implemented an Enterprise Data Platform based on Microsoft Azure and Power BI, to better leverage data analytics, The company used Agile to grow the platform and ensured that it contained clean datasets for specific use cases.

“Power BI is really powerful and provides a lot of flexibility and opportunities to visualise the data and make it more readable and understandable,” Taylor says.

Partnerships have been key to NCOC’s transition. But, at the end of the day, the true heart of the company lies within its people.

For NCOC, all its employees are part of one family, from its directors to its contractors. During the pandemic, the company has been working tirelessly to care for the mental health of all its employees and ensure their health and safety.

“Our key to success is people, their attitude, commitment and focus, and the fact that we just love our company and love our country and we want to keep producing to support the economy of Kazakhstan,” Taylor says. “That’s the main key to success, not only in this pandemic but in general, in any kind of crisis.”

On March 13th, 2020, Mansur Nazarov, NCOC’s Communications Advisor was preparing to leave the country. He was getting everything ready for his trip when he received a call from the company informing him that all business trips had been banned and that he would have to begin working from home.

Mansur was frustrated when he heard the news, but now he’s glad he was able to stay with his family and is thankful for the personal support that the company has provided through the crisis. For people like Mansur, more than the salary rises and the broadband provisions, it is NCOC’s preoccupation with employees’ families that he is most thankful for.

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was one of the drivers behind the HR responsibility for their own development,” transformation project, which looked to Assel says. “They can track and manage create a single HR platform where data was their career path in a more efficient way, meaningful and easily accessible. and the solution gives a lot of “NCOC needed an integrated opportunity from the transparsystem to manage all HR applicaency perspective, interaction with tions to maintain data the employees, and integrity and financial to optimise most of exposure, in order to the HR processes.” study the company’s It is because of HR needs,” says NCOC’s commitAssel Nakhimova, ment to people that, IT Project Lead at when it came to NCOC. choosing a partner To achieve this, to support NCOC’s Assel’s team HR transformacombined the tion project, the power of cloudcompany selected based solution TerraLink. The Success Factors international IT and Natalya Taylor and the company’s business consulting on-premise system to company has a very create one single HR strong presence in platform. Although it Kazakhstan - it has is still early to gauge the largest SAP team the success of the in the region - as project, NCOC has well as an approach already been able that focuses on to reduce its siloed developing local systems, increase talent, that perfectly process efficiency aligns with NCOC’s and transparency, mission. promoting data integrity across the company.

TerraLink was present throughout “Success Factor allows employees to NCOC’s transformation from a consortium manage their own personal data and take into a single company in 2013, when it

Our key to success is definitely people: their attitude, their commitment, their focus, and the fact that we just love our company and love our country”

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NORTH CASPIAN OPERATING COMPANY

In Partnership: TerraLink TerraLink has been vital to NCOC’s transition into the digital era, providing support in the areas of SAP consultancy, support, maintenance, information management and development and enhancement services.

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helped it merge the IT system of all its subsidiaries and address the issues that came with duplicated data and information systems.

Since then, TerraLink has provided NCOC with support in the areas of SAP consultancy, support, maintenance, development and enhancement services, but also in relation to information management, consultancy and service provision.

In addition to HR transformation and the transition to remote work, another area where digitalisation directly impacts people’s lives is related to safety., Taylor’s vision is to use digital tools to track every step of the supply chain, and utilise drones to conduct specialised monitoring of pipelines, thereby reducing the technician’s exposure to toxic fluids or ultrahigh pressures.

“Hardware and software tools can protect the environment, people and company assets,” Taylor says. “The digital space gives us plenty of opportunities worldwide, you know, to simplify, to stay safe, and to grow.”

This concern for employee safety was present before the pandemic. Until February 2021, the company was a couple of days short of reaching its goal of going one full year without a single lost time injury recorded on its sites, which Mansur considers “a great achievement.”

Kas adds: “It’s all about people: how

they adapt, continue to learn and improve.

In NCOC we have great teams working together in an ecosystem of industry partners, suppliers, and government stakeholders.”

With its digital transformation projects, NCOC wants to be an example for Kazakhstan, and it aims to support the country’s goal of becoming more digitally advanced. Moreover, the company is passionate about training its country’s youth, to ensure that the new generation of Kazakhs has the necessary skills to drive the country forward into the digital era.

“Kazakhstan is a very dynamic developing country with lots of young talent, particularly interested in digital. So it’s a very bright future, not only for NCOC but also for Kazakhstan as a whole.”

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GREYORANGE

RISE OF THE

ROBOTS Speaking to Digital Bulletin, Akash Gupta, CTO of GreyOrange, talks about the company’s expansion plans, the trajectory of the robotics sector and the relationship with man and machine

INTERVIEW BY: James Henderson

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H

i Akash, thanks for speaking with Digital Bulletin. Let’s start with one of the big questions - what impact has the pandemic had on the robotics space?

