Digital Transformation: The Advantage for Legacy Companies

By Adriaan Bouten
Former Senior Vice President & CIO
Commodities and Commercial Markets
McGraw Hill Financial








Most consider startup companies to be the innovators in digital transformation. Legacy companies have a great advantage to these startups that, when used correctly, can be used to great success.

Startup companies are nimble, and focused on a particular innovation, and these are typically the hurdles for a legacy company. So the solution is to remove the hurdles and to deploy the core assets of a company in a different way.

For more, read Adriaan Bouten's post on LinkedIn.

Issues Driving the CIO's Future

The CIO stands at the intersection of a perfect storm of events as technology becomes an increasing force of change within the business. Connecting the dots between the business value of disruptive technology and the CEO’s most pressing challenges means the CIO is in a unique position to help drive organizational innovation.

In this presentation at the 2nd Annual ConNEXTions 2014: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, Frost & Sullivan’s Richard Sear explored areas of change based on three specific challenges for a CEO: What is going to disrupt our business over the next five to 10 years, what could cause part or all of my business to collapse, and what could create transformation for our business or market?


SESSION
Issues Driving the CIO's Future

PRESENTER
Richard Sear, Global Vice President, Visionary Innovation, Frost & Sullivan

TAKE-AWAY

The key word these days is “change.” Companies need to adapt to ever more rapid changes so they can continue to survive and thrive. A lot of that change is related to technology, so CIOs have a unique position to offer their expertise to the CEO. For the future, Sear said, CIOs must think of themselves not as Chief Information Officers, but Chief Innovation Officers.

Sear made the prediction that Facebook, as we know it, will go out of business. Why? The interface does not foster human interaction in a 3D simulated environment, he said. It uses direct ads instead of indirect ads and does not appeal to our “humanistic” side.

According to Sear, Facebook and other portals like it have things backwards. Humans won’t adapt to technology – to be successful, technology must adapt to human habits. Humans have interacted with each other in similar ways for centuries, and Facebook and other technology built around human interaction will have to evolve to accommodate those habits.

Sear asked attendees to envision having coffee with other humans in a 3D simulated environment. Just as humans will continue to gather in groups, individuals will want technology that enables that.

Or how about trying on clothing with holograms? Online shopping could use innovative technology to simulate the tactile texture of a clothing item for the consumer to feel on a pad or other device.

BEST PRACTICES

Those are the types of directions technology will be moving. Over the next 15 years, Sear said, rapid prototyping and hyper-personalization will be the direction of technology innovation.

Technology leaders must help their organization’s chief executive understand those movements and how the company can thrive in that environment. From now until 2025, the CIO or CTO will be most valuable to the CEO if he or she speaks about mega-trends and business models, rather than individual products.

ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT

Sear said companies should make IT growth decisions based on an immersive 3D experience for customers. This mindset should be present during Research & Development – developers should consider all five senses. They need to see, feel, and think from the viewpoint of the end user.

Rapid prototyping and a focus on the individual are critical. Micro factory agility is required in the new environment, Sear said. The goal should be to personalize a product in three hours, rather than three days.

TAKE-AWAY

Companies need to spend time interacting with customers to understand how products are used and how they can be further personalized to better meet their needs.

Sear offered the example of a respirator mask developed by a leading brand. Senior executives conducted on-site testing in mine shafts in Chile where the product was being used. The goal was to understand the point of view of not just the decision makers purchasing the product, but also that of the ultimate end user.

The executives found that the workers had personalized the masks themselves by cutting slits into the mouthpiece and covering the opening with fabric so that they would be able to audibly communicate with each other. As a result, the company realized that for these customers, the product must include breathable fabric that allows for audible shouting. That insight was not anticipated by Research & Development.

Sear also discussed a Japanese Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that he said challenged the pre-conceived notion of a car and used a hyper-personalization approach instead.

