 Thank you to our first two speakers today, Charlie and Mark. We'll see them on the panel shortly, but we're going to move right along with the next speaker, who's going to talk to us about product centric technology operating models in practice and taking us through that topic is Justin Mann, who is the managing partner at Digital Business Consulting. Justin's an implementation consultant and educator recognized for his work in IT transformation and technology value management. While at Cisco, he developed the framework for and authored the associated book on operating IT as a services organization. Since then, he's continued to evolve the solution, aligning it with agile principles as digital product line management as one of the world's leading experience-based frameworks and training product centric technology management across a digital enterprise. In this session, Justin explores the core principles of product centric technology operating models and examines how they effectively rewire the central nervous system, like that, of traditional silo-based technology operations organizations and mindsets. He will also share a glance at how the forthcoming version 3.0 of the IT for IT reference architecture standard from the Open Group will carry digital product centric philosophies outward from this new operating model core across the full life cycle of any given digital product and into every facet of technology management. So a warm welcome from the Open Group please for Justin Mann. Welcome, Justin. Nice to see you. Thanks, Steve. So the purpose of this presentation is to provide a practical look at how product centric technology operating models can fundamentally and permanently change technology management from how we deliver, how we engage managed services providers, how and why we drive adoption of cloud capabilities and even how we make not just digital security but holistic risk management part and parcel with every single digital product that we deliver. Now, in simplest terms, what we're talking about is shifting technology management from something that looks like this where activities and decision making, day in and day out, are being made from inside of silos and where there's no dedicated management of the products or accountability for value management. And what we want to do is transition these models to something that looks more like this where there's now a strategic layer of management that's dedicated to products and value creation. Now, we're going to quickly look at some of the drivers and opportunities that are leading the industry to converge on this concept. And we'll also take a look at some of the things that take place inside this layer of digital product line management. But the biggest message I would highlight for this session is going to be that just because we call out these digital product lines or product line managers, that doesn't in itself make us a product centric organization. To do that, we have to shift the central core of our operating models to these digital product lines. In essence, we need to rewire the central nervous system of our operating models to those digital product lines so that they are now the central nervous system that informs all of our major functions. And so that all of the activities and decision making day in and day out are now being made from the perspective of the products and how they create value for the business. Now, before we look at how we become product centric, I want to take a step back and really be clear on the why. One of the first things we need to think about is revisiting the purpose and goal of technology management. And we need to elevate technology management beyond just basic operational health and move technology management to true value management. I think something a lot of technology leaders are learning these days is that true value management represents a significantly broader set of responsibilities than just managing technology for operational health. The next thing we need to do is make sure that we're managing value across how we both change the business through project execution as well as how we run the business through our daily operational activities. In reality, a lot of enterprise businesses have some level of control on the change in project side. So they're using capital investment to link projects to a clear value case or at least to a business strategy. And agile methodologies has taken this even further. So we've got some good control on driving value management as we run projects. But what happens is when we start to lose traction for value management is when we shift the shiny new products that we just built over into an operational framework that's barely aware of the product level. Something else we need to consider is that we need to manage the value of all technology that we deliver. What I am continuing to see with more clients is they're starting to apply basic elements of digital product management and product line management, but they're only doing that for a handful of premier digital products. We need to carry that prioritization of products and emphasis on value creation across everything that we deliver from infrastructure, digital security and even the outcomes that we deliver. The next thing we need to acknowledge is that in a truly digital business where technology and technologists are ubiquitous across every area of the business, the reality is a single organization trying to be the sole gatekeeper and key master for technology innovation and technology investment will not scale. So this is not about an IT operating model. This is about creating an operating model that can give us a common lens for technology across the entire business. The next thing we want to think about is we're starting to drive our digital transformations faster and faster. The question becomes, how do we make sure that digital security and risk management are actually keeping pace with our digital transformations? And finally, we want to think about how do we build off of the momentum of DevOps and Agile and continue carrying culture that's focused on products and value creation and make sure that everyone in our organizations is thinking in that way. At the very least, the technologists should see themselves as supporting a critical link in a technology supply chain leveraged to deliver the products and create value for the business. And lastly, we need to figure out how to accomplish all of this, but do it in a way that actually scales. Now, believe it or not, the first big step in accomplishing all of these target outcomes starts with a simple definition. So if you think about all of the