 Miles is the head of global enterprise marketing at Del Boomi and he also runs Hashtag CIO Chat. According to lead tales, Miles is the ninth leading influencer of CEOs. He's the facilitator of Hashtag CIO Chat. The chat has executive level participants from around the world in a mix of industries including banking, insurance, education and government. He also heads global enterprise marketing at Boomi, as I said. So Miles, welcome. Thank you. I'm really thrilled to be with you this morning. Great. Yes, we're in the same time zone. She's the Pacific time zone. So nice, nice early start for us, but thank you for making the effort. So I mentioned, I mentioned Hashtag CIO Chat. And I know you just had your first virtual event, Miles, because I was on part of it last week. Can you tell everyone on here a little bit more about what goes on at CIO Chat? Yeah, CIO Chat was started by John Dodge, who was CIO Magazine. And a few years ago, I got the honor to take it over. We're a nonprofit 501C3 company. And basically we do CIO education and then STEM diversity scholarships for the places that we go to. So, but, you know, we've gotten to talk a lot about this topic. So I'd love to share today that perspective as well as what we've been learning from our friends like Jeannie Ross. Yes, absolutely. So, yes, her name came up more than once yesterday. So what if your CIO is involved in that, told you about the days to come and how they think digital transformation efforts around the world will be affected by the pandemic and the recession that is undoubtedly already happening. Yeah, I mean, we've had a bunch of discussions about the pandemic and how it's impacted things. I mean, the good news is that CIOs say that the business is really now rocking, you know, the value that IT provides in a way that has never occurred before. I mean, they have been doing amazing things to keep things running. I was amazed, one of our CIOs a couple weeks ago, said she couldn't come to the chat even though she wanted to participate in the conversation because she was wiping down the counters to make sure it was a clean environment near the data center. So CIOs are standing up in lots of different ways. CIO is just like grocery workers and hospital workers because they're keeping the companies running. So, you know, thank your CIO when you get a chance. But in terms of digital transformation, they and others are talking about this being an opportunity to really become a digital first company. And there are some amazing things I've been talking to folks about about how higher ed, for example, will flip its entire model to be online first. And other industries are having similar changes. Just think about the brittleness of the supply chain and now you've got to make it work and be more flexible. So CIOs are all in the middle of that discussion and are making their companies better at digital. So digital is accelerating in many of the companies that we talk to regularly. Right. And one of the questions I came in on your event last week was the role of the CIO might be changing or is changing as a result of this. Can you tell us what you've heard about that? Yeah, I mean, I, Deloitte's done a lot of thinking about this and they talk about how the CIO is moving from, you know, you know, just running kind of like a utility if you want to think about it to being a, you know, a change co creator or change instigator. In some cases where they perceive the change first. And, but it's really important that they have the board relationships and relationships that one of our CIOs, Joanne, Joanne, a young likes to talk about the fact that it has to be 460 degrees because she's talking about up across and around and outside the organization. The CIO has to be a big relationship builder to make transformation work because it starts honestly with the people and process before we start talking about technology. Right. So let's talk a little bit about digital transformation. We covered, we heard quite a bit yesterday and some case studies, which were interesting. One of the things that came out of course was there's a lot of confusion around terminology when it comes to digital transformation. So let's take digitization and digital, there's a difference. Can you talk us through what the difference is? Yeah, I really like this way of thinking about it and I think it can help the folks that are on the call to think a little differently about it. You know, it's interesting. I was listening a week ago to a professor at Columbia University of strategy who says, you know, initially when people thought of digitization, it was for the marketing folks. But now everything is becoming digitally infused or digital first kind of thing. G Ross puts it nicely in her book. She talks about how the initial wave of digital transformation is really about taking something that was an analog process and making it a digital and for me, you know, the best example of what we were doing for many, many years was expense reporting. So in occur, for example, you know, you took something that was paper and made it, you know, a digital process. So it was just literally about taking something you were doing. And it was largely, you know, on the bottom side of the ledger that you were fixing from an accounting perspective, you were, you were transforming, you know, processes. But but now it's really about digital and digital in the new version of digital transformation is is not about efficiency. It's about affecting how you interact with customers or your value props for customers. You know, a great example of this is GE several years ago. They had built all the streaming technology coming off of jet engines and they applied it and it suddenly became that instead of selling jet engines, they sold the service where they kept the jet engines running rather than selling it. So they transformed what their product was. So digital is about creativity. It's about innovation. And it's about transforming how you make money rather than how you become more efficient. Right. Okay. So talking of everyone, everyone wants to be successful at it. What do you think companies have to put in place to be successful in a digital world? Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with, with, you know, finishing all the work that needed to happen about creating what Jeannie Ross calls an operational backbone. So in her book design for digital, she says, first thing you need to do, although you're not going to get competitive advantage from it, is you have to fix the things that you have to have your, your process digitized. You have to fix data quality issues. You have to create a single view of key entities. And that's table stakes, but you have to do that because it's a legacy business. That's where your advantage is going to come from. But she goes on to talk about, you know, then what you want to do is to turn that into APIs that can be consumed. And there are amazing stories she talks about where APIs allowed new businesses to be started. And then finally, you need to have a digital platform, which is allowing you to rapidly experiment. And so it's a, it's a big change that she's suggesting, but I think what we're starting to see is businesses that can, you know, take advantage of their historical legacy stuff, but also create these digital, offerings or is open group likes to call it digital products. I think out of that is where the, the opportunity going forward is. So, you know, help the legacy businesses move quickly. Now, the MIT sister research says that 72% roughly of companies aren't ready yet. 51% are in silos, 21% are still in Band-Aids and duct tape. So this is the time to quickly fix the duct tape and then with that, to transition into creating digital offerings out there. Right. And how about, you know, you talked about things you have to put in place to give yourself a chance of success, but how about organizationally? And how does, how does an organization go about changing its organization? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I had the chief enterprise architect from DBS Bank come visit me last summer. And I was amazed because he confirmed everything that was in the book, but the idea is that, you know, obviously the operational backbone probably keeping that running and all that stuff needs a historical kind of organization. But, you know, in this, in these innovation teams, you flip the organization, the pyramid goes upside down and you have hundreds if not thousands of these innovation teams of small folks who are chartered. And it's a big idea that I've talked to Charlie involved with Open Group and at Forrester a lot about, but basically what you're doing in those teams, and to use the, I give credit to Open Group even though it goes from the general, the team of teams idea is a, is a, is a notion that becomes prevalent in digital organizations. They have lots of teams that are experimenting rapid fire using things like low code. But without creating according to CIOs tech data or security issues. And, and they're, they're doing it in such a way that they're able to rapidly build lots of different offerings that transform their customers experience. Right. Okay. Well, that takes us into the world of people and Eddie Drucker famously said that culture each strategy for breakfast. So how important are the, the people and processes in a digital transformation we talked a bit about the technology but what about the people in the processes. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to CIOs and CIO chat and folks want to occasionally come and join us on Thursdays from two to three Eastern they're welcome to come and they want to just hear what we're talking about. They're welcome to follow me on Twitter. But the, the people and processes is just so important. I mean, the technology issues for and the failures that have happened are huge out there in terms of organizations. But it all starts with people and processes CIOs tell me over and over again, if I can just get the organization behind it. Now, I want to, I want to say something here that I think is important that we all recognize. Change is not easy. I mean, I, one of the people I got to spend all the time with over the last couple years is the CIA with the American Cancer Society. And he said, you know, and they did some amazing just transformational things for people who have cancer that you know my heart goes out to over the last couple years as part of their digital transformation. But he said, you know, everybody from the top of the company to the lowest level person knew they needed to make this change. The change means changing people's lives. People do things differently after the change happens. And so it's hard. And if you can be a change leader as a CIO or, you know, the key enterprise architect supporting them. You have an opportunity to, to truly cause transformation to transformation starts from the people side first and there's a great book that's out there that you could take a look at at this early in the morning. And she offers name, but you know, she basically talks about personally transforming first, before you do the technology stuff. So I think that's where it starts with and then you can tackle process and then you can tackle technology. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's it well. And if you don't, if the people don't change then it's just going to be a constant battle isn't it. It's never going to really work. So, let's flip a bit miles to to what's going on in the open group as regards digital. What do you know about what we're doing we had we had Dave Lanz we talk a little yesterday but anything that you've seen and being involved with inside our community. Yeah, I, I've been absolutely amazed at all of the things that are going and how forward thinking open group has been and all of this, which is my hats off to you. So, I mean, you've got DP Bach that's been going on for a while about how do you think about digital and then you've got it for it, you know, trying to think about the the teaming structure and all the issues and building digital products. And then you have the architecture team which is thinking about, you know, how do you architect these things correctly so it's it's been really amazing to re engage with open group after a little bit of a hiatus. And just see the amount of thinking that's going on but you know, I always like to say that, you know, I've every time I go to an open group meeting I feel like I'm home because, you know, us that think systems is maybe 4% of the population so you don't get a lot of that interaction outside your, and sometimes even in your organization, but it's always great to talk to folks and open group because you're already there, so you might get it and you're trying to push the agenda forward. So that's great to hear Mars. Thank you. And thanks for coming back to Del Boomi is one of our more recent gold members at the open group, expanding the participation so thank you for that too. It's great to see. So, we did have a question that has come in. And I know you've probably heard something about this on the, or being involved in discussions on this on the CEO chat, but, but it's a question around how digital transformation affects or reflects the 5G roll out and vice versa. Is that being a topic you've you've addressed in your chats. We've talked a bit about 5G I mean obviously as we create connectivity it's going to allow for, you know, kinds of amazing things from a digital perspective, you know, one of the things that we've been talking about as I said earlier is coronavirus. And a number of cities have been very forward thinking about how do I reach portions of my population that I normally don't reach during this crisis. And, you know, how do I, how do I enable education to take place and so from the higher ed perspective. And they've discovered that they've had to do all kinds of things, including providing connectivity to their students and one school they told me they, they gave away, you know, on a temporary basis over 1000 laptops. Yeah, in order to make it happen. So, look, digital transformation is more than about companies. It's about the world is I'm looking at the image up here. How do we make it a, you know, connect better so he's an important element in enabling people, especially as you, you create bandwidth and the, you know, one of the story I'll tell you about is there's this taxi company. Actually, it was, it was the cell company down and I believe it was Kenya that use technology to completely transform people's lives and, you know, give solar cells to a goat herds he's children were lit, studying under kerosene at night in the house. And it's kind of amazing. So, digital is really impacting the world or, you know, one of our customers doctors without borders, you know, uses us where they're connected sometime and then they're not connected other times, and how do you make all that that work. It's been really amazing to see how connectivity is critical. It's, you know, it's how we communicate. It's how we operate and we've seen where the gaps have happened. We've talked a lot. I mean, and you saw it at our, our event. connectivity issues with our, you know, provider of things. So, you know, one of the big things I think that's going to be a top priority for CIOs in fixing as the days roll on is how do we get better connectivity. We make sure that the service providers like others are operating and zoom has become suddenly in the United States. If you haven't noticed like Coca Cola. Yeah, but for the news media and others to describe this, this era we're in right now. No, absolutely. It's, and, you know, right now there's a lot of forgiveness for things not being perfect, but it won't always be this. Yes, yes, you'll need to get that. So, this being the, the open group miles. There's, there's bound to be a question about enterprise architecture, of course. And questions come in. How important do you think it is that enterprise architects take the role as change enablers in contrast to governance. Yeah, I, I, you know, I think that enterprise architecture architects are foundational and it's interesting. Jeannie told me when she was starting to write her new book that she was finally writing another book for enterprise architects. Now, it ended up not just being about enterprise architects, but, you know, embedded in there are, you know, how critical enterprise architects are for for driving forward the company into a digital world. So, I think enterprise architects critical. Now, one of the things we've talked about an it for it. However, is that we need to provide as these digital teams happen more guidance. You know, in terms of how to run things in terms of standards and things like that. And I think, I think we can stand up to that. Challenge, but, you know, enterprise architecture is going to need to be supportive of these, you know, loosely coupled teams that are going to need to be creating the innovation and experimenting. And, and, you know, we have this whole concept and open group about, you know, you know, people who start by farming and then there's a town and then there's a, you know, city kind of thing. And you know, at this morning at this time in the morning, you know, trying to remember all the terms, but, but, but that those concepts are good concepts. But, and so I think, you know, enterprise architects are the foundation for being a digital company. And they need to become enablers of that. And if they can do that step, they're going to become more and more relevant to the business success. Yeah, I think so too. Well, Mars, we're just about out of time. Any, thank you for your insights and I really appreciate you participating today. Any last thoughts for the people on on our event today or suggestions of what they should be reading or any particularly interesting articles or books. Yeah, I mean, there are lots of things that are coming out and, you know, obviously start with design for digital, but there's some some other things that have been coming out recently. I try to, you know, regularly, you know, people started shipping me books a while back. So I'm trying to review those things as fast as I can. And I just think the important closing remark that I would say is that architecture really important as we as we go forward as organizations. We've got big tasks in front of us. You know, but one of the things CIS told me a while back when I was interviewing them about enterprise architects is that they felt that enterprise architecture was critical. They felt that, you know, if properly constructed enterprise architecture is sitting with the strategy folks, however, that's constructed in business. And they're, they're the forward function of it, they're figuring out where the organization needs to go. And so today, where we need to go is digital so it's reaching into those key portions of the organization that need to become digital, and helping the CIO to either co-create or in some cases instigate change and then find the stakeholders who are going to be behind it. Sometimes we can proceed the digital change faster than others, but if we can do that, I think the road forward for architects is going to be enterprise architect is going to be a good one. That's a great note to leave things on. Miles, Sue, thank you very much for joining us today.