You’ve probably heard that creating extensive designs of your system upfront is a waste of time and effort. This idea is borne from the theory that in a world of agile iteration, you can develop your designs as you go and evolve an emergent architecture based on real-world feedback. I’m here to tell you: this thinking is naive and will do considerable harm to your delivery of enterprise systems.
In this interview series, we take an inside look at how enterprise technology leaders build systems that drive some of the largest and most complex business environments in the world. We meet the individual, understand their challenges, and learn about their vision of the future.
The Technology Leaders in this interview series have a considerable range of experience and backgrounds to draw upon, and provide some fantastic insights into the harsh realities of how we build truly digital enterprises of the future. From Startups, to Global Enterprises, from End Users to Consultancies, and within industries such as Finance, Media, Retail, Logistics, Automotive, Defence, Technology, even Public Sector.
There are some surprisingly consistent threads across all the interviews — showing that there is much we share despite the industry or type of organisation each of us may work in; yet each interview provides a wonderfully unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities we face, with insights and ideas that will expand your thinking of what it means to really solve the challenges that becoming a truly Digital Enterprise entails.
Too often we can get transfixed on technology when we talk about architecture, agility, service orientation and platforms. But this is not what enterprises of the future do. They think of architecting their entire enterprise, not just technology, and they think of agility at every single level — what good is agile software development if the business operations are rigid?, and they think of building business systems around services that are realised by technology, people, process, and information. It is only when we truly think of the enterprise as a complete system like this do we make the future of enterprise possible.
Paul Schwefer is a highly experienced strategic thinker in the ways to create enterprise systems and deliver real change in highly complicated enterprises, and has been a top technology executive at several very large global organisations. His forward thinking has been refined over decades of implementing ideas based on what we now call Digital, Agile and Service Orientation. Ahead of his time in this thinking, and with many insights on getting enterprise transformations to really work, this is an interview you’re not going to want to miss.
You’ve probably heard that creating extensive designs of your system upfront is a waste of time and effort. This idea is borne from the theory that in a world of agile iteration, you can develop your designs as you go and evolve an emergent architecture based on real-world feedback. I’m here to tell you: this thinking is naive and will do considerable harm to your delivery of enterprise systems.
In this interview series, we take an inside look at how enterprise technology leaders build systems that drive some of the largest and most complex business environments in the world. We meet the individual, understand their challenges, and learn about their vision of the future.
The Technology Leaders in this interview series have a considerable range of experience and backgrounds to draw upon, and provide some fantastic insights into the harsh realities of how we build truly digital enterprises of the future. From Startups, to Global Enterprises, from End Users to Consultancies, and within industries such as Finance, Media, Retail, Logistics, Automotive, Defence, Technology, even Public Sector.
There are some surprisingly consistent threads across all the interviews — showing that there is much we share despite the industry or type of organisation each of us may work in; yet each interview provides a wonderfully unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities we face, with insights and ideas that will expand your thinking of what it means to really solve the challenges that becoming a truly Digital Enterprise entails.
Too often we can get transfixed on technology when we talk about architecture, agility, service orientation and platforms. But this is not what enterprises of the future do. They think of architecting their entire enterprise, not just technology, and they think of agility at every single level — what good is agile software development if the business operations are rigid?, and they think of building business systems around services that are realised by technology, people, process, and information. It is only when we truly think of the enterprise as a complete system like this do we make the future of enterprise possible.
Paul Schwefer is a highly experienced strategic thinker in the ways to create enterprise systems and deliver real change in highly complicated enterprises, and has been a top technology executive at several very large global organisations. His forward thinking has been refined over decades of implementing ideas based on what we now call Digital, Agile and Service Orientation. Ahead of his time in this thinking, and with many insights on getting enterprise transformations to really work, this is an interview you’re not going to want to miss.
Phil Smith’s insightful perspective on helping modern, fast moving organisations deliver on the promises of technology takes us into the ideas of how data is the lifeblood of your future success, how understanding technology is now key to certain types of IT Leadership roles more than it has ever been, and how managing relationships is essential to making IT a key driver in the success of the business.
Phil Smith is a Transformative IT Leader with a technical background that has made him a successful leader of complex programmes and high performing teams in today’s modern organisations.
In this very insightful interview we learn about the impact of getting the early stages of a project right to increase the chances of success, and how the focus on stakeholders, and continual engagement and cooperation will create an environment of opportunity and prosperity. We also learn that we should be solving systemic problems, rather than letting the short term focus overwhelm us, and that the successful enterprises of the future will understand how to create a stable platform for rapid change.
Dan Onions is an experienced Technology Leader with a background in Enterprise Architecture and Delivery Leadership in Large Enterprise programmes, who is now helping build an Analytics Startup in the FinTech sector. Dan has had considerable experience in complex environments, including UK Government, Defence, Finance and Consulting Services, and is used to working in leadership roles on programmes with budgets in excess of £100m. Dan is also the founder of DASH — a unique agile project management app that puts results and stakeholders at the centre of a very visual model of your work planning, enabling you to focus on achieving results through better communication and relationships.
This interview delves into the challenges in making lots of independent elements of your enterprise work together effectively — from people to processes to technology, and even data. It talks about how people are an essential ingredient to success, and how we can think more sensibly about the journey from legacy to the future, using different teams to work at different velocities and stability levels in a productive and cooperative way, all brought together with a shared vision and big picture view of the enterprise as a system.
Randolph Kappes is an Executive Director at EY Advisory Services in Germany who works on IT strategy and IT transformation projects and is currently leading the Enterprise Architecture Community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He transformed IT landscapes and IT organizations for multinational companies and national champions.
Bastian Gilles is a Manager for digital transformations at EY Advisory Services in Germany. He supports big transformation programs and focusses on the design of suitable IT target operating models. Furthermore he leads the #makerlab, an EY-internal innovation laboratory working hands-on with innovation technology and acting as a creative think tank to incubate new ideas and business models for his clients.
In this interview we hear about the challenge with balancing the need for good architecture and developing frameworks with the need for startups to move fast and get user feedback, and how the User Experience is the essential metric for product success. We also hear about a future where enterprises will build their businesses on complete stack cloud platforms, and will re-imagine the way they cooperate with data ownership and access to enable the power of AI and Robotics to help them compete.
Murtaza Kanchwala is a Startup CTO, with a technical background in large corporates, mid-size businesses and startups, working in enterprise architecture and product development, that has made him successful in bringing new and improved products to market in complicated B2B environments.
Murtaza has a practical approach to getting things done in the fast paced world of tech start-ups, whilst bringing his extensive experience with architecture in large complicated enterprises to help drive out the best practices that help start-ups become scale-ups, and to ultimately compete in the large corporate space.
The pace of technology innovation today is staggering. It is hard to keep up with the breadth, depth, and speed of change of new technology, and the new business model opportunities this brings. In this interview we hear about about innovation driving Digital transformation and how investing in real innovation for your technology and business is more effective long term than simply optimising what you already have, as well as how easy it is to let bureaucracy ruin a great idea and opportunity— to the tune of €10m–€100m per year in new revenues — Ouch! Too often we see Digital Transformation programmes simply replacing existing processes, applications, services, with something essentially the same, just slightly updated tech that is web native. We should ask ourselves honestly if some of these (usually expensive) projects could be replaced with something that truly innovates on the entire business proposition and underpinning capability.
Alex is an innovative technology executive with experience helping large complicated organisations transform their enterprise systems and business models, as well as leveraging new market trends, business model strategies, and startup investment to help drive innovation. Alex’s background working in large management consultancies, such as IBM, KPMG, and Lufthansa, and his experience with technology and business architecture have helped create a strong understanding of the industry challenges and how best to apply new innovations in technology and business models in real world scenarios to revitalise traditional enterprises. Alex and his company are looking for innovators in the logistics and mobility space — get involved here: http://beyond1435.com/
At the heart of all our systems are the teams we create to build and manage them — this is why helping people to be the best they can be, can make the difference between success and failure for the whole enterprise. In this interview we hear how Steve Walker, a C-Level technology executive, has relentlessly focused on the individuals in his teams to create organisations that people want to work in, and help foster an environment that makes it possible for everyone to help build the future of the enterprise.
Steve is an experienced technology executive with an extensive background in the global logistics industry. His focus is on empowering people with confidence in themselves and each other as part of an effective team, which has helped him build successful and enduring global IT organisations.
Enterprise Architecture, when done right, makes the enterprise manageable and changeable in a predictable way. However, we still find enterprises having many issues arise from a lack of long term vision and thinking coupled with structured roadmapping, which inevitably makes short term delivery even harder to do successfully and gives us even more reason to avoid focusing on the long term. In this interview, we hear about the challenges with the culture in large enterprises inhibiting our ability to effectively embrace the right way to do things, instead preferring to just adopt the buzzwords-du-jour as the new nomenclature; we also hear how focusing on people and improving the overall capability of our IT teams — starting with management — will help us overcome these challenges.
Ulrike is an experienced technology leader currently working in a large Telco provider; she has a proven history helping large organisations understand their business and technology systems and how to incrementally transform them over time, using strategic and architecturally structured thinking.
In this fast paced world of technological innovation, businesses are challenged with the need to constantly adapt and grow in the face of ever increasing competition. With so much depending on this agility and continuous improvement, the need for organisations to focus on their culture and organisational behaviours is paramount to the execution of ideas.