To achieve that change, IT innovators employed simulator metrics to discover the braking habits of drivers and other relevant inputs. For instance, some drivers may prefer a thicker steering wheel because of the measurements of their hands, which can be a tailored input. Other customers may have different preferences about the firmness of the upholstered seats, for example.

BEST PRACTICES

CIOs and CTOs are successful when they understand the CEO’s growth map. It’s important to envision and anticipate the needs, wants, and worries of the CEO for IT innovations. Tech leaders win the trust of the CEO if they are compassionate about what keeps the CEO awake and worried about the business.

To get executive buy-in, it’s critical to present technology concerns not as a compartmentalized worry, but as an issue that will affect the growth of the entire business.

TAKE-AWAY

In addition to hyper-personalization, technology is also moving more and more toward smart products, and CIOs and CTOs must help chief executives understand the difference between dumb vs. truly smart IT innovations.

BEST PRACTICES

Google Nest, Cisco, and Huawei are all competing in the “smart home” space. Increasingly, customers will expect their smart house to communicate with their smart car to coordinate, for example, the opening of the garage door.

The smart house will also measure biometrics of each member of the household as she or he enters. When the wife and kids arrive, the house will be able to adjust to a temperature previously agreed upon by the group.

Smart also has potential for all kinds of other products, Sear said, For example, a smart bandage could change color depending on information gathered about the wound. Smart water pipes could automatically shut off if a contaminant is detected. These devices won’t just monitor information, but will also take action according to protocols pre-set by humans.

FINAL THOUGHT

The business environment, technology capabilities, and customer needs are changing fast. CEOs need help from partners that can help anticipate and adapt to those changes. Offering that insight will help CIOs and CTOs not only showcase the value of IT within the organization, but also help the company succeed in the future.

For more valuable information from ConNEXTions 2014, order your copy of Frost & Sullivan's Executive MindXchange Chronicles, a unique collection of all the key take-aways and best practices discussed at the event.

The Future of Work Starts Now

An interview with
Matt Carter
President
Sprint Business









As the President of Sprint Business, Matt Carter is responsible for looking ahead to the future of work and helping businesses navigate this new environment. Frost & Sullivan recently spoke with Matt about these changes and the challenges ahead.

As the nature of work evolves, what do you think are some of the challenges companies are facing?

Over the last year or two we’ve been talking to a lot of people: CEOs looking for more agility in their businesses to deal effectively with disruptive market change; line of business managers wanting to shift gear to beat the competition; and IT managers who need to respond to the changing needs of the workforce – in mobile, in social and in technology terms – but who find their legacy IT systems make it just too difficult.

One critical thread has run through these discussions: our customers and prospects are desperate to liberate their people from their existing systems so they can do their jobs better and enjoy them more.

According to a recent Gallup survey, only 10% of employees feel engaged at work – meaning they feel emotionally invested and focused on creating value for their organizations every day. Scarily, actively disengaged workers outnumber engaged ones by more than two-to-one.

This means that the big question that every leader has to answer is: how can we change work to deliver more of the things people come to work for? Things like fulfillment, autonomy, recognition, affirmation and, yes, fun.

What should companies be looking at in order to do that?

The answer to this question lies not just in technology, because company culture and values will play a vital role. Younger workers in particular are looking for jobs they can believe in, that they can commit to with their heart and their head. We have slideshare on The Future of Work that I think shows what I mean.

Company culture and management styles are critical, but technology is critical too.

Where does IT fit into all of this?

IT used to be a scarce resource, one that depended on platoons, even armies, of specialists to build it and keep it running. The systems were built from the inside out, with a focus on that business and that business alone. In this world, people were generally forced to adapt to the way IT systems worked.

Now that’s all changing. Cloud and mobile are creating a new IT eco-system, one where companies are leveraging outside resources to run some core processes.

In response, leaders are looking to turbo-charge productivity by encouraging their people to work together as flexible teams wherever they are so they can exploit great ideas more quickly. Teamwork is the central process of every business and it’s undergoing a revolution as new tools and deployment models proliferate. Analytics tools are delivering new insight at the point of every decision.

Together these profound changes are driving the way companies confront the triple threat of change, complexity and competition their companies face every day. Senior managers know that if they can win the commitment of their employees, the business will flourish however tough the outside environment.

To learn more, visit sprint.com/officefuel.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

By Mike Smith
Director of Strategy
Sprint Business









Most people alive today have lived through, and benefited from, three technology revolutions. And we’re just getting started on a fourth one.

The way I see it, the first one was the Digital Revolution, which essentially started with the proliferation of personal computing in the 1980s. You could argue that it started earlier than that, with some of the first computers in the 1960s, but let’s be realistic; it really didn’t crank up until the 80s. This revolution essentially began the process of digitizing the “real world” as data that could be captured, processed, manipulated, and reproduced –  increasingly efficiently.

Which was followed by the Internet Revolution, starting in the 1990s, which began the massive shift in which content could be easily accessed, shared, and moved across traditional physical and organizational boundaries.

And then there was the Mobility Revolution, which also started in the 1990s and skyrocketed soon after that. It has enabled virtually all people, things, and content to be connected all the time and everywhere.

The impact of these three revolutions on our lives, both at home and at the office, has been fantastic. We are now vastly more productive, both personally and professionally. We could no more turn back the technology clock 35 years than we could stop the universe from expanding; the resulting jolt would probably be similar in each case.

We are now embarking on the fourth phase, the Intelligence Revolution. This shift will enhance knowledge, well-being, and happiness thanks to the correlation and analysis of data from the intersection of people, things, and content.

How? Well, it will inter-relate data from individuals, from machines and sensors, and content across the three key segments that the Internet has evolved into: the Content Web, the Internet of Things, and the Personal Web. With everything digitized, it can move freely across all three of these sub-Internets.

Each individual today, whether at work or off the clock, has become a data factory. Our device creates data to move and store from traditional voice calls, from texts, website visits, searches, apps, social networking, photos, music, scanned items, and location and presence information.

Strap on a fitness watch or a medical monitor of some kind, and then that individual generates data reflecting his or her heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration levels, sleep or activity times, and walking pace.

Add a Google Glass, and you’ve just added image, sound, video, and facial recognition data.

That’s one person. Then you’ve got all those Things connected through the Internet of Things, generating massive amounts of data. As a point of reference, a single engine on a single Boeing jet generates 10 terabytes of information every 30 minutes of flight, according to Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata. Big data analytics has clearly arrived just at the right moment.


There is no better time than right now to start asking the tough questions about your business. Like the existential question of why is your company here? What is its purpose, how do you create customer value, and how can data enable that? And once you have answers to those questions, you can move on to how to invest in technology, and in the skilled people – most likely data scientists, who are already in short supply – who can leverage the data you generate and obtain to benefit your company and your customers.

To learn more, visit sprint.com/officefuel.

Looking to Drive Collaboration in Your Organization? Look Beyond the Tech

By Melanie Turek
Vice President, Research
Frost & Sullivan




While a lot of enterprise communication and collaboration technology is available, there's a key question that many analysts, consultants and vendors are struggling to answer: How do we get people to actually use these applications and services to better work together and improve business outcomes?

Several observers have wondered why the market for unified communications and collaboration (UCC) products appears to be flat. Frost & Sullivan research shows the same trends, so it’s not that the data is wrong—it’s that companies (driven by their end users) just aren’t seeing the value. Indeed, our most recent survey of more than 1,000 IT decisions makers in the US and Europe shows that 42 percent of them don’t even understand what UCC is.

In fact, the technology itself isn’t complicated. What’s complicated is actual collaboration. The need for UCC is there, of course; the changing nature of the workplace demands it. No one expects to be able to find their colleagues in person any more, regardless of where they work—we are too busy being “mobile” and “virtual” for that. Technology had to be developed to take the place of the in-person interactions that, until a decade ago, were the foundation of the workplace. UCC tools satisfy that. (We can argue the details about which does so best, but they all share a common vision.)

