Conclusion: To progress digital transformation strategies there are a number of new competencies (such as problem finding and problem framing) that organisations need to recognise and master or partner with specialists to ensure that investments and efforts are aimed at solving the right problems. CIOs and business executives will need to assess the problem finding capabilities within their organisations or risk implementing a better digital solution to a problem that is no longer relevant.
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- Sue Johnston
This Compass is a companion document to IBRS’ Master Advisory Presentation (MAP) “Delivering Digital Business Transformation” which outlines business and management issues and provides guidance on delivering an effective digital business transformation.
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- Geoff Johnson
Workspaces: At the next desktop upgrade an organisation has two options: It can incrementally improve the desktop, using 20-year-old assumptions, or create a new end user computing platform based on modern technology trends. In this IBRS master advisory presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues surrounding the future of the Digital Workspace from both a business and technology viewpoint.
This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussion between business and technology groups, and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: To grow their business and deliver sought after online services, organisations must provide error free systems supported by robust IT infrastructure. When unable to deliver one or both of these consumers will seek other suppliers that provide better online services.
To meet consumer expectations online systems must be comprehensively tested and error free before making them publicly available, and operated on IT infrastructure that can be ramped-up when needed to meet consumer demands. The inability to provide quality services when required could put the organisation’s reputation at risk.
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- Alan Hansell
Conclusion: The IT industry has hit a breaking point where the artificial grouping of information security and IT has left many organisations vulnerable. Business units have viewed information security as an IT problem, and IT has abdicated responsibility for many aspects of operations that should be viewed as basic hygiene. It is time for organisations that want to establish a reputation of trust with their stakeholders, to view information security very differently. This will require IT to take on more responsibility for security hygiene issues, and for many security practitioners to make the mental shift from technical do-ers to risk communicators. All organisations must know who, internally, is ultimately accountable for cyber-security and that this person is adequately informed, and empowered to execute on this accountability.
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- James Turner
Conclusion: The new digital business model for IT is based on selecting, composing, and leveraging a dynamic range of Cloud based external services. Under the new IT paradigm people will work the way they want, when and where they want and with all the tools with which they are familiar; collaborate using a wide range of low-cost commodity services; and use their own devices (and in some cases their own applications) while those responsible for information governance seamlessly maintain control over the organisation’s enterprise information, privacy and security.
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- Peter Grant
Conclusion: In this note, IBRS defines real-time co-authoring, and outlines the factors hindering its adoption. Real-time co-authoring has been available for almost a decade via products such as Google Apps, and in the past few years, web-based Microsoft Office 365. However, the uptake of this capability has been lacklustre due to immature collaboration environments and, more significantly, deeply held preconceptions about the nature of documents and work.
The introduction of real-time co-authoring in the Microsoft Office 2016 (Word) desktop client removes some barriers to the end user adoption of real-time co-authoring. However, it does not directly address the cultural aspects that hinder adoption. Even so, organisations should expect the use of real-time co-authoring to rise, but in a fragmented, infectious manner.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: The Service Catalogue required by the ITIL framework has undergone several variations during the last 20 years. The rationale was to address the emerging service trends in in-house and outsourced modes of operations. However, while the original service catalogues’ objectives were achieved, they are inadequate in acquiring hybrid Cloud core services (e. g. storage) that should be delivered under outcome-based service contracts.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: Business leaders who have concluded that a Chief Digital Officer is required to provide a critical focus on their digital transformation plans, will find that defining the role in detail will remain an ongoing challenge because it is intensely context-sensitive.
Consequently, the first iteration of a Chief Digital Officer’s (CDO) role responsibilities, job description and person specification needs to be widely canvassed and tolerant of the ambiguity between maintaining ‘business as usual’ and a digital transformation.
A CDO role action plan is an important first step in setting and clarifying expectations.
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- Geoff Johnson
Conclusion: The term ‘digital disruption’ exerts a powerful cocktail of possibilities. While the term has limited application in specific cases, its general use has diluted its meaning. Whether this is significant may be judged individually but the general use of digital disruption to any and all events coinciding with the introduction of new technologies is misleading.
For the most part executives and strategists can understand technologies and their implementation as progressive evolution. This is especially true for buyers of technology. For some technology vendors and industries the effect of digital technologies may be disruptive, even destructive, insofar as markets, capital and stock value are lost.
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- Guy Cranswick
Conclusion: Australian Organisations are actively developing and refining digital transformation strategies in recognition of the changing business and government operational environment. Innovation is generously mentioned in most strategies and there has been an increase in the number of Chief Digital Officer roles being offered and filled to assist organisations to achieve the transformation they are striving for. However, organisations need to actively develop innovation and entrepreneurial skills and capabilities across their organisations to ensure that they have broad skills to contribute to transformation and innovation programs and an entrepreneurial culture to support ongoing experimentation and change.
