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 Randolph Kappes & Bastian Gilles
Introduction
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.
Bitesize Takeaways:
Think of your entire enterprise as a system — then design that system
Ecosystems and Platforms are the future
We need ubiquitous integration — across tech, data, people, & processes
No big picture architecture & poor integration = serious complexity
It is hard to build consensual collaboration without a compelling vision
Patterns and principles are better than strict guidelines and rules
Strategy & Roadmaps are great — but you have to make them happen
The person behind the screen is more important than the screen itself
You’ll regret not properly defining your target model or involving people
Organise around business capabilities and integrate teams vertically
Business and IT are still avoiding each other, but should be one team
Recruit people who believe more in your vision than political agendas
Slow decision making and politics waste most of our time
Changing mindsets is key — but it’s easy to underestimate this
Don’t forget the legacy! It’ll be a part of your plans for years to come
It is about innovative business models enabled through technology
You should adopt a culture of Intrapreneurship & be open to failure
This is just the beginning: Society has a lot of catching up to do…
Meet the Individual
Q: Tell us a bit about what you currently do:
Randolph: There are various things I am doing at the moment. First of all I am on an IT project that is part of a major carve-out: the aim is to separate the ERP applications legally and operationally and to plan and constitute the related IT functions for the new company. In parallel I am working on a project in which I plan the reorganization of an IT department of a mid-size German company. Most of my projects in the last years have been around planning and executing major transformations as IT organization development and IT application landscape constantly change. My heart is still with enterprise architecture and all the stuff that makes an IT landscape running and fit for the future.
Bastian: I am also focusing on the IT target operating model design in the context of big IT transformations, including service design, sourcing and the application landscape with the underlying IT infrastructure. Additionally, I’m leading the EY #makerlab for the region west in Germany. Our aim is to get our colleagues more used to hands-on innovation technologies, understand their functionality and their possibilities to generate approaches for our clients or prototype concrete cases and business models. With this concept, we enabled a new culture of intrapreneurship at EY, using tools and methodologies of the startup world (e.g. design thinking approaches, ideation workshops, customer journeys) to incubate fresh ideas. A perfect example is the award-winner of a globally performed Bot-A-Thon, where we built a new conversational agent called “The Machine Doctor”.
Q: What motivates and inspires you to get up and go to work everyday?
Randolph: Get it implemented! I like good strategies and transformation roadmaps but I love to make them happen. This means make IT organizational changes effective and conduct transformation programs on business or IT side with its several go lives to implement new business functions.
Bastian: Working in a management consulting company means I can do one of the most diversified jobs you can imagine. Defining IT strategies for international players, building new IT organizations for mid-sized businesses, invent new digital services and implement them into the enterprise IT or support startups in applying industry best practices and established methodologies– the variety of topics, industries and people is simply infinite.
Q: Tell us about your journey to get to where you are today?
Bastian: Since I was young I was interested in IT and technology and as I belong to the last generation of children growing up without the internet it was particularly exciting to participate in this digital evolution. After finishing school I completed my apprenticeship as an IT technician and decided to start my studies in computer sciences. In this time I already led a student business and IT consultancy which paved my way into the real consulting business. An additional master in business informatics improved my profile as an IT management consultant.
Randolph: I have been in the IT business for more than 35 years now. When I had my first computer science class at school I learned the languages Basic and Pascal. Do you remember? It was the time when you stored your programs on a tape. The 3.5'’ floppy disc came later. After school I studied computer science with a focus on theoretical fundaments. So, coming from the basics I learned a lot about what is behind the screen. Moreover I learned that it is more important to understand the people that sit in front of that screen. To help users and whole business departments to express their need, translate it into IT and deliver IT projects. Today I think about changing whole IT application landscapes and IT organizations to improve the support of upcoming challenges as new business models and innovative technologies arise. And it is still the same: To understand the possibilities of the technology and to understand the user side what they really want and need. To bring business and new technologies together.
Q:If you were to do anything other than what you do now, what would it be?
Bastian: As I managed to make my hobby to my profession I actually can’t imagine doing anything else. It never gets boring to move with the current speed of today’s innovation cycles of technology and IT. In case that I ever lose my interest in these topics I will take over an alp in South Tyrol to keep cows and produce the best mountain cheese ever.
Q: What books or podcasts do you recommend for Enterprise Technology Leaders?
Bastian: As we planned to start our #makerlab I was really impressed by Eric Reis’ book “The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses”. I gathered pretty useful tips, insights and approaches, and it helped me to understand what is important to be an entrepreneur or in our case to be an intrapreneur in our own company.
Randolph: I still like old but fundamental books like Dern, “Management von IT-Architekturen” (I do not know, if there exists an English version) and “Enterprise SOA” by Krafzik, Blank, Slama. The basics are still valid. I would unquestionably recommend Enterprise Technology Leaders a management book called Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. The book is about corporate governance. But Deming was the man whose work led Japanese industry into new principles of management and invented “lean”. It is fantastic how he thinks about how to increase productivity and do quality management in a comprehensive way. His focus is always on the big picture and not on local optimizations. That is what each Enterprise Technology Leader should take into account if developing the IT landscape.