The pandemic accelerated the need for robotics immensely. We saw years of progress in weeks and more companies looking to invest in robotics and automation to combat labour shortages due to social distancing rules in warehouses and self-isolation regulations.

We also saw the pandemic impact other areas of the industry, for example, many brands that had already invested learned more about how robotics can be used to help with unforeseen challenges. The pandemic also demonstrated how flexible this kind of technology is, and how brands can use robotic technologies irrespective of changes in the market or consumer behaviours.

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How has GreyOrange and the robotics industry as a whole adapted to the challenges posed by COVID-19?

We have spent more time and energy educating the market and articulating how robotics can enable flexibility as we move forward. Prioritising helping customers adapt to changes they needed to make to cope with the pandemic has also been important to the team. The pandemic had a huge impact on every facet of society, so ensuring that every customer was able to deal with challenges was a priority.

As a result, we are looking to focus our time on ensuring we have the bandwidth to deal with the expanding market and serve our existing and future customer base.

Akash Gupta

GREYORANGE

“As more and more companies start to understand and adopt these technologies in warehouses, we will see the realisation of their potential” Away from COVID-19, what are the main technologies and trends driving innovation in robotics?

Innovation is constant in the general robotics industry. Things like battery technologies and the navigation space are always being updated to match the market. With navigation, it’s about how do robots know where they are?

We are seeing a lot more cameras being involved with this and robots being able to visualise where they are. I think the power and scale of these two ongoing trends are just starting to be realised as it will have a huge impact on the industry in years to come.

In the fulfilment industry, in particular, learning how we can apply flexible robotics in vertical directions is something market disruptors are curious about. We have seen robotics being

placed in large fulfilment centres and this is driving innovation, but I think the next step is looking at how robotics can be used to exploit the height of modern fulfilment centres. Robotics are becoming smarter and smarter every day and the fulfilment industry can capitalise on these capabilities with enough innovative thinking.

Could you tell us a bit about GreyOrange’s robotics and operating systems?

Our physical presence in fulfilment centres consists of our Ranger robots which can be used to optimise centres and distribution facilities. The robots do this by using artificial intelligence to perfectly time the movement of inventory around a distribution hub to ensure that the floor runs smoothly.

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In terms of software and operating systems, we have GreyMatter AI cloud software which acts as the brains behind the operations of distribution centres. It works by calculating the most efficient path for the inventory and organises the motion of that inventory in relation to the flow of the floor.

This, in turn, will ensure that the floor of the fulfilment centres operate with maximum efficiency. Our robotic and software systems are designed to work together and continuously improve each other’s intelligence, which maximises the flow of the floor.

How does robotics interact with humans and how is this relationship between man and machine evolving?

The relationship between man and machine is evolving slowly and steadily.

People are realising that robotics can help staff to use their skillsets in the places that will optimise business operations and improve productivity. This is also leading to a lot of upskilling which is good for industry and society - it is encouraging people to learn more technical skills. Upskilling within the industry is even more pivotal given the ongoing supply chain crisis the world is currently

Over the next three to five years, we would expect that nearly every retailer or ecommerce brand would have some experience with robotics”

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GREYORANGE

turing is pretty mature in using robotics technologies. With the pace that technology changes, there’s always more industries that can gain from it.

seeing. Robotics and automation can fill the gaps in vacancies while warehouse staff take on the jobs that need a human touch. I think, as well, there are enough collaborative systems within the industry that people are now using them to understand how to leverage robotics to solve challenges that they were struggling to solve manually.

Which industry sectors have the most to gain from robotics technology?

The manufacturing industry has gained the most from robotics in the recent past. It is still quite early for supply chains to really show significant strides from using robotics and automation because they’re very new and transformative for this space. As more and more companies start to understand and adopt these technologies in warehouses, we will see the realisation of their potential. Looking from a growth perspective, warehousing has more to gain, but if you look at the overall gains so far across all industries, manufac-

GreyOrange recently announced a strategic partnership with Conveyor & Caster, could you tell us a bit about that?

We want to enable AI robotic fulfilment for as many companies as possible.

Conveyor & Caster is a market leader in material handling solutions, and this partnership allows us to create more access across the Midwestern United States. As modern warehouse and distribution facilities are burdened with labour shortages across the globe and instralogistical challenges, businesses are investing in flexible automation to transform warehouses. The partnership allows us to offer our customers flexibility and the scale needed to meet modern fulfilment demands, as well as increasing capacity and accuracy to help achieve growth targets.

You’ve also recently scaled your reach in Belgium, is that part of wider expansion plans for GreyOrange?