The problem is that technology can’t change human nature. Or, generally speaking, corporate culture. And both of those are impeding the move toward truly innovative, game-changing collaboration. The social anthropologist in me sees several reasons for this, but let me outline just a few here:

Knowledge hoarding is more natural than knowledge sharing. 

A recent article in the Times notes a new study that shows that many employees intentionally hide information from their colleagues—even when they are asked directly to share it, for the good of the organization. The authors’ hypothesis for why is that the old adage, “knowledge is power,” still holds true. In fact, it has held true throughout human history, so it’s kind of hard to see why today, all of a sudden, that calculation would change without a strong change in the culture to go with it. Which brings us to…

Companies still reward individual performance. 

The authors of the above study suggest that the way to change this trend—which they and others insist is not actually good for the organization or the individual employee, since other employees refrain from sharing information with known hoarders, leading to a vicious cycle—is to change reward structures to focus more on group effort than personal performance. In theory, this makes sense. In practice, not so much. Most employees want to be compensated based on their own work, not on whether their colleagues are performing well. So while most people are happy to accept bonus compensation based on company performance, I’ve never met anyone whose salary is tied to the output of an entire group. My guess is few employees would be willing to place their entire livelihood in the hands of their co-workers, lest one or more of them shirk their duties and hold everyone back.

One way to address this is to reward individuals for their willingness and ability to collaborate effectively with their colleagues. Companies can look at activity as it happens on their own internal networks and social sites, measure results, and then reward good actors as appropriate. New technologies could make this possible, but for most organizations, that will require an enormous culture shift. And it may not even deliver results because…

Collaboration isn’t easy. 

One of the challenges UCC tries to address is the need to get the right information to the right people at the right time. The idea is to provide a single place to go to find people, data and communications, and then use these tools in context based on the task(s) at hand. But the reality is, most of us can’t process more than a certain amount of information at any given time. Research shows that we are terrible at multi-tasking, even if we think we aren’t. And get more than three people into a meeting and it all goes south. Indeed, when we look at how people work well together, the most critical element is to keep it small: involve just two or three people; keep the project focused on discrete tasks; and limit the number of inputs—people, data, tech—that need to be involved in the engagement.

Advanced UCC products do a great job of bringing lots of stuff together, which is really important in a global, virtual workplace, in which thousands of employees are working around the world on multiple disparate projects, leveraging petabytes of data. Employees working on their own still need ready access to information—which may reside in structured or unstructured systems, or in peoples’ heads—and they need to be able to connect to their co-workers as needed, from anywhere and on any device.

But will this increase collaboration? History would suggest not.

How IT Leaders Can Prepare for the Future

An interview with
Niraj Jetly
Senior Vice President - Chief Information Officer/Chief Operating Officer
NutriSavings

Interviewed by Sam Narisi





As CIO and COO of Nutrisavings, Niraj Jetly helped his organization earn Frost & Sullivan’s 2014 CIO Impact Award for Big Data and Advanced Analytics. The company was recognized for its innovative employee wellness solution, which uses big data to score thousands of food items and help people make smarter choice.

Frost & Sullivan recently spoke with Niraj to talk about another area of IT  change and innovation: how the nature of work is evolving and what IT teams can do to prepare and better support their businesses.

When you hear the phrase “The Future of Work,” what are some of the things you think of? What trends are occurring that are changing the ways people work?

Multiple trends are converging together, including the rise of unified messaging and communication, along with a drop in bandwidth costs. As a result, people are more inclined to use remote meetings. A few years ago there weren’t any instance of the remote collaboration tools we have now. As these tools advance, people are becoming more likely to collaborate remotely rather than in person. However, there’s a flaw in the collaboration tools. In many cases, you can have verbal communication, but not visual. I think these tools are going to evolve to include features like handwriting recognition and remote white boarding capabilities. That exists to some extent right now but when you’re using a PC rather than a touch-sensitive device, they are not really practical. With the rise of tablets, they’ve become a lot more practical in terms of remote collaboration.