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- Sue Johnston
Conclusion: This month, Fujitsu and Link Group announced a five year extension to their current ten year managed services agreement, which is founded on a combined on-site, on-shore and offshore delivery model for the provision of a variety of services. This is indicative of an increase in further alignment between IT spending and business strategic priorities utilising complex and evolving delivery models. The agreement highlights the need to provide a wide range of resources which cater to business needs, whilst managing them as one. In order to do this, a cohesive management strategy and the capacity to accommodate increased IT proliferation, new technologies, and associated security risks, must be carefully integrated into outsourcing plans during vendor engagement and contract performance.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion: Many business leaders around the world have concluded that although information and communications technologies (ICT) are mature, their own business has yet to systematically address digital transformation as an opportunity and a Digital Officer is required to provide that focus. ‘Business-as-Usual’ is an increasingly rejected approach.
A Chief Digital Officer (CDO) or similar appointment with broad responsibilities is clearly needed to deliver radical digital transformation in large or complex enterprises.
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- Geoff Johnson
Conclusion: There are two compelling information security reasons for creating a sense of purpose and ownership within an organisation. The first is that a sense of purpose and ownership will empower staff so that they move from responding to basic security hygiene matters, towards pre-empting issues. The second reason is so that organisations look out beyond themselves and work towards a more resilient ecosystem.
This level of resilience maturity is vital and will be driven by leadership and a continuing commitment to talent development. Astute security leaders will use cultural indicators such as engagement and sense of purpose and ownership, as a guide to the ability of the organisation to withstand security incidents.
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- James Turner
Conclusion: The return on investment in big data and associated analytics projects has been generally positive. It is more likely that returns over the longer term will grow too, provided strategic aims are established. The promise of big data hinges on information analysis, and therefore organisations must be clear as to use and application of the insight.
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- Guy Cranswick
Conclusion: Unless the Executive holds business and IT management accountable for reporting if the benefits expected in the business case have been realised or not, they will never know whether they made the right decision to invest in the first place.
To estimate the gross benefits and costs, it is imperative the business case records not only the performance metrics when it was approved, but also those current when the business system(s), was implemented (when there is a time lag).
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- Alan Hansell
Conclusion: The days of viewing BI as a single solution are over. Organisations should view Business Intelligence as four distinct, but interlocking services that each addresses a different critical business imperative: reporting; self-direct data exploration; operational decision support; and data science. Each of these imperatives addresses different stakeholders and will have its own architect.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: To improve the digital maturity of an organisation the CIO must encourage a team effort from business and technical areas within their organisation as well as strategic partners in the IT industry. Laggard IT vendors should be dropped in favour of digital leaders. The CIO will also need to convince their organisation to make early investments in long term capabilities that are critical to the adoption of new digital initiatives.
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- Peter Grant
Conclusion: It has been well established in recent reports that future workplaces will be significantly different from today and the workers of tomorrow will demand to work differently. Technology has enabled organisations to provide greater freedom to their workers with a new, greater understanding of the strength and weaknesses of flexible working. In addition, organisations will gradually casualise their workforce for greater flexibility. Organisations that fully harness the potential of providing highly flexible or flexible and creative workplaces early will be able to attract and retain the best talent for their workforce. Other organisations will be forced to adapt as work roles and practices disappear or change radically.
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- Sue Johnston
Conclusion: To ensure desktop investments are aligned to the organisation’s strategy, and the business benefits are clearly understood, IT organisations should create a Benefit Dependency Network. This is a benefits management tool that explicitly shows the linkages between technology investments and the business benefits, uncovers the business changes necessary to deliver these benefits, and clarifies the role of the business in harvesting those benefits.
Through the processes of building a Benefit Dependency Network, the IT organisation can engage the business in a meaningful discussion about business benefits and about the business changes needed to harvest them. Without a benefits analysis a major desktop investment is less likely to be approved and there are risks generating no value for the business, perpetuating the view that IT is a cost that must be reduced.
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- Kevin McIsaac
Conclusion: This month there has been an especially visible increase in managed service provider offerings and expansion globally. With the wide range and increased release speed of new technologies in the market, greater emphasis has been placed on adopting new technologies in business to support evolution and cost reduction. Approximately 70% of business leaders involved in company digital business transformation ranked new technology adoption as the top priority in a survey this month, resulting in an increased demand for tailored solutions with effective implementations in complex ICT environments.
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- Irene Pimentel
Many IT organisations are trying to change their perceived image from high-cost / low quality to value-added service providers. However, many of the adopted approaches revolve around improving just few processes (e.g. problem management). While these processes are important, they are insufficient to produce the desired effect for IT groups to deliver value-added services.
