 Hilton leads a growing in-market team supporting Lean IX's rapid expansion in the United States and fueling strategic growth for the company. He's nearly 20 years of experience heading high-growth technology sales organizations and operations teams. Driven by the IT needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hilton will discuss in this session what enterprise architects need to consider as they transform their IT to support a remote workforce. He's a very topical subject, so a warm welcome from the open group to you, Hilton, virtual at this point, I'm afraid, but I'll hand over to you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much, Steve. It was interesting listening to the panel speak and I think it will tie in some common themes. As I was introduced, I'm effectively a go-to-market person. I didn't grow up as an enterprise architect. I've been in the world for roughly 18 months now. Frankly, I'm really learning a lot about our customers at Lean IX and what we can do to support the practice and what we're doing as a vendor to hopefully extend that community. We'll talk a little bit about our story as a company in specifically the last six months. Some of my observations as the opportunity for us as a business has changed and then talk a bit about some of the approaches we've seen from our customers and maybe some of those observations will resonate and be useful and then I'll hopefully wrap up being time sensitive with a quick story about a real customer that used some of our technology during parts of the COVID crisis. And I'm sure that the COVID theme is something that's been flogged to death, to be honest, but it still has definitely changed the game for us as a business and as our customers been so deeply affected. So just briefly, we're a small shop, 231 people around the globe for those of you who don't know us. Key point is our technology was launched in Germany and our head office is in Bonn. I'm based in Boston, Massachusetts and really a big part of our current growth is being driven from the U.S. And if you did happen to stumble upon any press releases about us recently, we've just taken on a large chunk of VC money and we're gonna use that, not just to grow up the sales team but primarily to continue development efforts because we've very tuned into customer and partner needs and hopefully that translates into a product and a service that is valued by the community that is so strong here in the U.S. and globally. Just in terms of our growth and probably an interesting data point about change, we did what we call our EA Connect Day last year in New York City and I think we were very fortunate to see around 60 people actually show up for the event. And this year largely driven by the fact that COVID dramatically changed our horizon. We were compelled to do a virtual event very much like this. And we had, I believe, almost 960 people attend. So the driving force that COVID has created is very much a tailwind in many ways. And yes, it's been a painful tailwind for many, many people and that can't be overlooked. But we're trying to find opportunities to maximize the benefit from that both for ourselves and from our customers. We like to think of ourselves as the perfect match between precision engineering and U.S. customer support. And that's kind of hopefully how our customers see us too. So just jump right into the topic that I wanna cover. So this is a screenshot of our tool and all we're trying to point out here is a few things which will be hopefully glaringly obvious. The complexity created by change, by transformation, by a lot of these cliche terms that are kicked around means that it's very hard to make sense of people's environments that you effectively looking at here is an application landscape of our customers seen through our tool. And as organizations grow over time, all make conscious or unconscious choices to change and develop, completely breeds itself. So you have this massive ramp up from processes increasing, applications to support them multiplying and technologies exponentially growing. The key to this is that I'm not gonna pitch the product, but the key is that we're able to help you make sense of this environment. That's one of the reasons why our customers are so interested in our solution. And what I'm trying to show you is largely how complex an environment can become. Obviously, I'm singing to the choir here, but the key is that this is a massive area where we as a vendor have been able to support the community, providing actionable insights that are translated from an IT world that can be actually spoken to in business terms to the business. And any modernization, rapid change, scaling all of these cliche terms tend to create this situation. But we see that and have seen that as a big opportunity. Again, singing to the choir, I won't talk too much about this. The other tailwind we have is we see a huge opportunity for enterprise architects, for a lot of people like you to come on board to join businesses and then help them make sense of the current state with a view to building out a plan to ensure a successful deployment of technology in the future to support business requirements. Another big tailwind for others is clearly helping us grow as a company because a number of jobs advertised obviously indicates a big skill gap, which means there's demand for technology and the framework to support the growth of enterprise architecture and to support enterprise architects, not just in the IT arena, but increasingly at high decision-making levels to drive decisions around strategy. And some of you may be sitting there going, sounds a little bit like wishful thinking, but hopefully the aspirational goal is still valid and we've seen some real change in that view, particularly with the emergency situation that COVID caused. So, you know, here we are talking about our exciting technology business racing along hundreds of customers, massive interest and investment and everybody's probably acquainted with the scenario. On the 13th of March, it was actually Friday the 13th, we were forced to close our Boston office. And to say we were prepared is probably on one level 100% accurate, but nobody's ever really sure how things will work until the event actually hits. Many, many companies were prepared simply because that was their standard MO, that was a remote organization. Others that were prepared were basing that preparation on continuity exercises and planning, again, which worked. But the common theme we noticed with our customers is an increase in usage of our tool. Obviously, we're able to track all that data and we eventually realized that the increase in the use was driven by the need for the business to understand exactly what the role technology could play in the metamorphosis that was enforced. From a traditional office-based environment into a work-from-home approach, which is currently where I'm still sitting, even though we've partially reopened our office in Boston, there's not a normal situation because going back to the office, you're not going back to what it was before. So we're living in this interesting world where you have one foot in an office and you have one foot at home. There's limitations to what you can do in the office because there's limitations to space usage, but you have to figure out how to make things work. And we as a business have to make sure that we figure out a way to support our staff so that they can continue to be successful. And as a result of this interest, suddenly our customers, our champions in our customers were coming to us requesting more direction and support on how to find actionable insights they could share with the business to make sure that the new work-from-home environment was properly serviced. So we see this massive spike in interest in our tool increase usage and it's all kind of backdrop by what you'd expect which is the uncertainty created by the pandemic leads to a pause in spending. So the projections are that the slowdown in spending could well increase, the slowdown could increase. However, what becomes apparent is it's more of a redeployment of spending versus a spending freeze. Which again, I'm sure everyone's familiar with this making it increasingly hard to do to budgets and plan. People have to be careful about how they show an ROI as they go to the leadership and go to finance to request budget. And on the one hand, you have finance driving hard for cost reduction. On the other hand, you have the business pushing harder for answers on how to evolve the business to support the new workforce and end up with this kind of glue where decision-making becomes increasingly difficult. So we took a step back and we tried to listen to our customers to understand how they were dealing with the situation. What doesn't change is a large group of different stakeholders who need to be appeased. And maybe it's worth mentioning that our customers are a blend. So we have many customers that are very large, 41,000 organisations with complex environments who are trying to make sense of where they are to simply do basic things like application portfolio management. And then we have smaller high-growth organisations that are trying to, if you like, future-proof their businesses so that they don't end up in a place where APM becomes a massive project that they have to embark on, rather wanting to instill that discipline in their standard processes. But the feedback we got from our customers was that organisations had to take a view of just because we stuck in a crisis doesn't mean we should just go into survival mode. The idea of being that when we come out of the storm, if we haven't created an environment where people can execute and deliver based on strong technology investments, we'll really have no one to row the boat, which means that our competitors can and will get ahead. So the crisis situation is a real hotbed for innovation. And sometimes the feedback I hear from people is that suddenly things got so quiet when COVID hit and then suddenly things got so busy because it feels like a lot of people are just trying to create a project for the sake of being extremely busy, giving people something to do during a time when they're worried and want to try and add value and try and demonstrate their value. So we saw two buckets of investment, one in the survival mode where organisations from the cut costs and that money was then reorientated to a point where organisations could use that to innovate, to drive top-line revenue growth, rather than just park that money in a safe place for a rainy day. And this is the loose framework that we gathered from our customers in terms of how they would make sure that on a day-to-day basis, the lofty strategic goals weren't put ahead of the fact that the people who did the work had to remain successful, efficient and candidly in good spirits in a world where perhaps they were isolated and removed from their colleagues. Many organisations already were in this place, as I mentioned. So organisations such as Twitter could easily pivot and become a 100% work-from-home model organisation, but Salesforce, this is a lot of the stuff is all had for them, so they're well equipped to deal with this. And one of the things that we experienced was the need for individuals to gain again easy and quick access to technology that may have been slightly different from what they were using in the office and ought to gain basic access to expedited support so that they could get quick responses to IT requests and perhaps more importantly, from a resource perspective, that IT wasn't overwhelmed with requests. So we saw organisations trying to go after individual areas where they could save money. But the organisations that we've seen to be more successful, the ones that took a more of a macro view, a broader view, on taking a look at not just, for example, application nationalisation, but taking a careful look at the overall business strategy and not just piecemeal by piecemeal, refining application usage and trimming applications, but by using that overall view that we're able to give them to understand the connection between applications, business capabilities and the technologies that were supporting that. And the key to that was each and every time an opportunity to rationalise is identified, how do you make sure that you don't have to reinvent the wheel and perform a project before you can begin the project to find your starting point? Obviously, it's well known that large companies finding these duplicate applications and technology overlaps is a good way to make a quick saving on the bottom line. But in the absence of having a full picture of how those applications connect to business capabilities and business processes, it becomes a high-risk situation unless it's done thoughtfully. There was also, we noticed a sudden increase in the interest in maximising opportunities to deploy cloud technologies. And with that comes the risk of people meandering off into different corners and then effectively holding out things that suited business capabilities about consulting the broader business. So the topic of empowering people, as everyone is probably aware, quickly swings from, giving people what they need with the appropriate controls. And obviously we talk about governance and governance is a big scary word to a lot of people and they feel that it limits their ability to sometimes get their jobs done. But ultimately, we saw organisations that focused on the mantra. Governance is about increasing trust in leadership and reducing frustration, largely so that people can get access to what they need in a timely fashion. Means that people who build things