In another area, I think the keyboard interface will continue to exist for some period of time, but many functions – especially starting with sales and marketing – will go to voice-oriented commands. Some functions like the call center, graphic design and programming will continue to use the keyboard for a longer period of time, until other types of input gain traction in the marketplace.

Companies are also under more pressure to focus on the health and wellness of employees. We live a very sedentary lifestyle, and employees in desk-based jobs have a higher risk of diseases. It’s just a matter of time when we start weaving an active lifestyle into day-to-day work. If you look at the new Apple Watch and Nike Fuel band, there are a lot of activities which will be tracked in the workplace to ensure people are healthy. We’re also seeing employers become more and more conscious about providing healthy meals. If you look at vending machines in offices, usually they have a lot of junk food. With increasing healthcare costs, that will encourage employers to replace that with much healthier food and provide incentives to employees to buy healthy food items.

In a lot of companies, there’s at least some sense that IT is holding workers back or getting in the way of innovation. What are some of the ways IT could can overcome that and better support the ways people work?

Historically in IT, we’ve valued things like transactional expertise and knowledge, database knowledge, and security knowledge when hiring. The emphasis on communication, organizational and user experience skills were minimal. But now, more and more IT teams are reinventing themselves and customer-focused skills are becoming more valuable. I don’t just mean, for example, a business analyst, which is usually a customer-focused position in the IT department. User experience, customer engagement, intrinsic motivation and other softer skills are what we’re looking for now. The technical aspect will still be there, but the value of it will go down. Within IT, the tools are getting so sophisticated that we’re doing less custom development  and so the ability to create a compelling user experience becomes all the more important.

The concept of a data scientist is another big thing. I’ve talked to people in the industry who claim to be a data scientist, but in reality we don’t even know yet what we want in a data scientist. Transactional knowledge is not what we’re looking for. A true data scientist has a combination of database and statistics knowledge. Again, that’s a big shift from what we’ve looked for in the past.

Security is another huge thing that’s only going to get more important. All these things we’re talking about could be delayed by another couple of years if we continue to have these high profile breaches. Security, especially in the mobile space is a huge thing, and as more compelling interfaces come to market so are the loopholes in securing these architectures. When you mix cloud and mobile you have essentially an uncontrollable environment. In the past, we were able to get away with setting restrictions and enforcing standardization, but not anymore. We have to learn how to scale without standardization. I don’t have an answer for that myself, but those are the challenges IT teams are going to be facing in the near future.

Have you implemented BYOD within Nutrisavings?

We haven’t, because we’re still figuring out how to handle security. We’re a PCI-, SOX-, HIPAA-compliant shop and we have a lot of sensitive data. I’ll be the first one to acknowledge: I know we have to go to BYOD. And we have policies there, but I have no uniform way to ensure data safety and security. Even if I want to, I can’t do it unless I figure out how to do it.

Nutrisavings is part of a global entity, Edenred, and we are a Cisco/Microsoft shop. But now we’re building mobile apps, so for instance, take a change agent who wants to build an app for the iPhone. Suddenly you have an Apple laptop on your network. I need to do a security check with Active Directory, fully encrypt the disk, do remote backups and push policies. When you’re dealing with Apple those tools do not exist to a large extent. We also want to use Windows 10, which is coming out next year. But first we have to do a security check, and that takes time. The devices are coming at a much faster pace than you can screen, scrutinize and verify them. There has to mind shift in how you do those things faster.

It’s going to be a challenge for everyone, but what are some things IT can do to get ready or at least minimize the risks?

Retrain your team. But the first thing before that is to start getting the team sensitized to the new way, which is going to come sooner than we think. That’s very important, because if I send someone for training without getting them sensitized first, they may not even acquire any new skills because they didn’t acknowledge they needed to. It’s important that they first realize there’s a skill gap.

You also have to acknowledge the fact that the managers of the future may be younger than the employees. Historically in IT, the longer you worked and the more knowledge you acquired, the higher you went in your role. But now, knowledge of legacy technologies, including web technologies, is not as important, and a lack of that knowledge is not a handicap. As mobile, social and cloud become more important, anyone with those skills suddenly become a lot more valuable to the enterprise than someone who has worked with older technologies. Unless IT teams train and retrain themselves, they’re going to be managed by someone younger than them.

You need to keep your eyes and ears open. If you can’t see the train coming, put your ear to the track. It’s going to get noisier and noisier, so unless you have your ear to the track, you’re going to get run over by somebody.

And good luck to all the CIOs, including myself, because our jobs are going to get harder by the day. If I didn’t like challenges, I wouldn’t be in this job. From a CEO standpoint, companies need to get more done. But as CIO, I need to maintain my legacy, which is the iceberg no one sees – they just see tip, which is mobile, social , cloud and UX. For us those to deliver the results, we need to do all the work behind the scenes that no one sees. It’s going to get harder and a lot more fun for me, personally.

Big Data and Analytics: Where's the Value Proposition

By Sandy Borthick
Industry Analyst, Big Data & Analytics
Stratecas | Frost & Sullivan






Advancements in computing and network technologies have always driven big changes in the ways we live and work, sometimes quickly, but more often over a span of years. First comes the better, faster, cheaper technology, which stimulates new programming languages and tools, as well as new software applications. Then, as these applications are deployed and embraced, they become part of our work processes and they modify our behavior.

Big Data technologies, along with the accompanying paradigm changes in data processing and the evolution in analytic software applications, are just in the earliest stages of transforming our world. The blatant hype has died down a bit, and the pace of experimentation and implementation has picked up. Trade show conferences are beginning to feature some of the early adopters, sharing how they have used Big Data and analytics to find new insights that lead to improved business processes, increased revenues and reduced costs. Other organizations are paying attention, studying up and starting to wonder if they could achieve similar results.

Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan offers this Stratecast Perspectives & Insight for Executives (SPIE) to assist these organizations and their solution providers. Having previously detailed the components of the Big Data and analytics market, and described the marketing challenges being faced by the vendors, this SPIE takes a step back to explore the basic value proposition for Big Data and analytics, and to discuss the several issues that will have to be addressed to convert that value from conceptual potential to quantifiable business success.

To read more, download the PDF.

10 Things Most Exceptional CIOs Never Do

By Richie Etwaru

Group VP
Clouding and Digital Innovation

Cegedim Relationship Management

The list below is from over two decades of observations in first, second, and third person. Before publishing I asked over 50 Fortune 1000 CIOs and CTOs to review and comment; their feedback is included.

At the core of these 10 things most exceptional CIOs never do is going against the grain and the herd, and embracing counter intuition. Whether you embrace counter intuition systematically, or selectively, most of the items below suggest in their cognitive DNA counter-intuitive thinking:

1.    They do not try to define innovation - It's difficult to define innovation, and if you do define innovation it means that you will set up a single process to do or capture it the way you define it. Wrong – most exceptional technology leaders learn that innovation comes in many flavors, inside-out, outside-in, evolutionary, and revolutionary. If you define it, you have one process; if you do not, you learn there are many processes needed to do or capture the many types of innovation.

2.    They never have secret projects - The knee-jerk reaction is to have little secret projects, or "black ops" type projects. Exceptional technology leaders will tell you that you need to do innovative projects in the open and allow folks to see, smell, and marvel in their artistry. What you want is for everyone to copy the behavior of the few innovating. If you lock them in a secret room, no one knows, and no innovative behavior gets copied.

3.    They are never surprised by failure – A certain percentage of technology projects fail; that’s the nature of the beast. Exceptional technology leaders set these expectations for failure with their operating committees and investment governance stewards early in the process. When failure happens, it is never a surprise; it is usually, "Well that one falls in our failure bucket we prepared for."

4.    They never start projects themselves - Folks that want/try to build a prototype usually struggle to wow business stakeholders. This is because you have to get the business stakeholders involved before you can build anything. Some leaders I know do not even draw a project in PowerPoint before engaging the customer. Every project is started by the customer, whether it was on the customer's own conscious accord, or the customer unconsciously prompted leadership to do so.

5.    They resist the need for PMO - Certain processes in large organizations do not thrive with the presence of the project police, while others do. Most exceptional leaders I consulted agreed that a PMO in the wrong place at the wrong time can be catastrophic. Some processes need low rigor, some mild, and only some the high rigor that comes with a PMO presence.

6.    They do not break projects into phases - Large phases (one, two and three) are logical "kill points" for projects. Most projects get killed after phase one, and very frequently this is because phase one is a minimally viable product that does the least that can be done, but does it well. Two things happen, the business stakeholders see no reason to fund phase two and/or three (I mean they already saw something that kind of works), and the technology leader never gets to build phase two, which would deliver efficiency, or phase three, which would create business value. Have 24 phases, not three.

7.    They never worry about a target state - We can barely predict what our families will do in a year, yet we try to predict what companies of thousands of employees should be like three to five years out with a target state. Even worse, once there is a targets state, the "target state police" start to invalidate changes to the market place and new innovations by activating the "Well, it does not fit into the target state" card, essentially locking the company away from the world for three to five years at a time. Exceptional technology leaders create a governance culture to enable an evolving model, not a target state.

8.    They do not try to build hero products - Very rarely can you build a single product that solves all of your customer’s ailments in a vacuum. You cannot build standalone solutions; you have to build a product that works with others. The days of platforms with stocks of information are over; exceptional technology leaders build ecosystems with flows of information. Most folks suggested that they build as little as possible, and instead act as a maestro that orchestrates other products.

9.    They never wait on innovation - Exceptional technology leaders do not wait to see what happens to new innovations, they disdain being a fast follower, and they are habitual early adopters. They buy innovation commercially (and many times invest in the startups) early in the innovation cycle and way to the left on the diffusion of innovation bell curve. Waiting to see what happens to an innovation means paying more for it, and being late to the party.

10.    They do not read leadership books - There are almost a million books on leadership available for purchase on Amazon.com. All noise, an echo chamber, if I may. Exceptional leaders systematically and pragmatically go against the status quo. They thrive in counter-intuition. As technology commoditizes and the herd gets larger and larger, go in the opposite direction.

This article was originally posted by Richie Etwaru on LinkedIn.

Mobile Worker Applications: Prebuilt or Custom? In-House or 3rd-Party?

By Jeanine Sterling

Principal Analyst
Mobile & Wireless Communications

Frost & Sullivan

One of the key questions a business has to grapple with when implementing a new mobile software app for its employees is “Do we build or do we buy?”

There are pros and cons to each approach, of course. Creating a fully customized application takes time, money and sometimes internal IT resources. However, it promises a solution that is tailor-made to address the business’s unique needs … and it increases the level of confidentiality and control that some firms feel they must retain.

A prebuilt or prepackaged application – whether it’s a 100% out-of-the-box solution or an app that’s 70-80% complete and just needs some fine-tuning – is usually cloud-based. It can be deployed more quickly (taking weeks or days, instead of months or years). It’s typically much more affordable (priced on a monthly per-user basis). And it demands far less time and energy from the company’s IT employees.

In a survey of North American mobile and wireless decision-makers last August, we asked current users of four different mobile apps to describe their approach.  We’ll be asking the same question in this year’s survey for comparison purposes.

Per the chart below, some interesting facts emerge:

• Simple out-of-the-box implementations – with no customization required – are a distinct minority with newer applications. However, this seems to change as an application category becomes more established and standardized. While 28 percent of wireless email users have implemented out-of-box, only 7-8 percent of newer apps (in this case, mobile sales force automation and mobile workforce management solutions) do likewise. One of the newer M2M apps – tracking portable and semi-stationary assets in the field – follows this same trend.

