 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled brought to you by BizOps Coalition. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the BizOps Manifesto Unveiling. As things been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort and he's joining us from Boston. It's Serge Lucio, the Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you. Good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the BizOps Manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today in 2020? Yeah, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? About 20 years ago, the Agile Manifesto was created and the goal of the Agile Manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the effort to build software. And if you roll back kind of 20 years later and if you look at the current state of the industry, the Project Management Institute estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we recently surveyed the number of executives in partnership with Harvard Business Review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and IT. And that's been kind of a case for almost 20 years now. So the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, have been using different terms, right? Some are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site reliability engineering movement, in many ways it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believe that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around kind of one concept. And so in many ways, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are out breaking together a number of ideas which have been emerging in the last five years or so. And defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining kind of the key principles and values, we can help kind of the industry, not just by providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. A lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go. But one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes in social media is the driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces. Everybody's working from home and you got to go, right? So your reliance on these tools increases dramatically. But I'm curious, you know, kind of short of the beginnings of this effort and short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors? Cause we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has adopted kind of rapid change and iterative delivery and sprints. What was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes? Well, so you have to understand that IT is kind of its own silos and traditionally IT has been treated as a cost center within larger organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of the traditional dynamic between IT and the business is basically one of kind of supplier to kind of a business. And, you know, if you go back to, I think Elon Musk a few years ago, basically at these concepts of the machines to build the machines. And you went as far as saying that the machines or the production line is actually the product. So meaning that the core of the innovation is really about building kind of the engine to deliver on the value. And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from kind of IT becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. And it's all about culture. Now, culture is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at IT, especially in the last decade with agile, with DevOps, with hybrid infrastructures, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze kind of this system, it's very challenging for IT to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone to actually include business as kind of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of culture, which is required, as well as tools, right, to be able to start to bring together all these data together. And then given the volume, variety, velocity of the data, we have to apply some core technologies which have only really truly emerging in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks which are coming together today, drilling out organizations to get to the next level. Right, right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about the coalition, the BizOps coalition. I just like that you put down these really simple, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting. Business outcomes over individual projects and outputs, trust and collaboration over side load teams and organizations, data-driven decisions, what you just talked about over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, isn't everyone working to these values already? And I think you touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today or the person that's across the street that's doing it is going to knock them right off their block. Yeah, so that's very true. But so I'll mention another survey we did, I think about six months ago, it was in partnership with an industry analyst. And we surveyed, again, a number of IT executives to understand how many were tracking business outcomes, how many of these software executives, IT executives were tracking business outcomes. And they were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day, right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so. And we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives which are not strategic for us. I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the airline industry uncovered, for instance, that a number of, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. And yet, the IT teams, whether it's operations, software development, were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that IT is using, whether it's database lifetime, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in IT are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the software delivery chain, right? This system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to infuse some of the agile culture and principles that emerge from the software side into a business side. Of course, the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the business side. And so I think this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform now, you know, COVID obviously has been a key driver for that. The technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of a, also the cultural shifts through agile, through DevOps, through the SRE movement, through lean business transformation. All of these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. So Clayton Christensen, great Harvard professor, innovators dilemma might still my all-time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI. When you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing, I mean, clearly IT has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right? That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics in BizOps that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, the investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project A along or project B? So there are really two things, right? So I think what you were talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right? And which is a key challenge, right? In my own experience, right? Driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is, how many people do I have in that specific initiative at any point in time? And just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a project management institute, they have estimated that on average IT organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives which are not strategically aligned. So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the IT metrics. So I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key kind of philosophy, if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right? And fitness for purpose or coordinating application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. And so the, and yet, if you look at how IT operations are operating, they are using kind of a same type of kind of inward metrics like a database uptime or cycle time or what is my point velocity, right? And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that the IT is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so if I'm trying to build a core banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe a social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across IT to look at this metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And in some cases, cycle time may be completely relevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate. The key challenge you mentioned around the disruption that we see is, or the investors dilemma now, is really around the fact that many IT organizations are essentially applying the same approaches for innovation, right? For basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, there's been a lot of talk about to speed IT and yes, it exists, but in reality, are really organizations truly differentiating how they operate their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. I love that. Again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right? And it's horses for courses. As you said, this project, what you're measuring and how you define success isn't necessarily the same as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles. We talked about the values, but I think it's interesting that the BizOps coalition just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right? And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven this software to change in software development, because if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. So whether you had that on your Kanban wall, we're not. So it's really this embracing of the speed of change and making that the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI. And the big data thing with Hadoop started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out that it's not just big data and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem to your point to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's increasing your average ticket or increasing your checkout rate with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big giant MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches, subsequently to that. It's interesting, right? Again, back to one of these surveys that we did with about 600 ITA executives and we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open and one of them was really wrong requirements and it was really around kind of what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly, over 80% of the ITA executives said that the best approach, their preferred approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there. We're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these IDA executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before software development starts basically shows that we still have a very major issue. And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and IT, which is still very much contract-based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for IT deliver on time on budget, right? But what is being sensitive for IT to actually deliver on the business outcomes, right? How often is IT measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget-type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we really need to drive as an industry. And we talk about kind of this imperative for organizations to operate as one. And back to the innovators dilemma, the key difference between these larger organizations is really kind of a... If you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to startups? Why is it that more than 40% of personal loans today are issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which like Christensen covered at length. But it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic between business and IT and partner, right? To deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. I love that. That's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for the business leaders to, as you said, to know what's actually going on. But Serge, I want to close and talk about the coalition. So clearly, these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition? Why take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your competition and the broader industry to say, hey, we as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles? So first, I think we want everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we're all from our own different vantage point realizing that things have to change. And again, back to whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering or VisOps, we're all using slightly different languages. And so I think one of the important aspects of VisOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about consulting, agile transformation experts, whether we're talking about vendors to provide tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me, is for these concepts to start to be embraced not just by us who are trying or vendors, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our own customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. So our objective with the coalition is to be pretty broad. And our hope is by starting to basically educate our joint customers or partners that we can start to only foster these behaviors and start to really change some of the dynamics. So we're very pleased that if you look at some of the companies which have joined the manifesto, so we have vendors such as Desktop or AdVance or Page of Duty, for instance, or even PlanView, one of my direct competitors, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or Capgemini or smaller firms like Business Agility Institute or Agility Health. And so our goal really is to start to bring together thought leaders, people who have been helping large organizations do digital transformation, vendors who are providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital transformation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of education, support, and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, that's great, Serge. And congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together. And finally today, getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice because it is and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for sharing the story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you, thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. My pleasure. All right, he's Serge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps Manifesto, go to bizopsmanifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage on the Cube of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time.