 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing virtual coverage of IBM Think 2021. This is our second virtual think and we're going to talk about what's in the minds of CTOs with a particular point of view from the EMEA region. I'm pleased to welcome Rashid Parmer who is an IBM Fellow and Vice President of Technology for EMEA, that region. Hello, Rashid, good to see you. Hey, Dave, great to see you. So let me start by asking, talk a little bit about the role of the CTO and why is it necessarily important to focus on the CTO role versus say some of the other technology practitioner roles? Yeah, you know, as you look at all the range of roles that they've got in the IT department, the CTO is uniquely placed in looking forward at how technology and how digitization is going to make a difference in the business, but also at the same time, is there as the kind of thought leader for how they're going to really re-imagine the use of technology, re-imagine automation, re-imagining how digitization helps them go to market in different ways. So the CTO is a unique position from idea to impact. And in the past, we've kind of lost the CTO a little bit but they're now re-emerging as being the thought leader that's owning and driving digitization going forward in our big clients. Yeah, I agree, it really has a deep understanding of that vision and can apply that vision to business success. So you obviously have a technical observation space and you also have some data. So maybe you could share with our audience how you inform yourself and your colleagues and IBM on what CTOs are thinking about and what they're worried about. Yeah, and so what we've done over the last four years now is gone out and interviewed CTOs and we do a very unstructured interview as it's not a survey in the form of filling these 10 questions and tell us yes or no. It really is a structured interview. We ask things like, what's top of mind for you? What are the decisions you're making? What's holding you back? What decisions do you think you shouldn't have made or you wouldn't have liked to make? And it's that range of real input from the interviews. So last year we interviewed 100 CTOs. This year we're actually doing a lot more. We're working with the IBM Institute of Business Value and we're going to interview a lot more CTOs. But the material we're going to talk about today is really from those 100 CTO interviews. Yeah, and I think that, I mean, having done a lot of these myself, when you do those, we call them in-depth interviews or IDIs, you kind of have a structure and you sort of follow that, but you learn so much and that maybe does inform those more structured interviews that you do down the road. You learn so much, but maybe you could summarize some of the concerns in the region. What's on the minds of CTOs? Yeah, and the real decisions are based around seven points. So the first one is, we all know we're on a journey to the cloud, but it's a hybrid multi-cloud. How do I think about the range of capabilities I need to be able to unlock the latent potential of existing investments and the cloud-based capabilities we've got? So that hybrid cloud platform is one of the first and foundational pieces. The second challenge is that CTOs want to modernize their applications and that modernization is a journey of moving towards microservices. That microservices journey has two parts. One is the business-facing view and that's what containers is all about, choosing the right container platform. At the same time, they also want to use containers as a way of automation and management and reducing the effort in the infrastructure. So that's kind of two parts of that whole container journey. So microservices really become the business developer view and containers become the operational view. At the same time, they want to infuse new data. So they want to climb the AI ladder. They want to get the new insights from that data that plugs into those new workflows. To get to those workflows, there's a decision around how do I isolate myself from some of the services I'm using there? And we've created a layer in the decisions around what we call cloud services integration. So cloud services integration is kind of the modern-day ESB, as we might think about it, but it's a way in which you choose which technology, which APIs I'm going to use from where. And then ultimately, the CTOs are trying to build what are the new workflows, intelligent workflows, and they're really worried about, how do I get the right level of automation that managing that issue between what becomes creepy and valuable, right? You know, there's some workflows that happen, you think, why the hell did that happen? That doesn't make sense. And it really sort of nerves the consumer, the user, whereas some which are, wow, that's really cool. I really enjoyed that. So trying to get the intelligent workflows right is a big concern. And then on the two big parallels of that is, how do we manage the systems? The operational automation, right from having the right data, the observability of all the infrastructure, recognizing they've got a spectrum of things from 30, 40, 50-year-old systems to modern-day cloud-native systems. How do I manage, how do I operationally automate that, keep that efficient and effective? And then of course, protecting from the perpetrators, right? There's a lot of people out there wanting to dig into the systems and draw all kinds of data from their systems. Security, privacy, and making sure they're aligned with the ethics and privacy of the business. So those are the kind of range of issues. So right from the journey to cloud, through to operational automation, through intelligent workflows, right into managing, protecting the services. It's interesting, thank you for that. I mean, I remember, and you will as well, sort of the post-Y2K thrust, and part of the modernization back then was during that, they had budget to do that. But a lot of times organizations would make the mistake that they were going to migrate off of a system that was working just fine. That was their sort of mental model of modernization. And it turned out to be disastrous in many cases. And so what, when I talk to CIOs, they talk about maybe, you know, I look at it as this abstraction layer. We want to protect what we have that works. Yes, some stuff's going to go into the public cloud, but this hybrid connection that you talk about, and then we want control. And the way we're going to get control is we're going to use microservices to modernize and use modern APIs. And so very, very sort of different thinking, and of course they want to avoid migration at all costs because it's so expensive and risky. I wonder if you