In this IBRS Master Advisory Presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues, surrounding Running IT as a Service from both business and technology viewpoints.This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussions between business and technology groups and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.
The MAP is provided as a set of presentation slides, and as a script and executive briefing document.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: Especially interesting this month was a Trial Services Agreements (TSA) between SkyFii and Wests Ashfield Leagues Club. The agreement spans four weeks, with very specific deliverables and KPIs. In IT outsourcing, where agreements and relationships can become difficult to manage or collapse due to a wide range of unforeseen complexities, TSAs are emerging as a solid review process to measure vendor skills and capacity to service specific customers. These TSAs are also an attractive avenue for vendors to display competencies sought by customers and a precursor to possible long-term relationships. Such arrangements can also provide a greater clarity when setting terms and establishing final agreements as well as clearer and sturdier ongoing vendor/customer relations.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion: Non-IT executives are often reported as being concerned about the prospect of a cyber incident, but as security is not their area of expertise, responsibility for mitigation and preparation is often devolved to IT. This is a mistake, because as much as lack of any security could be devastating, applying the wrong controls to an organisation can be equally debilitating. Security is a response to risk, and it is the ongoing mandate of executives to demonstrate that they are guiding their organisation through foreseeable risks. Consequently, many organisations would benefit from the appointment of an information security officer who is able to translate between IT and the business and ensure that cyber risks are prepared for responsibly.
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- James Turner
Conclusion: The Australian market presents serious problems to marketers. The situation has been foreseeable for the last two years. The situation is likely to soften further, which will constrain their capacity to seek growth.
Solutions are available and require reappraisal of strategies and objectives. Applying intelligence and the right tools should help organisations steer through the variety of conditions ahead.
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- Guy Cranswick
Conclusion: Sustained investment in IT Infrastructure is critical for the delivery of services to clients and delivering business efficiencies. Without continued investment service quality will deteriorate, operational incidents occur more frequently and the organisation’s network put at risk from unwanted intrusions.
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- Alan Hansell
Conclusion: Most organisations have some form of central approval process (Governance) based around agreed artefacts – few organisations have a built-in evergreening process to ensure governance controls are in line with emerging technology and business trends.
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- Peter Grant
Conclusion: Despite the prominence of Business Process Management (BPM) in most organisations, Enterprise Architects are routinely oblivious to the scope for using Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) within their BPM.
The very large global Microsoft and Google developer communities have run with the most popular collaboration suites as a foundation for their CEBP apps.
The most common CEBP solutions are based on customised messaging allowing alerts, alarms and notifications to be used to support business process. Widespread use of customised ‘Presence’ has become particularly helpful in giving the status of people or resources to inform transactions. Human delay and business latency is being minimised by using notifications to handle routine processes as well as exceptions to business rules.
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- Geoff Johnson
Conclusion: There is debate within the IT industry whether or not DevOps can replace ITIL1. From ITIL perspective, many IT organisations, especially in Australia, have been implementing ITIL processes since 1994 with significant investment in technology and professional services. Hence, it is impractical to just drop ITIL and adopt DevOps. This is because firstly, DevOps covers only Release Management which is only one process of the 26 processes of ITIL v3 and secondly, DevOps in not different from mature2 ITIL Release Management. In this light, existing ITIL organisations embarking on digital transformation should plan to mature Release Management to match DevOps principles. DevOps3 sites need to leverage the lessons learnt from ITIL implementation to enjoy a smooth business transformation as fixing only the software release process without integrating this with the remaining 25 ITIL processes is insufficient to raise the overall IT performance to the level needed by the digital world. This research outlines that ITIL and DevOps can co-exist in the same organisation once brought to the right maturity level.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: Organisations typically discuss the selection of enterprise mobility development in terms of web-based applications versus native applications, which quickly leads to debates regarding cross-platform tools versus standardising on one platform, such as iOS or Windows10. This is entirely the wrong way to think about enterprise mobile application development, resulting in unsustainable portfolios of fragmented and increasingly difficult to maintain applications. Instead, organisations should first identify the generalised use cases (i.e. common patterns of work) and seek to select mobile solution architectures (as opposed development tools) that meet each use case.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: To enable the new work practices, processes, organisational structures and cultures that will be required in the Future Workplace1, IT organisations must transform today’s device-centric desktop into a new end user computing platform that is based on modern usage and technology assumptions.
Simply adding a mobility strategy to the existing device-centric desktop only adds complexity and perpetuates a high cost, inflexible device-centric model. The CIO should examine fresh alternatives such as the Digital Workspace2.