Yes, one of our customers was looking to expand into Belgium and we wanted to help them expand and replicate the success they had seen with GreyMatter and the Ranger robots in The ISSUE 34

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Netherlands. Our target is to improve efficiencies across several warehouses in Europe, especially with the surges in ecommerce that are expected over the festive season. The challenges being posed by labour shortages are global, and automation and robotics are solutions that enable brands to improve the efficiency of their fulfilment.

As customer demands increase across the globe, retailers must be prepared.

Our expansion plans will allow retailers in Europe and further afield to exceed customer expectations and prepare for further increases in ecommerce.

How do you expect the robotics industry to develop over the next three to five years?

With the rate robotics technology is maturing, and as fulfilment and supply requirements and capabilities develop, we can expect the market to evolve quickly. Over the next three to five years, we would expect that nearly every retailer or ecommerce brand would have some experience with robotics. In the same timeframe, people will be more educated on robotics and how to use it to achieve their individual operational needs. As more businesses adopt robotics and AI fulfilment software, the knowledge and accessibility of these solutions will also increase, broadening the industry and further expanding across different markets.

What are some of the goals for GreyOrange over the same time period?

Our biggest priority is around how we can enable more customers to use GreyMatter to its highest potential and ensure retailers and ecommerce brands are truly omnichannel. This is intertwined with customer satisfaction and how GreyMatter can help to reach even

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higher satisfaction scores. The times of customer satisfaction being ‘good enough’ are gone. Modern commerce and the desire for omnichannel operations means it must be a priority for retailers as consumers are the drivers of the change we see.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Yes - the core software stack in fulfilment is evolving. This is causing businesses to look for the right set of

software to get the largest return on hardware investments and to achieve best results. Also, I think considering whether you are ready to adopt robotics is just as important as adopting robotics itself. Are you robotics ready? Are you automation ready? These are the questions that retailers, ecommerce providers and brands should be asking themselves.

Ask yourself those questions before you even consider adopting robotics.

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PLAYING

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SAFE

Avinash Prasad, Head of Managed Security Services at Tata Communications, discusses the rise in ransomware attacks over the last year and the strategies companies can use to share information securely

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

I

n a digital world, security and connectivity are two sides of the same coin. As remote work becomes a constant, and organisations move their information management systems to the cloud, the need to safely share sensitive information is more relevant than ever before.

The rise of high-profile cyberattacks in the past 18 months - such as SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, JBS or Kayesa - have served to illustrate further the need for organisations to be able to secure their information as it is transferred between stakeholders. Over the first half of 2021, Check Points has identified a 93% 58

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increase in the frequency of ransomware attacks, compared to the same period last year. As a result, it is no longer enough to secure the place where the information is stored. Now, the whole network needs to be completely protected.

“The notion of connectivity has changed,” says Avinash Prasad, Head of Managed Security Services at Tata Communications. “Pleasure and work are going to be linked as the global internet expands and gets better with 5G and IoT and new technologies. And security needs to be able to cater to that.”

As a company that carries around 30% of the world’s internet routes, network

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safety is paramount to Tata Communications. The Tata subsidiary provides connectivity to over 190 countries and connects business to 80% of the world’s cloud giants. Prasad’s team is responsible for developing innovative cybersecurity networks that ensure the safety of clients’ connections.

Despite the recent rise in media attention regarding cybersecurity, Prasad stresses that the need for network safety is no greater now than it was a few years ago. Nonetheless, he recognises the effect that highly publicised cases such as the Solarwinds ransomware attack have served to bring these issues to the forefront of the industry debates.

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“It’s been a hot topic for much longer than a few months now,” Prasad says.

“What tends to happen is that, as the context of the situation changes, it highlights some other new aspect of cybersecurity, that’s something that we have clearly seen. And that happened in the context of the pandemic, and it made enterprises suddenly become elastic to certain forces that earlier, they were not really open to.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and the opening up of the enterprise forced business leaders to rethink their security strategies and adapt them to the cloud and the new ways of working. Remote work blurred the boundaries of a compa-

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ny’s enterprise, which now did not only refer to what was present in the company’s offices but also all the technology used by people in their own homes, all around the world. Companies became more open but also more vulnerable.

Has the number of attacks increased in the last year? To an extent, it has, Prasad says.

“But the attacks were also there earlier for sure, and will continue to be there,” he adds. “Because if there’s something to be gained or an adversary with a certain motive, that will happen, and there are more tools available out there.”

For some time, security was kept close to where sensitive data is. However, now all most of the data is on the cloud, IT systems require more comprehensive security frameworks and tighter verification processes that account for the fact that information is being accessed from many devices and locations.

“From the Tata Communication standpoint, we need to be concerned about the users, we need to be concerned about the devices and we need to be concerned about the connections that are getting established, end-to-end,” Prasad says. “And then we need to think of where the systems are going to live, where the applications are going to live, where the data is going to live.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, Tata Communications has been speaking

The notion of connectivity has changed. Pleasure and work are going to be linked as the global internet expands and gets better with 5G and IoT and new technologies.

And security needs to be able to cater to that” Avinash Prasad

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to customers to understand their main sources of concern in relation to network security. The most common response was, according to Prasad, the fear of the security risks that came with giving employees access to sensitive environments remotely.

“The more advanced the work which is being done by a certain user, the more the potential of damage that could happen because of what they’re doing,” Prasad says.

“When we spoke with these customers, the fact that this is an intelligent, smart, white-collar worker, who now needs to be given access to sensitive environments, and they need to be able to work remotely was a general concern. And how do we

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partition the fact that they’re using the same network, the same connection, the same device for doing their own personal stuff?”

To fight this, Prasad underlines the importance of taking security down to the level of the devices in order to address the gap created by the blurring of lines between the personal and professional internet spaces. If the devices are left unsecured, they can compromise the security of the whole

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network. Only then you can ensure full control over the network.

Prasad’s team has enabled a solution that runs a series of checks when a device connects to the company network, allowing employees to terminate a connection at any point when a suspicion of a malicious actor is detected. Moreover, the company has also integrated new perimeter controls so that gateways and doors were much smaller. The goal was to maintain the

same type of control and traffic connections that will allow for live inspection, within the new system.

“While the notion is that it’s opening up things for you, and you are moving things out of your own secure perimeter, actually, you can have more controls that support you in terms of your security,” Prasad says. “There are certain parts of our solutions that have been rapidly transforming, not so much by way of technology, but the way they ISSUE 34

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have to be implemented to cater to these kinds of requirements. And that is something that we see happening more and more going forward.”

However, Tata Communications did not only help customers undergo this process of transformation: it underwent one itself. And the best example of this are the company’s Cyber Security Response Centres (CSRC), which provide 24/7 cybersecurity services to clients all over the world. The centres incorporate interactive visual walls, dashboard displays, 3D object recognition and a virtual reality experience to provide a glimpse of the security capabilities that can help organisations build 64

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and monitor cyber security platforms, as suited to their business needs.

However, COVID-19 forced the CSRCs to transform themselves, to be able to meet the huge demand for its services, while also ensuring the health of the workers.

“Looking at how to build more capacity in that physical facility, it became much more about how to enable them to be effective and efficient,” Prasad says. “That means ensuring that smooth handoffs are happening between shifts in the virtual world. But I’m happy to say that we were able to keep the lights on playing it at all times, and the CSRCs are still serving all those customers in a redefined model.”

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However, at the same time that the pandemic was shifting the way enterprises operate, there is another technology that is transforming telecoms: 5G. “5G is a story which is not directly connected to the pandemic,” Prasad says. “5G is a much bigger industry shift that is happening gradually in different countries for different services with different providers. But with this current environment that we are living in, the consumption of 5G will be even faster.

“5G can open up environments and improve performance but, at the same time, it can also give that kind of access highway to the malicious elements, which is something that needs to be thought of.”

5G is the future, but the cloud is our present. As many companies transition into cloud-based systems, Tata Communications is focusing on enabling security systems that allow companies to use as many services flexibly from the cloud as possible, while maintaining the agility that is the essence of the cloud.

“We are creating a model, which caters to a world which will be leveraging cloud heavily and which will expect all those qualities of flexibility, agility, more stability in the cloud; and security should be able to reflect that,” Prasad says. “So, that’s one major focus for us: create a security framework, consumption model around that, and then keep

It’s about securing the cloud world as we rapidly move toward that and beyond” expanding and sifting as the customers expand that environment.”

But technologies are not the one thing that evolves. Rules and frameworks do too.

The recent wave of ransomware attacks all over the world have targeted all industries and taken many forms, forcing organisations to rethink the way that they think of secure practices and malicious users. The notion of what makes a “good” user is constantly changing, and security systems need to be able to change with it.

“We are looking at it in terms of: How do we remodel the notion of security from more standard black and white rules to thinking around analytics and being able to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a very dynamic fashion?” Prasad says. “It’s about securing the cloud world as we rapidly move toward that and beyond.”

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DELIVERING

DEVOPS This month’s topic for high-end tech debate is: “How can enterprises effectively build a culture of DevOps and why is it so important?”

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A shift in mindset is critical

Michael Cote

Staff Technologist at VMware Tanzu

Agile and DevOps approaches have brought configuration, monitoring and infrastructure to project and product management. This has led to an all-too common problem - lack of ownership.

While small start-ups or isolated teams in large organisations can be full-stream owners, in large enterprises this isn’t practical. Someone needs to “own” and tightly manage the business outcome of the application. To effectively build a culture of DevOps, there needs to be a shift in mindset.

If heads of departments can’t seem to coordinate, there is a headless pipeline.

Rather than create yet another silo to solve this problem, there needs to be an owner for the end-to-end process.

This starts with putting in the work to discover and document the path to production. The critical mindset shift here is two parts: Firstly, there is an end-to-end path to production, and likely no one has ever discovered and charted it. Secondly, that path to production must be owned and activity managed to perfect how software delivers business value.

Moreover, as organisations are scaling new methods, they are held up by governance and security. These two functions have yet to fully “shift left”. What do we mean by “shift left”?

Successful organisations are spending the time to work with auditors and security staff earlier in the process, hence, “shift left”. While these relationships have been oppositional in the past,

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working together earlier in the process removes much of that opposition and serves both the needs of the auditors and the product team.

The mindset shift here may seem simple in principle but can be hard to shift in practicality. It takes leadership to shift their collective minds to a new way of thinking about the purpose of software in their organisation. Software innovation can no longer be thought of in terms of one-off projects, as it has in the past. This is a closed approach, not aligned with the need to adapt to new market dynamics.

Rather, a product mindset focuses on continually learning what the product is and continually delivering new features as determined by evolving customer and business needs.

Thinking about software as a “product” is what’s needed in this kind of environment. Leadership must own and model a new product mindset of agility and dynamism. No more complaining about ‘the other guys’, no more silos and sticking to the rigid path previously trod.

This enables the integration of swift innovation and stronger resilience within the culture of an organisation, no matter the headwinds.

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Begin with culture and gradual change Erica Langhi

Senior Solutions Architect, Red Hat

DevOps – the practice of automating the processes between software development and operations teams – is an important shift in both an IT team’s daily practice and culture and something that can be achieved over time by taking a step-by-step approach.

Implementing DevOps, however, is as much a cultural effort as it is a logistical change. Embracing a DevOps culture can be seen as fundamental to success as the paradigm is built on open communication and harmonisation between teams, bringing agility and time-efficiency to your process. Automating processes in this way requires aligning people and communication structures to enable agile development through working continuously and in

DEBATE

concert. Transparency and collaboration are key and the benefits are clear.

Iterative by nature, DevOps ensures IT teams can quickly adapt to new business needs or recent developments in hardware or software as DevOps teams can work through a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, creating a virtuous cycle of efficiency and automation. Deployment time can be improved and the number of errors can be cut down as DevOps teams practice continuous testing and improvement an increasingly key process in today’s business environment.

Building a DevOps culture, though not requiring a cloud-native backdrop, lends itself to cloud-native architectures. Driving the adoption of cloud technologies such as microservices and containers helps to create a common language between development and operations teams – an imperative for complex IT environments and architectures.

Bringing scale to traditional monolithic applications and breaking down silos

also allows for agile communication and working practice, as teams can work concurrently on all aspects of the development and improvement process and can produce results continuously, rather than waiting for one large release. Moreover, through this scaled structure allowing DevOps team to work harmoniously across your processes, IT teams are much better prepared to face sudden changes in technology or unexpected problems, bolstering your resilience to disruption and increasing efficiency.

This is not to say that the transition to DevOps isn’t a complex and expensive one, as it will likely require both new training and technology. However, the results of the DevOps approach are pivotal in securing buy-in as they represent a long-term transition to a more time-efficient, agile and communicative way of doing things.

The best way to approach this shift is in incremental steps, building in new technologies and techniques gradually in order to initiate the shift and to tweak mindsets to a more open manner of working than the traditional approach between developer and operations teams. Moving to a DevOps culture ultimately will see IT teams not only improving service delivery for end users, but also noticing that it has made their own lives significantly easier.

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Don’t view DevOps through a tech lens Nerys Mutlow

Evangelist in the Chief Innovation Office at ServiceNow

The future of DevOps lies in people, process, and culture. Yet too many organisations still associate DevOps with being a technology solution. Most programmes’ chances of success are hindered because they focus solely on the technology, rather than on people.

However, employees are the ones adopting a DevOps approach, and consequently need to embrace it culturally. For successful enterprise adoption,

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it is vital for departments to work cohesively. Operations teams, developers and testers must collaborate during the development and delivery processes.

DevOps was initially introduced for the purpose of removing bottlenecks and reducing siloes, bringing people together. It also increases accountability and moves teams towards a more product-centric approach with the aim of delivering value understood by all.

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Cultural practices and norms that are characteristics of high-trust organisations, like cross-functional collaboration, transparent information flow and shared responsibilities, are the same as those at the heart of DevOps. An organisational culture that nurtures effective software development programmes and IT operations is one that encourages new ideas, shares successes, and enables teams to learn from failures. This is fundamentally why DevOps practices correlate so strongly with high organisational performance; it is only achievable when you show people the value of working differently through a more orchestrated approach towards a common goal.

Effectively making the shift towards a DevOps culture must also come from the top down. All organisations need to prioritise the journeys or products that underpin what they do as a business, and ensure alignment throughout teams

with shared goals and a focus on value.

For the ethos to trickle down to all separate teams and individuals, senior leaders must get behind a collaborative culture. It is equally as important to hire employees who embody such values and want to engage with and foster an environment of collaboration.

Ultimately, DevOps is still a work in progress. If organisations are serious about focusing on people, rather than the actual technology, they must address the systems of work that bring employees together across the DevOps cycle. Fostering a company culture that breeds collaboration around common goals, embraces lean methodologies to optimise end-to-end results, and delivers cross-functional communication, is crucial to this. And by doing so, companies can strike the perfect balance needed to deliver an effective DevOps programme that is fit for ISSUE 34

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Collaborate and break down silos James Harvey

Cisco AppDynamics Executive CTO EMEAR

purpose.

The pace and scale of digital transformation since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has been phenomenal. Our research found that technologists have been delivering digital transformation three times faster than prior to the pandemic, whilst simultaneously grappling with the knowledge that any drop in IT performance could be incredibly costly, impacting end user experience at a time when customers and employees have been relying on digital services more than ever before.

Now, after more than 18 months of rapid digital transformation in response to the pandemic, technologists are encountering crippling IT complexity, left trying to manage an increasingly sprawling IT estate across a patchwork of distributed legacy and cloud technologies. IT and business leaders are now turning to DevOps to solve this.

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applications with a higher degree of consistency. But, of course, there is no magic way to streamline digital transformation. It all comes down to people and culture - this is also where most organisations fail. Organisations must create a strong company culture that focuses on breaking down silos. For this, they must also ensure involvement from the C-suite to delegate decisions and stay transparent across both IT and business leaders.

To break down silos between departments and establish a DevOps culture, businesses must shift to collaborative

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After more than 18 months of rapid digital transformation in response to the pandemic, technologists are encountering crippling IT complexity”

ways of working across the entire business. For this to work, technologists require a single view on performance up and down the IT stack — from customer-facing applications to core infrastructure – and they need a business lens on IT performance to align with the wider business on priorities and to pinpoint the most critical issues so that they can take action before they impact customers.

Full-stack observability with business

context gives technologists the ability to connect IT performance to business outcomes. With this, technologists can deliver faultless digital experiences and game-changing innovation needed to succeed and win customer loyalty. Only this alignment between technology and business performance can enable technologists to deliver the very best digital experiences and thrive within a DevOps culture, to drive innovation in these ISSUE 34

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DevOps essential for innovation Margaret Lee

SVP and GM of Digital Service and Operations Management, BMC Software

uncertain times.

Essentially, DevOps is all about driving change and innovation through repeatable iterations of design, development, testing, building, deploying, and analysing. For enterprises that have applications and services spanning multiple generations of mission critical technologies, they will know that practicing DevOps in a complex environment with a multitude of dependencies can lead to uncertain, unpredictable, and in some cases, unintended results.

To drive a culture of significant growth and innovation, incorporating DevOps across the enterprise is essential. It

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is key in enabling large organisations to rapidly deploy new applications, systems, and processes, with greater efficiency than ever before. Successful DevOps transformations break down silos by using standard tools and sharing data. When DevOps teams share technology with security, operations, and service management teams or work toward one gold data standard, they can better meet end-user needs and accelerate timelines.

There is a strong correlation between the speed and agility of software development and overall organisational success.

Often, DevOps teams move in fast, and

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implement lean, direct toolchains, which enable a resilient path from change initiation to deployment. Enterprise DevOps radically enhances current processes and practices, positioning enterprises for growth and continuity. Businesses operating effectively are positioned to deliver a competitive differentiation through quickly responding to customers’ changing needs, providing higher quality digital products and services, incorporating continuous delivery of changes and fixes and the enablement of software DevOps by streamlining external gating processes.

One of the keys to DevOps success is technology optimised by artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning. A robust continuous integration and deployment pipeline ensures productive work over cross-technology environments, components, and locations, which enables validation and maintains agility. DevOps principles are centered on improving the communication and coordination between development and operations. By integrating incident and change management with leading agile development solutions along with the cultural shifts and streamlined work methods across all teams, boosts service quality, reduces downtime, resolves issues more quickly, and enables innovation.