emphasis on moving to value management, the reason this concept of a product is so powerful is because of the implications that it carries. When you hear the term product, you immediately think that's that final unit of delivery from an organization to a consumer. So if you're going to do value management, that's where you start at. That's where you want to understand any product-specific value elements that a lot of times your ability to deliver in that area are the only thing that matters. But it's also the place where you want to start to map out and understand and drive the customer experience. This is where you want to look at product performance as opposed to just reporting on technical metrics from the technology supply chain that was used to deliver it. This is where you want to be able to show back a total cost of ownership. So the definition I've been using for the past few years leads with that piece. But I also want to make some explicit call-outs that a product can represent many things. It could represent a software package that we deliver, which is I think what most Scrum Agile teams are familiar with, but it could also equally represent a set of technical capabilities that we're delivering to the business by managing the application and infrastructure stack on their path. It could also represent a technical end customer device, a laptop or desktop that we're delivering, or it could even represent an outcome that we're delivering. For example, a service desk changing a password. Now, what I will share with you, there's always going to continue to be thinking on how we define these things. If six weeks from now, you want to have a minimum viable product for digital product line management that can start to achieve those outcomes that we let off with, this definition will serve that purpose. Be careful with how much academic debate you invite around these definitions. Next thing you know, it will be eight months from now and your teams will still be debating the definition of a product. And in fact, this isn't the only definition we need to think about here. It's easy to say that we want to start managing every product we deliver for value, but the reality is we deliver dozens, if not hundreds of digital products across the business. So how do we do that in a way that scales? And the opportunity lies when we take a step back and you start to realize that many of these products share common elements. It could be support for a common customer base, maybe a set of products all are leveraged to support a specific business outcome, things like that. And it opens up this opportunity to start very easily logically grouping these digital products. And I want to be clear, this isn't about randomly trying to manage 10 completely different products. This is about trying to find a way to manage 10 products that have close relationships. So the reality is in these product-centric operating models, these digital product lines are going to become that central point of focus. They are our pivot points for managing value and relinking all of our thinking to this. Now, as important as the digital product lines are going to be in these future operating models, something we need to think about is we need to think really hard about what types of roles and what type of individuals are we gonna allow to take ownership of these digital product lines? Now, this is going to be an area where in the next few years there's going to be a ton of interest, a lot of different ideas. So I wanted to think back in my experience the past few years, building out these models and what was it? What were the basic mindsets and skill sets that made all the difference in the world in achieving those outcomes that we went off with? And it's this, it's finding individuals who are willing to adopt and apply a general manager mindset to accept that responsibility for end-to-end ownership of a service and accept that sole accountability for whether or not a product line delivers value. What we're looking for here is someone to step up and say, I'm gonna delegate, I'm gonna work with product managers, product owners, but at the end of the day, this is on me, the buck stops here. To really drive home this point, I wanna dig into this concept of a general manager because a general manager is someone who can look across all of the things that need to be accounted for in managing this product line. That's gonna span daily operations, figuring out how to facilitate target outcome outcomes for conformance or performance targets, demand planning, risk management, supply chain management, all of these things have to be accounted for. Now, obviously no single individual can be solely accountable for those. Successful track record of delegation is incredibly important for this role. What we're looking for is someone who can effectively work with product managers, product owners, and delegate these things out, but who accepts that they are the ultimate responsible party, meaning if they delegate an activity and that point of delegation fumbles the ball, these are the guys who are gonna jump in, pick the ball up and get it over the goal line for us. I get a lot of questions on, okay, how exactly is that different? For example, the typical organizational manager. An organizational manager typically is looking at resource management, work prioritization, and they're probably accountable for an operational budget. What we're setting up here is something that is much more strategic. Another question I get is, what about how is this different than a business relationship manager? And again, there are elements of business engagement. They're gonna be critical to being successful in this role. But when I'm looking for a BRM, the main trade I'm looking for is someone who's really great at relationship management. When I'm looking for a digital product line manager, what I'm really looking for is a high performance decision engine. I really have not found a better way to describe it. I'm looking for someone who can look across a broad panel of levers, dials, and switches, and who can understand how to start making changes, understand the ripple effects, and manage those things to deliver the outcomes. And do that while working with the product line managers and the product owners. So that to me, this general manager mindset and some community of individuals willing to step up and say, I will own this, I will delegate, I will partner with product owners, but at the end of the day, this falls on me. And I'm gonna do what it takes to make this successful. That mindset, that skill set is the thing that is different than everything that's come before in our