Understanding Their Challenges
Q: What do you personally spend most of your time dealing with?
Bastian: Usually I’m performing my projects in big enterprise environments where besides the main project topics the most time-consuming tasks are slow decision making processes and a large amount of internal politics. If grown companies begin to deal with innovation and agility there are usually high internal compliance standards and overloaded IT processes that slow down any progress. Last but not least a missing strategic vison and a nonexistent overview of the big picture lead to thinking in small domains — breaking through this mindset and getting a feeling for the big picture is a long term change process and a pure people topic rather than technical or processual.
Randolph: In addition we spend a lot of our time in workshops and their preparation and post processing: To discuss new ideas and innovative solutions with people. It is my job to align and agree new business solutions with business and IT, with senior management and solution architects. This is important as this brings innovative ideas and new business functions to life in the following implementation project.
Q: What is the most important thing you focus on to make the organisation successful?
Randolph.: It is the mindset. For example, to implement Agile into an organization it is first of all about changing the mindset of people to think Agile. Just to provide a new methodology, new templates, and new tools is just the starting point. We have to work on the mindset of our people to have it implemented and enable change.
Bastian: And to change the mindset first of all a very clear strategy is essential. It must be regularly adopted and clearly communicated to all employees. In all business areas communication is the key. Therefore a clear governance that encourages close cooperation between business units and IT must be provided. This avoids the encapsulation of single departments and is the basis for an open business culture.
If we talk about faster innovation cycles, an open innovation culture has to be supported and dedicated incentives have to be provided in this area (e.g. employees being enabled to develop a pitch new ideas). In the next years the IT organizations employees are not the only technology experts in the company — a lot of innovative strengths comes from the new generation of employees that grew up with technology and new business models. This requires structured approaches for innovation and new (digital) service development as well as a culture of “fail fast” and move on.
In the field of IT operations the employee of today and the future isn’t a technical IT specialist but a very good vendor manager overseeing a heterogeneous and varying mix of different providers working with different delivery models. This “less” of IT knowledge has to be replaced with more business process knowledge and deeper understanding of the value chain of the business. The shift of this role is essential and also requires a long term cultural change.
Q: What are the most expensive mistakes you have seen made in organisations, and how did they happen?
Randolph: I see two main mistakes. The first mistake is to start implementing new functions or even starting a transformation without a proper target model in place. The second is to start it without a plan how to involve the people and help them to be prepared for the new.
I remember when I learned object oriented programming, it was easy to learn a new programming language and to write my first programs. But it took quite a long time before I really started to “think” object oriented and to develop object oriented software, leaving the procedural thinking behind me and really using all the benefits of that new methodology. It is the same with Agile or Digital or any multispeed IT approaches. It is easy to provide some new organizations or methodologies. And it is easy to underestimate how long it takes to change the mindset of the people to use the new approaches in a proper way and to be more efficient than with the old ways of working.
Bastian: Another mistake in the context of major IT transformations as well as the design of new digital services is the development of solutions based on individual ideas but not focusing the customer needs. A more customer centric design also requires regular and structured communication by asking the customer for the real daily operational challenges. These challenges have to be addressed in close cooperation. This approach is often prevented by the existing cultural image that IT is still an expensive cost center that brings no value. To break through these organizational walls, organizational structures have to be created that are aligned with key business processes, e.g. dedicated business, IT project, IT operations and IT provider representatives working closely together in one team.
Q: What drives the complexity in your Enterprise Systems?
Bastian: The main driver of complexity are heterogeneous grown architectures that become unmanageable due to missing documentation and a missing architectural big picture. Additionally a lack of integration layers to seamlessly integrate new solutions and upgrades is the main reason for highly complex system and software architectures.
Randolph: Yes, the latter topic: Integration of old and new. This drives complexity. Each IT landscape that has been grown for years with new solutions, new technologies, new ways of integration and new resources to maintain it.
Q: What are the most frustrating challenges when designing, building and managing enterprise systems?
Bastian: I see again and again the partially intentionally missing involvement of the business units by the IT which leads to solutions that don’t match the business needs. But as there are always two sides of the medal, there is also a regularly missing interest of the business in the involvement in IT projects.
Randolph: And that is because there is a lack of vision. There are a lot of business and IT projects that implement new functions to better bring the business into market. Each unit is looking for its best local solution. These projects are really important as they bring specific benefit to the organization. But I miss the additional long term vision how to develop the overall business and IT landscape, how to integrate the innovative solutions and how to manage complexity and how to avoid increasing operating costs for the IT landscape.
Q: What has most helped to drive the success of your change programmes?