The pressure to innovate rapidly should not override the necessity of

The pressure to innovate rapidly should not override the necessity of stability. A DevOps culture and mindset promote both, by effectively coordinating people, products, and processes” stability. A DevOps culture and mindset promote both, by effectively coordinating people, products, and processes. When operating effectively, and with careful management of the competing needs of both operations and development teams, DevOps enables organisations to deliver competitive differentiation as an Autonomous Digital Enterprise which is made up of intelligent, interconnected, technology-enabled, value-creating systems that minimises manual effort to capitalise on human creativity, skills, and intellect across the enterprise. In turn, this equips the organisation with the agility and culture to respond quickly to customers’ developing needs.

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A life in tech Simon Robinson is an award-winning innovator and internet pioneer who is globally recognised for his contributions to deep tech. Here, he tells Digital Bulletin about his technology life lessons

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SIMON ROBINSON

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he five words I would use to describe myself are: Inquisitive, driven, creative, explorer, optimistic.

As a teenager in the 1980s I learned to programme on my ZX Spectrum and my school’s BBC computer. At university I studied artificial intelligence as part of my cognitive psychology degree.

So I was incredibly lucky to start my career at BT Laboratories where I could combine both interests as a specialist in Human Factors and human-centred design.

Two people in particular played a central role in helping me progress in the early part of my career. At BT Laboratories, Peter Cochrane, futurist and head of Research and Development, encouraged me to specialise in the usability of mobile technology when multimedia was all the rage at that time.

In the mid-90s Tony Eales, head of Business Development at BT Cellnet, showed huge foresight in inviting me to join BT Cellnet’s commercial business development team due to my championing of user-centred design across BT. Even today, very few businesses have this customer experience role that

One of the most significant developments for mobile in the late 1990s was the introduction of the interoperability of SMS” I had been given, with strategic and P&L responsibilities, in their commercial teams.

One of the most significant developments for mobile in the late 1990s was the introduction of the interoperability of SMS. This gave teenagers and young adults access to mobile technology which had previously been too expensive for them.

In the mid-90s I began to work with various handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola and Nortel on the first smartphones, but these did not have cameras as the operating systems simply did not have enough power for them to be included.

I can testify that no one saw the revolution that social media would bring to mobile telephony, not so much in terms of video but the still photograph.

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More recently I think one of the most disruptive innovations has been in the music industry where mobile has replaced not only mobile players but also home stereos.

Many organisations were procrastinating in their digital transformation initiatives due to the level of investment required to really achieve the expected results. The penny dropped when many executives realised just how many interactions and transactions were actually possible in the digital space, both in relation to customer relationships and across supply chains.

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This has led to investment not only in an organisation’s digital systems, but also in the development of platform-based business models, digital operating models and deep analytics and data capabilities.

Without a doubt we are now experiencing a workplace revolution in which more and more organisations are switching to hybrid working models. However, people have started to suffer burnout from the over-use of Zoom etc., and we still have a long way to go in terms of improving digital collaboration tools.

SIMON ROBINSON

Very little work has been done exploring the impact of remote and hybrid working on an organisation’s culture and the level of trust people have in digital productivity tools.

Digital transformation has really elevated the strategic importance of HR teams, and so I predict that we will see a more balanced focus between the development of digital systems and new approaches towards the employee experience.

I was 27 when I was invited to become a cofounder, responsible for music, games and entertainment, when Genie was still at the initial stage of conception.

My advice to aspiring technologists is to do everything possible to secure a secondment in order to gain experience outside of your speciality. And if secondments don’t exist, do what I did and create one by finding a sponsoring leader to act as a mentor and help you gain the necessary authorisation from your management team.

In addition to my consultancy work I am also a lecturer at a number of business schools and a master’s degree and PhD supervisor. This has allowed us to take our message of the importance of universal human values in technology to an extremely wide audience.

Because we were mobile network-agnostic, this meant that I was responsible for developing partnerships with the most forward-thinking media companies like EMI, Virgin Music, MTV and Ministry of Sound, developing cutting-edge services such as G-Live Music, presented by radio DJ Jo Whiley, which gave bands and artists direct access to their fans years before Twitter had been conceived.

It was incredible to have this opportunity in one of the UK’s first startups at the intersection of new technology, digital platform development and the design of trans-media experiences.

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I really cannot look beyond AI when it comes to the most important tech in the next decade”

It has also been the inspiration for the development of our Deep Tech Discovery process which integrates design practices with our teachings, allowing organisations to innovate through elevating their core value propositions.

I really cannot look beyond AI when it comes to the most important tech in the next decade. Holonomics’ involvement in OpenAI’s GPT-3 private beta test initiative has shown me just how powerful natural language processing has now become.

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However, there are still several challenges that AI needs to overcome before computer systems can make sense of the world at an ontological level. Once this happens our whole way of interacting with artificial systems is going to change radically and dramatically.

To switch off, I love to play my electric guitar and experiment with soundscapes.

I would have absolutely loved the power of the technology now available as a teenager, writing and producing music for the band I formed at school.

SIMON ROBINSON

Holonomics is helping organisations to transform through our New 4Ps framework of platforms, purpose, people and planet. What we have found is that by framing the need for profound transformation in organisation in these terms, we have been able to facilitate powerful new forms of seeing and thinking about the world in senior leadership teams.

of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence into the core of their organisations’ strategies and innovation.

This includes an appreciation of the need for a more expanded form of consciousness and the need to introduce the five universal human values

Simon Robinson is the co-author of ‘Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation’ and CEO of business consultancy Holonomics.

Our vision of deep tech is one of conscious business leaders who are able to understand and integrate universal human values into their organisations. So this is where my professional work is now focused.

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Nokia’s Michael Montag and Dr. Dimitrios Schoinianakis on security and trust in the 6G era

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he 6G era is approaching. It will connect the physical, digital and human worlds to provide new experiences, whether in the context of high-resolution mapping for self-driving or remote cars that require microsecond response times to dangers, or the proliferation of mixed reality telepresence. Communications in the 2030s will serve the needs of the future world, embodied by a drive to augment human potential.

While 6G opens a world of digital possibilities, its acceptance will critically depend on a comprehensive 6G security vision, supported by a range of 82

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technologies to ensure privacy and trust for the next generation of networks.

The 5G security evolution 5G security design has brought about unprecedented flexibility and transformation. For example, it improved the authentication and key agreement procedure to further reduce the threat of tracking or attacks, where an attacker may be able to verify the presence of a victim device despite the enhancements in subscriber privacy. Additionally, special “lightweight” crypto algorithms that provide high security but, at the same time, minimise the computational

MICHAEL MONTAG & DR. DIMITRIOS SCHOINIANAKIS

effort for low-energy budget devices, will soon be introduced.

Enhancing privacy protection is high on the security evolutionary agenda of not only 6G, but all networks that have come before. 6G requires a developed security paradigm not because it is flawed, but because advancement must be met with protection.

The 6G threat vector As technology continues to advance, the threat vector broadens. In the context of 6G, billions of sensors, devices, and new human machine interfaces (HMI) will form the basic threat layer. On the network side, millions of untrusted specialised sub-networks will redefine the arena for attacks, including the risk of malicious appropriation of authentication and identity.

The 6G threat landscape will require five dedicated privacy preserving technologies: Multi-party computation Multi-party computation will allow multiple parties to collectively perform computation across the cloud, sub-networks and devices, and receive the resulting output without exposing any party’s inputs.

Federated learning Federated learning will allow for flexible and decentralised training of machine

Prioritising an expansive global infrastructure of cyberresilience, privacy and trust as the 6G paradigm evolves will ensure that society can maximise value from this unprecedented networking era” learning models at the place where data resides and, for instance, performing training at the edge. Implementing this collaborative approach will first require incentive design to motivate the participation of devices and sub-networks in the federated learning model. Novel federated multi-stage learning protocols will be needed, as well as learning model updates, possibly using blockchain.

Data synthesis Data synthesis is the systematic and controlled generation of artificial data that mimics the dependencies and characteristics of a system’s real data.

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It’s used to extend the data coverage to simplify or transform a model in cases where no real data, or only spare real data, is available. It can be used as a data privacy-preserving technology when, by replacing real data points, it also removes privacy-sensitive dataset features.

data processing and even generating machine learning models on an untrusted central infrastructure without disclosing the data itself. Once decrypted, the result of the computation matches the result from the computation done on clear text data.

Homomorphic encryption Homomorphic encryption allows computation to be directly performed on encrypted data which allows

Edge profiling In the 6G world, with large numbers of human-attached sensors, such as ear buds, glasses and cameras, there is a

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MICHAEL MONTAG & DR. DIMITRIOS SCHOINIANAKIS

significant increase in the risk of privacy loss because of the inadvertent sharing of private information through these sensors.

It is highly desirable to have an automated approach to checking and validating the data integrity from these sensors before data is shared with other applications.

These technologies will ensure that society realises the full value of 6G technology, while creating a resilient, privacy-preserving and trustworthy 6G network.

As we enter a world of increasingly divergent digital standards, governments and policy makers will need to be agile in evolving policies to meet equally divergent industrial and operational security standards needed to support 6G development. Prioritising an expansive global infrastructure of cyber-resilience, privacy and trust as the 6G paradigm evolves will ensure that society can maximise value from this unprecedented networking era.

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