and need to deploy these cloud services can do them in an effective, efficient way with full visibility to the organisation. The obvious and crucial spin-off that has to happen is that the controls need to remain in place to ensure compliance with things like HIPAA, FedRAMP, if that's applicable, et cetera. And making sure that you have a complete view, not just of your current environment, but also your cloud environment and how those environments tie together has become something that's increasingly topical for our customer base. So just to steal from someone briefly, I came across an article on a website, actually a CIO website, and the individual is kind of saying that when we make assumptions, we contribute to the complexity, rather than the simplicity of a problem, making the problem more difficult to solve. And I think the metaphor used is that it's a very similar scenario to being a parent and some of us can probably connect with that. So really what we saw is organisations trying to simplify their approach to understanding where they were. And you find people at this, we find the customers at this sort of fork in the road, where you do need to build up a strategic view of where you're going. But there's what I call strategy fatigue that's clipped into businesses where architects and IT leaders have been talking about strategy. And some of the broader stakeholders in the business who have been barking about results don't feel like that is the long-term solution to getting to where they need to be. So we saw enterprise architects juggling the situation where you're thinking about, how do I show a rapid return on investment if I embark on an EA project or purchase an EA tool? And how do I balance that with the need to make sure that our choices support our long-term business goals without getting the kind of roll of the eyes from the business again. Here goes another strategy plan. So people were looking for a combination of the two and increasingly so. How do I show a quick way to demonstrate an impact on the balance sheet? And how do I underline the fact that what the enterprise architecture function is doing in our business ties to strategic goals? So I'm not gonna walk through every element of the slide. I think it's something that people logically are familiar with. The key was simplicity and making that decision between balancing the requirement for strategy versus effectively finding a way to get quick wins in a time when budgetary scrutiny is probably an all-time hire over the last probably three to five years. So if you've got our website, you can actually get a much better version of the story about the government of Yukon. There's a webinar where Ryan Ago actually talks about what it was like to deal with the challenges that Yukon faced. Just a couple of key points I'd like to touch on. Interestingly, and maybe significantly, Yukon is a very remote and small province with about 50,000 people and that remoteness and that isolation makes it already difficult to service people with the limited resources they have. When COVID hit, like most government organizations, I should say every government organization to some degree, limitations to resources were imposed, which means that from a staffing and infrastructure perspective, it was just in simple terms, hard to get the services to people who needed them. And it's not a unique story again, the impact of the pandemic has been dramatic on both public and government organizations. But because of the way Yukon had architectured their EA practice and how they'd used our tool, they were able to very, very swiftly identify the connections between the infrastructure they delivered, the services they had to deliver, and the most critical applications they needed to keep running. They also made use of pulling out some dashboards using the open APIs so that really in a matter of a couple of days, Ryan and their team were able to identify how to help, where to help, and do that in such a way that they could communicate effectively with their constituents because I think the common theme is often, if the answer is a bad one, we'd rather share it quickly with accurate data. If the answer is a good one, sharing it on time is always good news. And this was certainly a situation that Yukon were able to create where although the news wasn't typically good, the information was very useful so people knew what was going on. Again, it's probably worth your while to go and check out that webinar at some point and get it from the horse's mouth as it were. So that concludes the bulk of the presentation. I think I wanted to just make sure that the key element I'm trying to drive is that from our customer's perspective, the observations I had speaking to them through the crisis was that the opportunity was created by uncertainty for them to leverage their skills and the information they had to step a little bit more into the spotlight whereas historically many of them had felt that a lot of their projects, a lot of the endeavors were kind of hidden in the shadows as skunkworks and then were not really seen as a priority for the business when speaking to IT. And certainly the crisis gave a lot of our customers an opportunity to see things like that. So with that, happy to answer any questions. Hilton, thanks very much for that. We're up against a break as well so I'm just gonna pick one question and that's, do you think that office politics will decrease through the remote work model and software driven employee efficiency? I like that question because it's a fun one. I speak from personal experience. No, it's a fascinating thing to see with collaboration tools like Slack, with Zoom, Skype, name it, people have a number of avenues and vectors to keep communicating. If anything, it could make it worse because there's a little bit of disconnect when not being able to sit in the front of someone and make sure you articulate the full story. So pieces get lost, problems get exaggerated, which then drives the need, not just in office gossip but in the business to make sure that data is accurate, information is shared in the right way. Yeah, I could talk files about that. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. It's the end of the day, we've said for years there's no just no such thing as a virtual beer and there is a need, that's just a fundamental human need for some kind of connection and interaction and with all these tools at our disposal nowadays, it's very easy to not just be constantly using them but also to rattle off a poorly crafted response to something that can set off a chain reaction. So I think I agree with you, it could actually make it worse but we have to leave it there Hilton but thank you for your thoughts today and a warm virtual round of applause from the open groups. Thank you. Thank you very much Steve, thanks for running.