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- Kevin McIsaac
This paper explores why IT security in supply chains is an important topic and sets out a model for organisations to review their exposure and then communicate these issues internally, and with suppliers.
The IT dependencies that organisations now have are largely invisible and can be easily taken for granted, much like the infrastructure involved to have electricity or water be provided to a home. And just like electricity and water, when there is an incident in the IT supply chain, the impact can be considerable on the end consumer.
Security in the supply chain can seem like an overwhelmingly technical topic, and it is a large topic, but it is not insurmountable. An increasing number of security leaders are looking at the supply chain as the ecosystem that their organisations operate in, and are starting to work on securing the resilience of every link in the chain – and this will take time, effort, and collaboration.
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- James Turner
Pervasive networking is becoming ubiquitous as fixed and mobile communications’ reach, coverage, reliability, latency and speed improve consistently over time. These critical networking characteristics are unlikely to saturate before 2025. The net outcome of all these factors is that telecommunications and enterprise networking will deliver networked applications that create the foundations for transformational corporate agility and productivity.
In this IBRS Master Advisory Presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues, surrounding communications from both business and technology viewpoints. This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussions between business and technology groups and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.
The MAP is provided as a set of presentation slides, and as a script and executive briefing document.
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- Geoff Johnson
In the search for a competitive edge more organisations are looking to activity-based working (ABW). It is not a quick or low-cost option. Some of the apparent benefits and merits may also lack demonstrable certainty. However, the workplace is changing rapidly for some types of information workers. IT should understand ABW, its potential and pitfalls, and be prepared to engage the rest of the organisation.
In this IBRS Master Advisory Presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues, surrounding ABW from both business and technology viewpoints. This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussions between business and technology groups and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.
The MAP is provided as a set of presentation slides, and as a script and executive briefing document.
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- Guy Cranswick
Enterprise Mobility is opening up new approaches to performing business activities. Early adopters of mobility technologies report significant improvements in process quality, as well as dramatically reduced latency for work activities. However, to achieve the expected results of mobility, organisations need to balance tactical mobility projects against longer term architectural approaches. For this reason, it is vital to have an enterprise mobility strategy in place, which can both prioritise mobility initiatives as well as link such initiatives back to business objectives.
In this IBRS Master Advisory Presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues, surrounding enterprise mobility from both business and technology viewpoints. This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussions between business and technology groups and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.
The MAP is provided as a set of presentation slides, and also as a script and executive briefing document.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding Big Data and analytics were prominent. With increasing volumes of information possessed by organisations, a clear and solid information management strategy is critical. To meet this rise in demand, new product and service offering levels and uptake in external information management services were high. The development of this service area has been driven by the recognition that this type of data management can provide organisations with insights for action, organise unstructured data more efficiently and will continue to evolve as vendors provide tailored solutions to meet customer needs.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion: Since 1994 many Australian IT organisations have been implementing Configuration Management practices. However, it has been done with limited success when assessed against the key objectives of Configuration Management process and its associated database (CMDB) in terms of service availability and configuration items interdependencies. IT organisations should review their Configuration Management plans in view of the latest public Cloud offerings and adopt a phased implementation approach.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: Telstra’s new shared access WiFi service Telstra Air solves the problems of users’ limited access to WiFi away from their own home, office or WiFi Hotspots by sharing some of other users’ WiFi capacity (2Mbps on a land line).
It uses globally deployed Fon services which also have massive capital expenditure reduction benefits for fixed and mobile telecommunications carriers and global roaming benefits for Internet service providers and users.
Enterprises should evaluate this type of architecture and service for use in novel ways to brand, differentiate and transform their customer engagement. Shared WiFi access to the Internet is another example of recent trends in the ‘sharing’ economy such as airbnb, Uber, GoGet carshare and others that create practical value.
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- Geoff Johnson
Conclusion: A high dependence on a small range of technologies can reveal and extend weaknesses in marketing strategies. Coupled with the development of mobile applications to enhance their brands, marketers have moved to one-to-one communications which entails relatively increasing marginal costs because the efficiencies of scale are discounted. The focus on metrics and CRM in order to gain a comprehensive view of customers should aim to improve marketing activity efficiency, which also includes investments.
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- Guy Cranswick
Conclusion: It is undeniable that Cloud services will only become more important to organisations. However, executives must bear in mind that as increasing Cloud adoption meets an onslaught of cyber-attacks, regulators and courts will be looking for evidence that organisations exercised due care in vendor selection and support of information security initiatives. The great challenge is in communicating to non-technical people what are often thought of as merely technical issues. In this shifting market, an approach such as the “Five Knows of Cyber Security” can prove invaluable in shifting a technical conversation to a governance conversation.
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- James Turner