In this interview series on inspiring digital technology leaders, we take an inside look at how enterprise technology leaders make systems work in some of the largest and most complex business environments in the world. Meet the Individual, Understand their Challenges, and learn about Their Vision of the Future.
An Interview with Nikolaus Bubner
Introduction
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.
In this interview we learn about the perils of cultures that punish mistakes and reward the status quo, and the long term impact of making short term decisions, as well as the need to empower the real thinkers and doers of the organisation, rather than the politicians and administrators. Nikolaus talks about the potential for organisations to evolve into the digital enterprises of the future by embracing change, by dealing with the difficult challenges inherent in managing complexity, as well as the emergence of innovation from a workforce truly empowered and supported.
Nikolaus is an Executive Director at EY Advisory Services in Germany who works on IT strategy and emerging technologies to help large global companies to transform their enterprises. His methodical and transformative approach ensures even the most complex of problems can be brought under control and developed into a modern enterprise.
Bitesize Takeaways:
Look for new & innovative ideas — do things that are challenging
Be careful not to remove the ‘communities’ from your organisation
The culture of avoiding mistakes “If I do nothing — I can do nothing wrong”
Too often, mistakes are punished, and status quo rewarded
Mission statements on openness, innovation, change are rarely the reality
Complexity comes from short term thinking & lack of big-picture thinking
Invest in the difficult long term projects — they will make the future easier
Architecture’s real value emerges over time
Just because it worked in the past, doesn’t mean it will in the future
Give “power to the people”, dare to foster emergence
Try things, learn from the mistakes, don’t punish them
Listen more to the quiet people
Leaders need to be able to manage complexity, creatively and flexibly
Long-term visions and plans must be feasible
Empower the open minded deep thinkers
The future is modular, the future is integrated: interoperable grids
Meet the Individual
Tell us a bit about what you currently do:
My current mission is to support my clients to ‘digitize’ their business. That means I need to be a consultant, advisor, evangelist, networker, account manager, sales & pre-sales manager, project lead, and sometimes even a general sparring partner. In addition, I manage and look for co-operation with partnerships and think-tanks in Europe.
What motivates and inspires you to get up and go to work everyday?
Changing things for the better; making sense of, and structuring, “the mess” that you find in all large organisations; and finding innovative solutions, or more accurately — solutions that work. And, of course, the welfare of my family and my friends.
Tell us about your journey to get to where you are today?
I started out working in the field of quantum physics, which completely disrupted our thinking and has led us to where we are now — modern medicine, chemistry, electronics, nano techniques and of course IT and digitization are emergent results of quantum physics.
Afterwards, I switched to applied mathematics and ultimately to IT. Starting as a project leader I soon became a consultant within end-user organisations and consulting companies, guiding projects and programs worldwide for large, globally acting clients.
If you were to do anything other than what you do now, what would it be?
I would like to do arts and philosophy.
What podcasts, books, blogs would you recommend?
The internet is full of anything you need, so nothing specific— but I would recommend to read “normal” literature that helps you to change your world-view, thinking models, and general perspective, e.g. 1Q84 from Haruki Murakami.
Understanding Their Challenges
What do you personally spend most of your time dealing with?
I spend most of my time with client meetings, project work, writing proposals, and admin, though I also spend a lot of time researching, reading, thinking, and having interesting and thought provoking discussions. The first part can be good —but the latter is always great…
What is the most important thing you focus on to make the organisation successful?
I try to do two things at the same time to create both organisational success and personal improvement:
Look for new and innovative ideas (both big and small) and implementing them to help my clients; and
Doing things that are new and challenging, that I haven’t done many times before, as I like to keep life interesting and ensure I continually have better ways to solve problems for my clients
Generally, that means to orchestrate many stakeholders, partners, and colleagues to agree on a common view in order to be able to move forward with an idea or a project. It seems that this is getting more and more time-consuming; maybe because digitization breaks up traditional “communities” and more people in new roles have to be involved, where there is often cultural barriers, poor communications and a lack of integrated processes.
What are the most expensive mistakes you have seen made in organisations, and how did they happen?
“If I do nothing — I can do nothing wrong” : The culture of avoiding mistakes — it leads to standstill. The culture in corporates is mainly still punishment of mistakes that you’ve done or the remuneration of not having done any mistake, respectively, which in turn lead to the avoidance of any risks and the preservation of the status quo.
Furthermore, the management is often burdened with daily work and tends to choke off ideas from their employees — too much work, ideas mean disturbance of the daily routine.