• Smaller businesses (fewer than 500 employees) are more likely to implement out-of-the-box when it comes to wireless email and mobile workforce management apps.

• Prepackaged solutions hold the majority position at this time. Businesses seem to prefer the advantages that come with prebuilt applications – ranging from 61 percent of mobile asset tracking users to 58 percent of mobile SFA users to 52 percent of mobile workforce management users. The proportion of prebuilt wireless email apps is the lowest of this group at 41 percent, but it is still more popular than the out-of-box or customized options.

The percentage of businesses currently using fully customized applications range as follows:

• Wireless email – 21 percent
• Mobile asset tracking – 30 percent
• Mobile sales force automation – 35 percent
• Mobile workforce management – 41 percent

What about the use of third-party experts to handle any customization needs?  Are businesses more apt to hire help or do the custom work themselves?  As of August 2013, the trends were as follows:

• For prebuilt mobile applications that required some customizing, businesses are roughly just as likely to use a third-party partner as do the custom work themselves in-house.

• For fully customized mobile applications, however, customers are much more likely to develop the application in-house with their own IT personnel. Depending upon the application category, 60 to 70 percent of the businesses opting to create a fully customized app do so utilizing their own staff. Larger businesses are more likely than smaller firms to use a third party when customizing.

Prebuilt preferred over custom. In-house development preferred over third-party. Will these trends hold in the mobile business apps sector?  We’ll begin to do some longitudinal analysis after the 2014 responses come in.

 

People, Processes, Technology: 3 Keys for Security Leadership

By Richard Noguera

Head of Information Security

The Gap

When I get introspective about myself as a leader, it's often because I've had a flash of doubt. In other words, I sometimes wonder if I made the right call on any given topic during especially stressful times. And through the course of self-analysis, I am often reminded of Ray Dalio and reflect on what makes me tick as a leader.

I'm a process guy that thrives in the company of good people. More often than not, I find my operational peers to be extremely technically focused. So as a people and process person, I'm typically at odds with those peers. That's not to say that I'm not technically competent, I'm just not comfortable asking an engineer to step aside so that I can correct the flawed line of source code, running config, FW policy, or ACL at the drop. My peers however, not necessarily those immediate to me, largely believe this is a functional must-have. And interestingly, one that I am often presented with, directly and indirectly, at least once a month.

Information Security was begot by Information Technology. So naturally, most leaders expect CISOs to be nearly entirely technically driven. Arguably, this works – if not required – when you operate in organizations like Google, Facebook, or Yahoo! Beyond the Technology sector though, the balance between people, process, and technology is critical to success. Consider Retail, an industry sector largely built on brick and mortar and Loss Prevention. Here, Information Security cannot be driven without understanding the Store Operations and employees in the field. With approximately >90% of retailers not technically driven, and often prone to compromise by the phishing/spam campaigns that the Finance and Technology sectors have identified several years ago, success in Retail requires a strong people and process focus in order to maximize the benefits of technology. Recent breaches in the sector only stress the need for balanced people, process, and technology capabilities.

So to simplify, my view is that Security Leaders must have strong capabilities in the following domains:

• People – Communicate, educate, and motivate their superiors, peers, and subordinates effectively. Customers, partners, and employees are always the first line of defense. 

• Process – As it relates to the business and what it does, leaders must manage Information Security itself as a business and maintaining controls consistently to minimize human error risk.

• Technology – Effectively identify, qualify, and remediate threats holistically across the cloud/mobile connected enterprises across an ever changing technical landscape. 

So when these flashes occur, I remember that I'm here because I chose to be, and make a call based on the people, process, technology information I have in hand. And if my assessment of the situation isn't right, I can course correct with my team the next day.

This post original appeared on Justin Somaini’s Cyber Security Blog.