Published on the 18/05/2023 | Written by Heather Wright
Watercare, ABN and Tetrapak show the way…
Infrastructure and operations leaders must immerse themselves more in their organisations, stop focusing on tools and start building engines to become ‘I&O forward’ – to propel their organisations forward.
That’s according to speakers at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference, held this week in Sydney.
Attendees were told a triple squeeze of inflation, labour market shortages and global supply constraints are intensifying the ever-present need to accelerate innovation and forcing infrastructure and operations leaders to rewrite their future and set their sights on new horizons.
“We must stop focusing on tools and start building engines.”
Gartner’s executives were keen to press home I&O’s potential in moving entire organisations forward, outlining their views of the path forward and a world where platform engineering and intelligent automation put tailored solutions in every employee’s hands, with I&O as the innovation centre for organisations.
Padraig Byrne, Gartner senior director analyst, says that path starts with I&O teams becoming more immersed in the business. He called for attendees to encourage their teams and leadership to devote four hours a week, above and beyond normal project and service reviews, to working with the wider business in order to better understand the friction holding the business back.
“It’s more crucial than ever that we spend time with the organisation,” Byrne says. “If we are going to remove friction we need to find out what they do, how IT serves them and what we can do better.
“If we are not immersed it creates friction. Business chooses to go around us sponsoring their own solutions as it gives them better and faster outcomes.”
A recent Gartner survey found two out of three CIOs want more tech work done directly in their business – something that is leading to the rise of business technologists, who now make up 41 percent of non-IT staff.
Demand for technology skills including AI and data and analytics are growing faster outside of IT than within, Byrne says, but problems can be created when they can’t find the tools they need or don’t understand data management protocols or policies that are in place.
“We all have war stories of business technologists with good intentions,” he notes.
By embracing them and making them feel included – and spending those four hours a week in the business – much of those potential negatives can be removed, he says.
“Digital business is now a team sport.”
To that end Byrne advocated for more fusion teams combining business technologists and IT counterparts, saying the benefits of such teams are significant with Gartner finding that organisations that operate with more distributed simultaneous initiatives deliver 2.5 times faster than organisations running in a typical IT team.
He cited the example of New Zealand water management company Watercare, which created fusion teams to reduce internal friction as part of a move to focus on customer-centricity, flexibility and adaptability. The company has seen time to deliver new solutions decrease from one to three years to a matter of weeks, with customer net promoter scores jumping from 29 to 46 and employee net promoter scores soaring from -5 to 35 over two years.
Byrne stressed the need to talk in terms of the impact of IT, rather than the effort it requires, saying only 17 percent of organisations regularly demonstrate the business value of IT.
“As a result many IT organisations are left out of strategic decision making and are more likely to be subject to budget cuts.
“The secret to communicating value is to show the impact you have on the top three priorities executives measure their success against: the ability to make money, the ability to save money and the ability to protect the business.
“Once they understand the value they get from I&O, it’s easier for them to set digital priorities and make more informed decisions and the result is often more investment in I&O.”
But Mark Cleary, Gartner senior director, noted that removing friction to immerse themselves in business problems can be difficult when I&O leaders often feel like they’re drowning in their own problems.
Cleary pointed to initiatives such as platform engineering and automation as key to freeing I&O teams up to focus on the bigger picture.
Platform engineering, an early stage technology all about creating layers of components and services that enable anyone to develop solutions quickly and safely, is attracting huge interest, he says.
“Within I&O we use platform engineering to deliver shared infrastructure. These platforms are composed of software defined, API-driven, loosely coupled architectures and they allow multiple teams to make up basic components at the same time.
“It enables independent deployment and scaling and allows greater flexibility and ease in collaboration.”
Product teams use the multitenant environments via self-service portals enabling them to select and automatically provision infrastructure as needed.
Cleary says the platform engineering focus fits with the low-code, no-code trend, which Gartner has forecast will be the basis of 70 percent of all new applications by 2025, up from less than 25 percent in 2020.
He outlined ABN Amro’s move to adaptable and easily consumable platforms in order to move faster.
A look at consumption patterns through logs, tickets and surveys of existing technologies, highlighted key dependencies and made it clear that I&O tech silos were great at standardising internal efficiency, but not so great for developers who had to work with ‘a whole bunch of I&O teams just to get stuff done’.