Today, many corporates state that they are open for new ideas, innovation and change; they like to talk about being eager to listen to their employees and being open to try new ways of working, etc, but so far I’ve seen these values only paid lip service in most organisations. Many managers dare not try to do something new, for it will cost them dearly, and will have little to no support.
What drives the complexity in Enterprise Systems?
There is at least one major and simple reason: A mess in your room arises when you’re not tidying up according to certain rules or guidelines, e.g. where the toys and where the clothes should be stored. Setting up ‘rules and guidelines’ and following them is essential if you want to keep reasonable order. This means to pay money for projects to do the hard and difficult to financially justify in the short term type work — like sorting out your IT landscape and creating something that is coherent and comprehensible.
These projects appear to have no direct and immediate positive impact to your business, so are disregarded by most managers as too abstract and unnecessary. It is often the same managers that complain when project costs and timelines seem to spiral out of control due to the complexity of the estate. That is where complexity comes from, and it is a vicious cycle brought about by short term thinking and a lack of big-picture thinking.
What are the most frustrating challenges when designing, building and managing enterprise systems?
The biggest challenge is the lack of long-term visions, ambitions and attention. Architecture is something that needs time to really demonstrate its strengths. Again, the culture in corporates is contrary to what is required, it rewards short-term successes, and it is rare that a manager is pursuing long-term goals, because he might not even be part of the company by the time the goal is achieved.
What has most helped to drive the success of your change programmes?
As stated above, a manager and a general management team with a long-lasting ambition and corresponding attention, plus a team with profound architectural knowledge and the ability to communicate and to convince the rest of the world — communication is key. My programmes were most successful when those factors were in place, and they did not work out when even one factor was missing.
What has most negatively impacted your change programmes?
When one of the success factors noted above is absent during the execution of the programme.
Nevertheless, nowadays I see that some managers start a “bottom-up” approach, since the top-down approach rarely succeeds. That means that they start to do architecture, cloud computing etc. in a proper and aligned manner, they clarify and align the “how-to” so that the people can do their work in a way that it should be done, and consequentially others start to adapt accordingly.
What is currently holding companies back from having the tech/engineering credibility of the tech giants?
Main reasons are the above mentioned aspects of the culture and of the difficult work that hasn’t been done for a long time, which results in inflexible legacy IT landscapes that can been seen so often. Furthermore, even former economical success can be a reason: Managers that have been very successful in the “old world” are now in leading positions, and like to repeat what has worked for them in the past, but today their task is to steer the change — so sadly that rarely works.
Their Vision for the Future
What are the 3 key changes that Technology Leaders should focus on in the modern world?
Tear down hierarchies, give “power to the people”, dare to foster a more emergent approach.
Try things out and learn from it; that is already often proclaimed, but I haven’t really seen it in practice.
Listen more to the quiet people and less to those with “big mouths”.
What is one thing about the future of technology that you believe in, but most people generally don’t know, or disagree with?
Almost always the empowered people of a company, the managers, correspond to a certain image, such as knowing numbers & KPIs and how to deal with politics, they are able to assert themselves in meetings and discussions, they are able to manage the daily routine, etc.
But in fact, what we need is that they should be creative and adaptive, that they should be able to capture and manage complexity (not deny or ignore it), that they should be able to listen to very different point of views and be able to integrate very diverse characters and perspectives. And, of course, they should have deep technical know-how, or at least give power to and listen to those who have it — even the so-called ‘geeks/nerds’.
How can we build better technology organisations?
It’s not really about technology, it’s about culture.
Long-term visions and plans must be feasible
Open-minded people with deep conceptual and technical expertise must be empowered
Few hierarchies should be in place
A culture that does not ask immediately for a business case
What do Systems of the future look like?
Although it might sound a bit outdated now, I do think that the vision that existed some years ago is still valid, at least to some extent: We need a modular landscape, a SOA, sometimes very granular using microservices, sometimes less, depending on the business domain.
And we should think about the idea of an enterprise ‘grid’ or ‘supergrid’: Setting up interoperable business services, potentially structured in a hierarchical way, that can be orchestrated by an overarching “hub” to deliver the services that you need internally or externally. Kind of a “Business SOA”.
Nikolaus kindly provided his time, knowledge and insights in this interview as part of my research for an up-coming book: Mastering Digital: how technology leaders, architects, and engineers build the Digital Enterprises of the Future
You can contact Nikolaus on LinkedIn.