operating models. Now, if we want to support the launch of this role and make sure the first individuals stepping into this role can be incredibly successful, one of the first things we need to do is lead with a very clear vision in terms of what does it look like to actually manage a digital product line. The reality is, these product lines are gonna be very unique. And if we leave it open-ended, all of these product line managers are gonna go in different directions. It's that conundrum where you have a 700 horsepower engine, but all 700 horses are going in different directions. So we want to provide some clear vision to say you have flexibility to do whatever you need to do, you need to your product line, but we have this top level of consistency to make sure everyone's looking at the same things. So I'll draw your attention to the hexagons in the middle. Those are product line performance areas. That's where we're looking at the unique value contributors. We know we need to think about the customer experience. Quality has historically had a ton of focus. We also need to be thinking about the speed of delivery, demand and leverage shaping, and do we have the capacity to support incoming requirements? Do we have a model of the total cost of ownership? Do we have strategy in place to continue optimizing there? And finally, risk. And I mean risk as in not just digital security, but truly looking at everything from political conformance to things like EPA, if you're in the shill oil industry, that is a well-rounded view of risk management. And that's gonna become incredibly important here in a few slides, we'll circle back to that. So we want to provide a consistent view of what it means to manage a product line. Something you'll notice about these, first and foremost, they're well-rounded. If we leave it open-ended, we'll find a lot of technologists are looking for most tech quality and the consumer base is probably more focused on speed. And it's easy to lose focus on all of these other things like risk and the total cost of ownership. So adopting something like this is our way to maintain consistency across everything that we're managing in the business. Now, one other element of this I do wanna highlight is the product line reviews. I continue to see organizations who opt not to do some type of product line review. And I understand it, a lot of times they are at risk of devolving into more operational updates or product line project status updates. These things should reflect more like an earnings call. So the product line manager is stepping out in front of a group of senior business leaders and senior technology leaders. And demonstrating, here's how we created value in the past few quarters and how we hit our agreed-to targets. Here's how we're going to continue increasing value in the future. Why would we continue to invest in a company or a product line that's not willing to regulate, step out and qualify how they're delivering value? Now wrapping up on the digital product line management there's a couple of other points I wanna bring to light here pretty quickly. The first thing is that our silos don't necessarily have to go away. The silos allow us to drive excellence in how we do infrastructure, analytics or even functions like project management. But what we need to do is carry that product thinking and that product value management wrapper down to those silos so that we're designating digital product lines to encompass everything we deliver across the organization. Now when we do this, a couple of best practices keep in mind, small enterprises, you're probably looking at 20 to 25 digital product lines. On a larger enterprise, about 70. Going above that for the largest global organizations that are really complex, might work. What I would caution though is we a lot of times have a tendency to take these neat ideas and over rotate on them. So it's possible to designate way too many digital product lines, way too many digital product line managers and the next thing you know, you're putting in a lot of effort and not getting a lot of value out of it. And in fact, there's nobody left to do the actual delivery work. So I would almost caution you to go smaller at the outset. Go with a smaller set of digital product lines, coach up those digital product line managers and over time they will highlight for you if there is better visibility and decision making that can be made by calling out a few additional product lines. Also keep in mind that you always want to keep your product ownership and the digital product line managers internal to your business. Literally everything else is subject to be since external. Now at this point, I want to start walking through when we start to move to these models and we start to reorient our product models to this layer of digital product line management at a practical level, what starts to happen. And the first thing you'll see is we now have a community of digital product line managers that start passing requirements down into their technology supply chains. So we have to remember that the way a lot of these silos have been managed for years, their scorecards, their performance are ranked on baseline operational health. And what can happen is they drop the requirements coming in from the digital product line managers because they simply don't have time. So what we have to change is set the expectation that they're going forward, there will now be a second level of requirements being passed into these silos and that those requirements are directly linked to the products and how they create value for the business. So it's a bit of a cultural shift and you will know you're making progress when these traditional silos realize they have to adopt this product thinking and product line management wrapper in order to keep ahead and start building all of the incoming requests. And you'll notice a big change when the product line managers for these business enabling products start to attend the product line reviews in these silos. And they're gonna be sitting down and saying my product line is starting to go yellow and red because I'm relying on your products as part of my value chain. That's when you know you're making progress in this type of model. Now, well, it's one step to correct for that culturally internal to our organizations. What we find a lot of times is delivery is actually kicked out to manage service providers. So here again, the problem is we have these contracts that were drawn up years back that primarily reflect silo-based operations and baseline operational health. So what happens now is we have a whole new set of requirements being driven by the digital product line managers and their model and the contracts don't support it. So it's an easy enough fix. We just have to realize that in some cases our digital product line or MSPs may actually be inhibiting our opportunity to truly shift to these models and create value for our products. The fix, again, easy enough in theory, we need to start incorporating the elements of these operating models into our contracts so that they can support both the requirements coming in from the digital product lines as well as the core infrastructure and traditional silos. One of the things I expect to see in the next few years are managed service providers actively advertising that as a market differentiator that they have gone ahead and figured out how to support digital product line management in these type of product-centric operating models. At this point, let's take a quick look at how this can change adoption of technology. For example, cloud. A lot of times we set high-level targets for cloud adoption. That says we need to be 80% in the cloud by this date. And so we start lifting and shifting quickly. And what we don't realize is a lot of times we're not getting the value. And in fact, we could be breaking the customer experience. Now what this sets up is each one of our digital product line managers is not gonna be responsible for developing a cloud strategy unique to their product line. So what we're doing going forward is we're leveraging cloud not because of some high-level target, but because there was a product unique value case to adopting those capabilities. And in reality, moving to this model will more than achieve whatever your previous targets for cloud adoption were. One of the most exciting is if you think about the need to scale digital security and risk management. And in most of our models, we've got a central team for digital security and they're trying to use a one to many approach to drive digital security across everything we deliver. That approach will not scale for a digital business, but digital product line management creates a new opportunity. Each and every digital product line manager will be required to maintain an ongoing risk management and digital security practice. So what that means is they need to regularly engage with their digital security practice to develop and maintain these risk management. Strategies. So in that effect, this becomes a force multiplier for digital security. And this is what I talked about early, where we're making security risk management part and parcel with every product that we deliver. This is probably the only solution I've seen to accomplish this and make sure security keeps pace with our digital transformations. Now I'll add quickly, there are dozens more scenarios that we could talk about in this way. If you think about the fact that modularity actually equals business agility. And these models are all about modularizing around what we deliver and then having someone accountable or proactively managing the risk. And if you can take a moment just to consider how a business with a mature and mature model for digital product line management could have responded differently to an event like the COVID-19 pandemic. Last thing I would ask you to conserve for these models, digital transformations, such a very high level effort and you're looking across DevOps, scaled-out-doll framework, automation, artificial intelligence, all of these are important. Where do you start? How do you start to prioritize? And the reality is if you weed with this layer of management, it will tell you how to prioritize. You can start looking and prioritizing by digital product lines and using the value cases to figure out where to invest in first. So there truly is a tip of the spear to kick off your digital transformation. Now, finally on my last slide, I wanna share something very exciting. So in this session so far, we've primarily looked at that central core of the operating model, what it takes to manage at that strategic level and start making decision-making activities from the perspective of the products that are going to create value. What about everything else further down in the stack? The decades of process definitions and philosophies for service management that are all still largely anchored to silo-based thinking and organizational models. And it was incredibly exciting for me a while back to come across the earliest content for the Open Groups IT for IT B3 standard. And this thing is all about emphasizing the shift through digital product. Now, obviously one of the first things I did is I got it and I started flipping through it immediately to understand, are they just rebranding a bunch of stuff? And the answer is no. What makes this so exciting is that this team is truly rethinking all of this from the perspective of a digital product. So the content that's going to be released from this, while some of it may be familiar, it does represent a fundamental and permanent change to how we drive all of these. And the same thing can be said for the technologies that we use to then manage all of this. So if you look at, if you think of any major vendor right now for service management, things like that, and you take a look at their roadmaps for their data models, they are also quickly shifting to this focus on digital product line management. So all of that coming together, I would say, guys, get excited. This is an incredible shift for us from the operating model layer, the standards and value change for how we manage a digital product across all the life cycles. And even down to the technologies and platforms that enable us to do all of this, it's all coming together. And we are able to legitimately solve challenges that business and technology leaders have been looking for for the past 20 years. My name is Justin Mann. I'm the managing partner and trading lead for digital business consulting. We continue to share a lot of explainer videos, articles, all based on our experience, building out these frameworks and training. And I am certainly looking forward to hearing from all of you in the Q&A session and beyond. And I obviously want to take this moment to thank the open group for giving me the opportunity to present today. Thanks, guys. Justin, wonderful job. Thank you very, very much. And a great, great note to end on it. It is exciting the new version of the IT for IT reference architecture. It's a lot of work's gone into that by a lot of people. So thank you for that. And thank you for sharing your other thoughts. Stand by and we'll come back to you on the panel. Meanwhile, a warm virtual round of applause for Justin Mann. Thanks, Justin.