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 Ulrike Goose
Introduction
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.
Bitesize Takeways:
Leaders should be the supporters of their teams and not their bosses
There is a lack of knowledge and skills in IT — especially in management
Focus on people, culture and skill, rather than KPIs, power and control
IT should understand the business and drive it
Not having a proper long term vision is a recipe for failure
Without real Enterprise Architecture, costs & complexity naturally escalate
Poorly defined processes leads to poorly designed solutions
Lack of a holistic and integrated view leads to complexity
Pushing for simple short term solutions creates complexity
Large enterprises are held back by their culture and old style views of IT
People need time to learn, as well as do
Open, Componentised, and Flexible Architectures are the future
Value people and their skills, and use the right person for the right job
Data Management needs to be federated if it is to be flexible
Industry specific functionality should be separate from general capabilities
Meet the Individual
Tell us a bit about what you currently do:
Currently I’m heading the Design & Delivery Division for Enterprise IT of the German operating company of a global telco provider. The division has around 100 people designing all IT capabilities to support sales, fulfilment and customer service for B2B customers as well as online and customer self service systems. Enterprise IT is part of IT, business demand and all over project management is provided by the business, software development has been outsourced.
What motivates and inspires you to get up and go to work everyday?
I like to drive change, solve complex logical and logistical problems and most of all, work for and with people.
Tell us about your journey to get to where you are today?
Coming from a very conservative area of Germany and having been a girl, I learned cooking and housekeeping at school instead of math after the age of 13. I was first trained to be a business interpreter for English, French and Spanish. Only many years later after I had moved to Berlin, I had the chance to go back to evening school and get university entrance qualification. When I was working as multi-lingual secretary and sales clerk, I was always the one, to use computers and implement new digital processes. I opened up my own business to do computer trainings but soon found out, that without a degree, I had difficulties entering large global corporations. So I decided to start university and study general information science with a special focus on distributed systems and communication protocol implementation.
Suddenly everything seemed to be simple; it felt as if this was what I always was good at. After university I had a bit of a struggle finding my first job, as I was already in my mid-thirties. From that time on, however, things went really quick and I got promoted every other year and ended up in IT Management pretty soon. I always wanted to be really close to the subject of IT but also work in higher Management to get the chance to a) create more impact and b) to show how simple complex problems can be solved, if you do it as it’s supposed to be (most people working in IT are coming from other areas and often do not know about design principles and also have difficulties to understand how IT teams tick and how they are motivated).
I was lucky and unlucky got great jobs and lost them due to economic difficulties of the company I was working for, but even though it was hard to cope with losing the job, I always got a better job, position and salary with the next one. In the beginning of my career I was working with two companies twice — returning after the economics got better. I was lucky to get the chance to create my own business area within a large IT provider. Thanks to some wonderful mentors who supported me, gave me chance and advice, I felt freedom in my own personal development and made it up to successfully being the CIO of a European incumbent telco provider.
My beloved husband and family supported me on my way and still do. They made it possible that I could move to another city and even another country for some years.
If you were to do anything other than what you do now, what would it be?
I could be an architect or city planner but also a musician or artist. However, I would also want to move something really big
What books or podcasts do you recommend for Enterprise Technology Leaders?
W. Richard Stevens — TCP/IP; Tom DeMarco — The Deadline; Goldratt — The Goal; Sandberg — Lean in; David Graeber — Debt
Thomas A. Harris — I’m Ok — You’re OK
Robert M. Persig — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Herrigel — Zen in the Art of Archery
Harry Mulisch — The Discovery of Heaven
New York City — city planning — https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/about-zoning.page
linkedIN — Enterprise Architecture group
Gesellschaft für Informatik
Understanding Their Challenges
What do you personally spend most of your time dealing with?
Meetings with my stakeholders and direct reports as well as management steering committees — too many meetings due to lack of structure and responsibility paired with individual politics. Not enough teamwork.
What is the most important thing you focus on to make the organisation successful?
Team building and development; get customer and stakeholder requirements and develop a proper strategy and roadmap — organisation, process and architecture and the other elements follow as a measure to implement the strategy.
What are the most expensive mistakes you have seen made in organisations, and how did they happen?
Not having a proper long term vision on where the business needs to go to stay successful and a holistic strategy and roadmap. Not knowing the direction and therefore investing in capabilities that are outdated before implementation is finished.
Not having proper Enterprise Architecture and therefore re-implementing IT capabilities several times, creating expensive complexity.
Low process management capability: Implementing processes that have neither been defined properly nor being optimized before implementation and therefore designing solution architectures that are not sustainable and have to be redesigned soon after first go live.
What drives the complexity in your Enterprise Systems?
Competence has been outsourced to product suppliers and SI very soon. Fast implementation driven by business requirements without a long term vision.
Mergers and acquisitions and no clear concepts for IT integration.
No holistic enterprise architecture concepts that also create a clear transparency of where complexity and costs really are.
Company culture in all large enterprises prevents transparency. Talking about problems is not appropriate — they have to be called challenges. Companies look for simple solutions not wanting to invest into long-term architecture and non-functional requirements.
What are the most frustrating challenges when designing, building and managing enterprise systems?
Looking for the easy way. Lack of general IT know how in IT and in IT Management; Lack of acceptance for lean and smart concepts; Old fashioned concepts. Buzzword Bingo — Cloud, Agile, DevOps etc. companies want to use it without building up skills, changing processes or work style.
What has most helped to drive the success of your change programmes?
Proper Enterprise Architecture concepts, holistic portfolio management, transparency on costs, a proper roadmap showing dependencies, costs and benefits and showing a way for the business to get short term results without destroying long term value
What has most negatively impacted your change programmes?
Buzzword Bingo — change in management and direction.
What is currently holding you back from having the tech/engineering credibility of a Google/Facebook/Amazon?
Lack of IT skill in management; lack of architectural know how; old-style view on IT.
What could be done better: Focus on people, culture and skill, rather than KPIs, power and control
Their Vision for the Future
What are the 3 key changes that Technology Leaders should focus in the modern world?
Have or build up skill within the company and not with vendors; accept help from experts for change periods;
What is one thing about the future of technology that you believe in, but most people generally don’t know, or disagree with?
IT should 1. understand business and 2. drive it. Real teamwork and meaningful goals will drive the future. Focus on personality types and look for the right people for the right job. Grant everybody at least one day a week to read or do something to learn something new.
How can we build better technology organisations?
Turn the pyramid upside down. Leaders should be the supporters of their teams and not their bosses. Focus on community and open architectures. Value skill. Value people.
What do Enterprise Systems of the future look like?
Architectures are open, capability elements are small and independent; I believe in federated approaches for master data management, as it is far more flexible. Flexibility is key. “Systems” should be a cluster of capabilities — industry independent. Industry specific functionality should be separate from general capabilities. No more monoliths.
Ulrike kindly provided her 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 Ulrike via LinkedIn.