ABN Amro deployed self service to reduce I&O platform complexity for developers. Each end to end platform includes built in security, code scanning tools and other functionality developers were looking for and provides access to new I&O offerings based on emerging technologies, along with the training to use them.
“However, just meeting the needs of today is not enough,” notes Cleary.
With that in mind, ABN Amro shifted the network to software defined architecture and use of APIs, making networking services self-contained and allowing for quick upgrades.
“People want easy to consume offerings that allow them to get what they want and avoid what they don’t,” Cleary says. “So we must continue to manage all the assets and processes we need, but at the same time present our work in terms of business benefits. Platform engineering is how we take the best of multi-cloud operations and commoditise infrastructure and tailor them to provide value to every single business stakeholder.”
Intelligent automation, meanwhile, can enable speed to market and increase business agility, mitigate risks and optimise service cost.
Gartner research shows for common automation activities mature organisations are twice as likely to invest in service desk automation and are also more likely to invest in repeated tasks such as patch deployment and new infrastructure configuration.
When it comes to differentiating automation activities, however, problem detection using KPIs stood out as an area where mature I&O teams are investing.
“They are also concentrating this into service delivery rather than just using disconnected automation tasks,” Cleary says.
“We must stop focusing on tools and start building engines.”
Retooling the I&O workforce by shifting the focus from legacy skills to critical technical needs and collaboration skills, and optimising employee efficiency through digital employee experience best practices, and using dynamic work management to not only define new roles but enable task self-selection were also lynchpins of Cleary’s push for I&O teams.
He cited Tetrapak as another example of a company where radial thinking is moving their organisation forward with workforce reskilling and optimisation – and reducing the potential for staff turnover.
Every 18 months Tetrapak reassesses their products to decide what teams are needed for the coming months, then product leaders create short pitches to woo staff members to join their team. In three years nearly one-third of the I&O team has transitioned to work outside of their core skills areas.
The final step in creating an I&O forward organisation is building an innovation engine, according to Karen Brown, Gartner director, analyst.
She outlined the need for I&O to help organisations navigate the vast landscape of emerging technologies – from the cutting edge like quantum technology, generative AI and digital twins, to the more practical evolution of technology such as zero trust network access and private 5G.
“Whether you have an innovation lab or not, think of an innovation engine as the next step. It’s a mechanism that draws in new technologies, tests and evaluates them and then generates the best candidates for further development.
“The engine therefore must have well defined processes, inputs and outputs.”
Inputs can includes the information gleaned from that time spent with the business and learning their needs, research, peers and the like.
When it comes to innovation engine design, Brown says Gartner research shows five distinct patterns for success:
- A visionary strategic CEO. Senior executive buy-in is essential for innovation lab success
- Building the right mix of skills in the innovation team, including business technologists with business acumen
- Determining quantifiable outcomes and measures
- Developing strong innovation processes, with the most successful innovation labs extensively scoping and validating their ideas, using techniques including design thinking, customer journey mapping and hackathons, and
- Establishing strategic innovation lab partnerships with academic and industry partners. “If you are looking around your innovation lab and all you see are your own I&O folks, you might be doing it wrong,” Brown notes.
In the case of Spanish energy and petrochemicals company Repsol, a redesigned operating model gave business leaders control of their own digital initiatives. A digital innovation group was formed outside of the traditional IT team to help business unit leaders define their strategy and test new technologies and business units set up their own fusion teams. An innovation lab fund was also established by the CIO to invest in promising technologies that business leaders found too risky, preventing good ideas from being discarded because of fear of failure.
“The results have been impressive,” Brown says. “The financial impact for the Repsol DX initiative totalled more than €550 million in 2021, encouraging the company to raise its targeted impact to €800m in 2022.
“For companies such as RepSol we see that innovation engines can give us that critical go, no go technology evaluation.”
The innovation engine she says helps weed out hits from misses and identify the Goldilocks technologies perfect for an organisation. And Brown notes while only two out of 10, or even 100, might be ‘goes’, that’s a good thing.
“It indicates that we’ve built a well-functioning engine geared towards business innovation rather than just a playground for cool to have IT toys.
“With this design we are ensuring our innovation engine can run efficiently and sustainably and more quickly move winning tech to adoption.”
