 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. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveil. Something's been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the Manifesto, authors of the Manifesto if you will joining us again. We've had them all individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up, we have Mick Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Tasthop. Mick, good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver, Canada, one of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East Coast. Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. Nice. Great to see you again. And also joining Serge Lucio. He is the VP and General Manager Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you again. Where are you coming in from? From Boston, right next to KitKat. Terrific. So welcome back, everybody. Again, congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. BizOps Manifesto. What was the initial reason to do this and how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company initiative that you can do better stuff within your own company? Serge, why don't we start with you? Yeah, so I think we were at really a critical juncture. Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognize that the Business 980 collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system decorators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together as part of the coalition and formalizing basically the core principles and values in a BizOps Manifesto, we can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform. So whether it is technology or services or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together. Great. And Mick, to you, why did you get involved in this effort? So I've been closely involved with the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level. And I think as Sarah just noted, we really need that improvement at the business level. Every company's trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can give them depth quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused at these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Organizations are agile transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that and that's exactly what the business manifesto provides. Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very, very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you can kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to sign on to this manifesto. Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or DevOps or ML Ops, any of these kind of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the BizOps idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. That's great. Serge, back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trekking along and then COVID hit and it was instant light switch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees. Wonder if you could share how that really pushed this all along, right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down and you really have to prioritize and get it right. Yeah, I mean, I'll just start by quoting Satya Nadella basically recently said that there's been two years of digital transformation in just the last two months. And in many ways that's true. But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, when we look at certain parts of the industry, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? About 40% of the personal loans today are being originated by fintechs of a like of Sophie or a landing club, right? Not your traditional brick and mortar bank. And so while there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's more of a survival type of driver these days, the reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business and IT. In many ways and make cover that agile really emerge from the core desire to really improve software predictability. But what we've really missed is how do we start to align the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of this inward metrics that IT is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within your organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever, there's an imperative to act now. And Bezos I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. I want to follow up on the culture comment with you Tom because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout an organization. And we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think that tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people, the way they think, and then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. Yeah, I've always found that the soft stuff, the culture, the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change. And more and more we realize that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. We haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures and in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that than did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction. Which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we build a system. If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right, right. So I want to go to you, Nick, because we're talking about workflows and flow. And you've written about flow, both in terms of moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical because you have a lot less wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on using flow as a way to think about things to get the answers better. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom just said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and to the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data since that we've learned from customers' value streams, enterprise organizations' value streams is that when it's taking six months end to end to deliver that value, where the flow is that slow, you've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers. When you're innovating fast, so high-performing organizations, we can measure their end-to-end flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop, the satisfaction of your developers, measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context-switching less, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other proxy metrics that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team? How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the BizOps manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow, on the delivery of business value, and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right, I love that. And I'm going to go back to you Tom on that to follow up because I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for because if you're optimizing for A versus B, you can have a very different product that you kick out. My favorite example with Clayton Christensen and Innovators Dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power is one thing. If you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, they missed it on the palm because it was the game console which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really force them to look at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing as Mick just said, what are you optimizing for? Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. There, it's not a technology issue in many cases, it's largely a human issue. But if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, it's very difficult for the process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, Sergio, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you could put in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology even if it had nothing to do with it. And when you look at the core values of the Bezos Manifesto, a big one is trust and collaboration, learn, respond and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology and the process and helping customers take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. So I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon in my experience that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one-hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. And so one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing a high fidelity dataset to different stakeholders from their different lands, we start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data but really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to truly affect around data-driven decision-making, it's all about bringing the data in context, the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders where they were talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. So that's the first thing. The second layer I think is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting a sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is. If you start to connect that KPI, the business KPI to the KPIs that developers might be looking at whether it is the number of defects or velocity or whatever metrics that they are used to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextualize in what way are they affecting, basically metric that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to drive engagement. So if you look at Zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away its service to education is all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams and because now they're doing something for good. And many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect everybody to kind of business objective through data and how you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on the data. Right, right. That's good. Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying IT for a long time, right? And lots of books and getting into it. Why now? You know, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with IT objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this move with the biz ops? Well, in much of the past, IT was sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for producing your paychecks and capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it. Now every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business. The ante has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors totally. So, and even if you're in an industry that hasn't historically been terribly technology-oriented, customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our IT projects or building things that don't really work for the business. It's mission critical that we do that well almost every time. Right, and I just want to follow up by that, Tom, in terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from our tisinal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage. And what I find interesting about all those stages is you always put a start date, you never put an end date. So, you know, is the big data, I'm just going to use that generically, moment in time, finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists that actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seem to go away, that the artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So, we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, you know, at some point maybe we reach the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but you know, we are making progress. Right, right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at Agile, because you're such a student of Agile, when you look at the opportunity with BizOps and taking the lessons from Agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past and what are you so excited about, you know, taking this approach will enable? And I think both Serge and Tom hit on this, is that in Agile, what's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate, the data's there. Developers are working on these tools, they're delivering features. The foundations for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy, is when I was able to deliver value to customers. The quicker I was able to do that, the fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was. And that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the Agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data-driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers, not around these legacies that Tom touched on, which is cost-centric metrics from an IT, from where for IT being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new meaningful metrics that are customer and business-centric and make sure that every developer in the organization is focused on those, as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. I love that, Mick, because if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it. But you got to be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, thank you again for your time. Congratulations on the unveil of the BizOps manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So congratulations again and thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so we had Serge, Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. It's the BizOps manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.