From our perspective as consumers, perhaps the best thing about digital
transformation is how consumerization is making technology so much easier to
use. Sure, our television remote controls still have too many buttons, and I
have yet to figure out the digital display in my Honda, but all in all, tech
is getting easier for everybody.
Within companies - even very large ones - the consumerization of technology
is gradually taking hold as well. There are now simple mobile apps for a wide
range of big company tasks, ranging from changing your benefits to replacing
a security badge.
As enterprise denizens know all too well, however, there is still plenty of
technology that's too hard to use. For every intuitive, AI-driven user
interface, there are dozens of arcane, menu or tab-driven monstrosities from
the last millennium, raising our blood pressure and slowing us down.... (more)
In the 67 years since Alan Turing proposed his Imitation Game - the infamous
‘Turing test' for artificial intelligence (AI) - people have been confused
over the very purpose of AI itself.
At issue: whether the point of AI is to simulate human behavior so seamlessly
that it can fool people into thinking they are actually interacting with a
human being, rather than a piece of software.
Such deception was never the point of Turing's exercise, however. Rather, he
realized that there was no way to define true intelligence, and thus no way
to test for it. So he came up with the game as a substitute - something
people could theoretically test for.
Regardless of Turing's intentions, setting the bar for AI based on its
ability to snooker an audience has become fully ingrained in our culture,
thanks in large part to Hollywood.
The AI We Love - and Love to Hate
Ever since the... (more)
As today's digital disruptions bounce and smash their way through
conventional technologies and conventional wisdom alike, predicting their
path is a multifaceted challenge. So many areas of technology advance on
Moore's Law-like exponential curves that divining the future is fraught with
danger.
Such is the problem with artificial intelligence (AI) and its related
concepts, including cognitive computing, machine learning, and deep learning.
Today we have interesting but hardly revolutionary technologies like Apple
Siri and Amazon Alexa. And tomorrow? If you listen to the doomsayers, The
Terminator's Skynet or its killer robot kin will take over the world from us
puny humans.
While we cannot entirely disagree with the dire warnings of certain pundits,
the reality is that there is quite a lot of territory to cover between Siri
and Skynet. Even well before some kind... (more)
Three Digital Transformation Truths and One Great Myth
By Charles Araujo
It's conference season and, as you might expect, Jason and I have been on the
road covering a bunch of them. It's always great to see what the disruptive
players in the market are doing - and this year did not disappoint. But there
is one thing that repeatedly happens that just gets under my skin:
transformation-washing.
As Jason explained in a Forbes article over a year ago, ‘washing' is when a
vendor (or pundit) applies a buzzword loosely in an overt attempt to attach
themselves to its buzz. And transformation-washing is rampant.
At virtually every event vendors bombarded the attendees with all the reasons
that this tool or that solution was the driving force behind digital
transformation. Unquestionably, many of these tools are innovative and
represent genuine breakthroughs. But no tool, in a... (more)
Transformation Practice: The Key to Making Change a Core Competency
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
There is a fundamental flaw in how many people think about digital
transformation. First, as we've written about extensively at Intellyx, people
tend to think about it as a finite corporate project, rather than as a
process of continual transformation.
There is a deeper flaw in thinking, however, that leads to this type of
project mentality. Enterprise leaders commonly think of transformation as
something done at a corporate level - something the organization does to
itself.
But that mindset creates a separation between the act of transformation at an
organizational level and the transformation that must occur within each
individual to make organizational transformation a reality.
The truth, however, is that there is no such thing as organization... (more)
"At the keynote this morning we spoke about the value proposition of Nutanix,
of having a DevOps culture and a mindset, and the business outcomes of
achieving agility and scale, which everybody here is trying to accomplish,"
noted Mark Lavi, DevOps Solution Architect at Nutanix, in this SYS-CON.tv
interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the
Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Download Show Prospectus ▸ Here
DevOps at Cloud Expo taking place October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa
Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions
from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the
world.
Must Watch Video: Recap of @DevOpsSummit New York Javits Center
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in
enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams ... (more)
Companies have always been concerned that traditional enterprise software is
slow and complex to install, often disrupting critical and time-sensitive
operations during roll-out. With the growing need to integrate new digital
technologies into the enterprise to transform business processes, this
concern has become even more pressing.
A 2016 Panorama Consulting Solutions study revealed that enterprise resource
planning (ERP) projects took an average of 21 months to install, with 57
percent of these projects experiencing timeline overruns. A span of almost
two years can be a long time when disruptive change comes in weeks or months
rather than years. Any executive that has been around enterprise software
implementations knows not only that new systems can take a long time to
implement, but can take almost as long to change or update with new
technologies.
Drivers o... (more)
SYS-CON Events announced today that Japan External Trade Organization & Six
Prefectures of Japan have been named "Pavilion Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 21st
International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at
the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Meet the leading Japanese cloud computing companies from six prefectures of
Japan. The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) is a non-profit
organization that provides business support services to foreign companies
expanding to Japan, and Japanese companies expanding to all over the world.
With the support of JETRO's dedicated staff, clients can incorporate their
business; receive visa, immigration, and HR support; find dedicated office
space; identify local government subsidies; get tailored market studies; and
more.
For more information, please visit https://www.jetro.go.jp/usa/.
21... (more)
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I was at a conference recently when I saw it. I sighed and shook my head.
A development manager from a large enterprise organization was explaining how
they had created a DevOps maturity model based on CMMI. They went on to
describe their current state of maturity and their plans to get to ‘full
maturity' in the next three years. He continued by explaining how they had
presented this plan to executive management and subsequently received
approval for a new ‘DevOps team.'
Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their
DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as
enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to
embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they
have fallen into time and time again.
Unfortun... (more)
Silos Are Dead! Long Live the Silos!
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Nothing unites any group of people like a common enemy. And since the move
toward digital transformation began - and IT transformation before it - a
favorite common enemy has been organizational silos.
It has been an oft-repeated mantra that in order to execute a successful
transformation of any kind, the organization must break through the silos
that have been the source of dysfunction and obstruction.
Everyone could agree that silos created unnecessary separation,
protectionism, and bureaucracy. No one would dare argue that having rigid
silos were somehow good for the organization.
Silos were, therefore, the easy target. They became the mantle onto which
leaders could lay all past transgressions, and, in so doing, they became a
convenient artifice to allow the leader to pro... (more)
I recently had a conversation with Jennifer Lent from TechTarget. She's a
respected thinker in our field and covers major trends. We spoke about the
emergence of BizDevOps and its implications for businesses.
We tackled a number of topics. She wrote about our conversation in a recent
article, "BizDevOps: Here's how to make it happen in your organization."
Since our conversation, I've been thinking more about BizDevOps, its
challenges, and what makes the BizDevOps pipeline flow.
Peter Drucker made the prescient statement that "Culture eats strategy for
breakfast." This applies to BizDevOps - changing tech is not hard, but
changing culture is. You can buy the tools and put the processes into place,
but getting team buy-in and creating the cultural shift to make BizDevOps run
are not easy tasks.
This type of change requires leadership commitment, communication, and
edu... (more)
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