Bastian: The most essential drivers for successful change programs are, again, people and communications. Regardless of the conceptual project or program content an open and regular communication with important stakeholders and all relevant users is the main success factor. The bigger the program, the more communication is necessary.
Randolph: Yes, people. People that are eager to make a program a success independently of individual preferences and the politics of the involved units.
Q: What has most negatively impacted your change programmes?
Bastian: The most negative impact in all kinds of transformation programs or change processes have been internal politics that slow down any project progress. It gets worse when there is a lack of management support for the initiative and all political barriers have to be taken by the project members.
Q: What is currently holding you back from having the tech/engineering credibility of the modern tech giants?
Bastian: I’d like to answer this question from the point of view of my role as lead of the EY #makerlab. As we are not a tech company we don’t claim to have the tech credibility of the big players but we are a pretty agile and small initiative within a globally acting group. That’s why we are directly confronted with some challenges. The main problem is the lethargy of a globally distributed, highly efficient and standardized IT organization. The complexity of existing processes and compliance requirements is not able to support fast development cycles, the implementation of proof of concepts and especially fast failure. This shows that enterprise IT has to develop the organizational and processual capabilities to support a legacy IT as well as agile speed boats. This can be solved by supporting the different speeds in one organization or by holding a network of different companies that enable different development speeds of services and solutions.
But even if an IT organization is able to develop new services very quickly till they are customer proven and established it still requires the capability to integrate them seamlessly into the existing enterprise architecture in the next step.
Their Vision for the Future
Q: What are the 3 key changes that Technology Leaders should focus in the modern world?
Randolph: Well, if I am looking back at my last projects I see first of all that Enterprise Technology Leaders have to support digital innovative projects with patterns instead of tight guidelines and rules. These projects need more tolerance in experimenting with new technologies. We cannot have prepared guidelines for all these new technologies without thwarting new ideas. I have seen patterns as a good solution to give guidance without being strict. In addition we have to decide soon which patterns prove its worth and shall be a guideline for future projects and which one failed and are then forbidden for coming projects.
Second: Integration is the key. The integration of old and new — in technology and in thinking will guide us to the future. We have to carefully plan how we integrate new solutions and how to master the complexity.
Number three is not particularly popular but essential for the future: Care about your legacy. There have been immense investments in existing systems. There is a lot of knowledge in them and they still help the business to do their daily work. And last but not least most of the time they have all the data we need for the new innovative solutions. I know, it is fancier to build innovative solutions but we as Enterprise Technology Leaders have to care about the investments of the past: They will persist and remain the core of our application landscape for long.
Bastian: I’d like to add two more key topics for technology leaders in the so called modern world. The first thing I already mentioned before: Try to integrate business and IT more than ever. There are multiple concepts and approaches and this topic is actually not totally new. But in my projects I see again and again a lack of integration and the resulting problems like miscommunication, mistrust and defective requirements.
The second topic I see is about a strong focus on ecosystems and platforms. See your business as one integrated system including customers, additional suppliers, individuals, organizations, services, software and applications sharing one or several missions and focusing on the interactions and interrelationships among them. Think about how to use your market position to provide an ecosystem, where to participate in one, and especially where and how you design your interfaces.
Q: What is one thing about the future of technology that you believe in, but most people generally don’t know, or disagree with?
Bastian: When you ask me for the one thing I have to give a more holistic, maybe a bit philosophical answer. We’re just at the beginning: Global networks and raising technology will change social systems, global politics, economics and the way we life together — politics, society and companies still have to learn how to handle the fast change and find the right governance systems and cultural frames.
Randolph: We’re not just at the beginning. We have and will have for many years existing solutions we have to care about. Most of our time we have to care about the legacy and make them the core of our digital solutions.
Q: How can we build better technology organisations?
Randolph: In helping business and IT to come together. I know that it is nothing new but it is still a big challenge. Regardless if we talk about agile methodologies, digital innovations, or expanding our legacy applications, business have to better understand what technology could provide and IT has to better understand what the business really needs. I do not see innovative technologies, but innovative new business models that are enabled throughout technology.
Bastian: I see it likewise. As I mentioned before only close cooperation between business and IT, enabling multiple IT speeds and perfect integration capabilities can enable good technology organizations.
Q: What do Enterprise Systems of the future look like?
Bastian: The main aspects of the enterprise systems of the future are standardized interface and integration technologies that enable seamless communication and integration of functionality and data between multiple solutions — independent from development frameworks, programming technologies or hosting environments.
Randolph: And theses solutions are losing their boundaries. In the old days there was an application that provided business functionality, had data ownership and interfaces to other applications. The boundaries between Enterprise Systems are no longer tangible: we embed one component in another, have micro applications and provide the same information via various presentation devices. Therefore it is even more important for Enterprise Technology Leaders to keep the big picture in mind: Who is owning the data, how are components integrated and how do they interact. We have to orchestrate components today. That is our job: to keep the component landscape manageable.
Randolph and Bastian kindly provided their 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