could talk about, are there any patterns in terms of where people get started and the kinds of outcomes that they're working towards that they can measure? Yeah, we kind of love the learning from the work into three broad patterns, right? One pattern is primarily around survival. They recognize that this journey is very complex. The pandemic has created tremendous challenges. The market dynamics means that they've got to try and really be thoughtful in taking costs out and making sure they survive some of these issues. And so the pattern is really around cost reduction. It may start with the hybrid cloud. It may start with the internal workflows, but it's really about taking cost out of the systems. The second pattern is what we refer to as a simplification pattern. And this is about saying that we've got so much complexity because of technical debt, because of systems that we've half migrated and half done things with. So how do I simplify my IT landscape from applications through infrastructure through data and make it more consistent and manageable and effective? And then the third one is that there are CTOs saying, look, we've got to really pick the time when we superscale something. We've got some things which we are unique and effective on. And I want to take that and really superscale that very quickly and make that consistent and really maximize the value of it. So the patterns really fall into the three categories of driving cost reduction and survival, simplification and modernization, transformation, and then those that have got something which is unique and special and really superscaling that. Yeah, right, right. Doubling down on those things that give you unique competitive advantage. Now, in the studies that you've done over the years, you use this term ADP architectural decision points and some of them are quite compelling. Maybe you could talk about some of those, were there some anxieties from the CTOs that you uncovered? Yeah, the ADPs, we've talked about the sub-ADPs and it starts from the hybrid multicraft through to intelligent workflows and so on. And the ADPs themselves are really distilling the clients' words and the clients' way of thinking about how they're going to drive those technologies and also how they're going to use those technologies to make a difference. But as we went through those interviews, what became apparent is CTOs do have some anxieties as you referred to and those anxieties, they couldn't necessarily put words on them. And there were anxieties like, are we thinking enough about the carbon footprint? Are we being thoughtfully in how we make sure we're reducing carbon footprint or reducing the environmental impact of the infrastructure? You've got, we've got sprawling infrastructure, ripping out rare metals from the earth. Are we being thoughtfully in how we reduce the amount of rare metals we have? Water consumption, right through to, is the code that we're producing efficient, secure and fit for the future? Are we being ethical in capturing the data for its right use? Is the AI systems that we're building, are they explainable? Are they ethical? Are they free from bias? Or are we kind of amplifying things that we shouldn't be amplifying? So there was a whole bunch of those, what we're calling anxieties. And what we did along with the architectural decision report, a point after the decision report was, was identify what we call a set of responsibilities. And we've built a framework around responsible computing, which is a basis for how you think through what your responsibilities are as a CTO, are as an IT leader. And we're right in the process of building out that kind of responsible computing framework. You know, it's interesting, a lot of people may think about, they think about the responsible computing and the sustainability. And they might think that's a 180 from Milton Friedman Economics, which is a job of business to make profits. But in fact, responsible computing, there's a strong business case around it. It actually can help you reduce costs, it can help you attract better employees because young people are passionate about this. I wonder if we could talk about how, how people can get involved with responsible computing and lean in. Yeah, so what we're about to publish is actually a manifesto for responsible computing. So I think everybody, once we get that published, I'm hoping to do that in the next two to three months. We're working with a few clients. So there's actually three clients that have chosen, three clients, CTOs from the ones that we interviewed, were very keen to collaborate with us in laying out that manifesto. And the opportunity really is from anybody listening. If you find this of great value, please do come and reach out to me. I'm more than happy to collaborate. We're looking for more insights on this. We've also had some competitions. So in EMEA, we've had a competition with business partners, looking for ideas of how we can really showcase examples or exemplars of being responsible computing provider, whether it's at the level of responsible data center, whether it's about responsible code, data use, responsible systems, right through to responsible impact. And obviously a lot of our work around things like, your tech for good is tied directly to responsible impact. And of course, if you want to see what we, IBM have been doing, our responsibility report, which we've been voluntarily publishing for the last 30 years, provides a tremendous set of insights on how we've done that over the years. And that's a great way for you to see how we've been doing things and see if they're applicable in your business. Yeah, so the ADP report is available. You can check it out on LinkedIn. Go to RushEek's LinkedIn profile, you'll find it. There's a blog post that talks about the next wave of digitization, the learnings that you just talked about. So there's a lot of resources for people to get involved. I'll give you the last word, RushEek. Yeah, and look, this is what I call job begun. It's not job done. The whole ADP responsible computing is a digitization journey where we want to balance delivering business value and making a difference to the organization, but at the same time being responsible and making sure that we're thoughtful of what's needed for the future and we create impact that really matters. And we can feel proud that we've put a foundation for digitization, which will serve the businesses for many years to come. Love it, impact investing in your business and in the future. RushEek, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Dave, pleasure, thank you. Okay, keep it right there for more coverage from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE.