Digital transformation as a team sport: How five enterprise IT leaders collaborate to enable the new way of work

Enterprises must move on from legacy networks, legacy security, and legacy thinking to support the new, cloud-first way of work. That transformation requires collaboration between network teams, infrastructure leaders, security teams, and -- perhaps most significantly -- business stakeholders in the C-suite.

At the recent third episode in the Zscaler CXO Summit series, "Scalability without limits: Operationalizing the resilient enterprise," I was joined by five innovators driving transformative change in their organizations: Nicole Darden Ford, VP and CISO at Carrier; John Maya, VP of operational excellence for the Royal Caribbean Group; Larry Biagini, former CTO of General Electric; Remi Gas, global CTO for Sanofi; and Helmuth Ludwig, former CIO at Siemens AG.

Teaming up to pivot to remote work at Carrier

Nicole Darden Ford is the VP and CISO for Carrier Global, a leader in heating, air-conditioning, and refrigeration solutions serving both consumer and commercial markets. For Ford, the COVID pandemic challenged her and her IT team to respond nimbly and quickly. More importantly, it validated the earlier decision to shift to the Zscaler Zero Trust Architecture.

"It was always a part of our strategic plan to build on digital foundations," explained Ford, "which included a lot of the cloud-based solutions." When the pandemic hit, she and her team -- working from a "tiger-team war room" with colleagues from multiple Carrier business groups -- made the decision to accelerate Carrier's adoption of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), extending its rollout to the entire (suddenly-remote) 50K+ workforce. Legacy solutions couldn't handle the pivot: "Our traditional VPN was really going to be tested -- We didn't have enough capacity."

Ford led the (rapid) move to the cloud, and ZPA delivered the remote-access capabilities Carrier needed to ensure business continuity: "We were able to roll out Zscaler in about nine days to all of our employees, which was a big lift."

Embracing a faster, even-more agile approach to IT deployment at Royal Caribbean

At Zscaler, we've seen that wonderful things can happen when an enterprise's network, security, and architecture teams come together. At Royal Caribbean, VP for operational excellence John Maya had to enable remote access for the company's thousands of employees, while also contending with dramatic business impact to the cruise industry.

"COVID has redefined what 'crisis' really means," noted Maya with some understatement. Shepherding Royal Caribbean's IT response required a new level of collaboration between network, security, and IT teams, explained Maya, who recognized that establishing a culture of teamwork was key to success.

Like Ford, Maya had already kicked off a Zscaler deployment: "We were midway in our journey of implementing Zscaler globally." That foresight helped Royal Caribbean establish remote access for its employees in less than two weeks. According to Maya, the impact went well beyond quickly connecting a work-from-anywhere workforce: Better remote-access capacity came with better performance and better security. 

"We got the user experience, we got the feedback, and it said, 'It just works,'" said Maya. "As a result [of deploying Zscaler], we have looked at the executive insights we get on a regular basis...we're seeing where we're being attacked, but everything is just being dissuaded."

Making digital transformation “personal” at General Electric

Former GE CTO Larry Biagini knows that it can be difficult to effect change in an organization, especially when that change impacts hundreds of thousands of employees. Biagini led GE’s shift to the cloud, and adoption of local internet breakouts with Zscaler for all 360K+ employees. At that (massive) scale, project success was never guaranteed.

To ensure corporate buy-in, Biagini advises other CXOs to ensure change (in particular, cloud migration effort) is aligned with business goals, even on an individual level.

“Any time you’re going through a change,” said Biagini, “you have to make it personal.” He explains, “You can’t say you’re going to transform a large organization, because nobody ‘feels it.’ If you make it personal, and set goals that resonate with all your constituents, that’s the way to get forward.”

Enabling business at Sanofi: simplified app access, good performance from...wherever

Among its myriad business priorities, French pharmaceutical multinational Sanofi is doing critical research in the quest for a COVID-19 vaccine. IT must support that urgent work, and global CTO Remi Gas is enabling it with the cloud.

“We are leveraging more and more SaaS solutions,” said Gas, who is also overseeing the migration of on-premise Sanofi applications to the public cloud. That shift aligns with the ease-of-use preferences of Sanofi employees for a “seamless experience,” in Gas’ words.

“Our users, our business stakeholders, they don’t care where a solution is hosted,” he explained. “They need a good performance, they need easy access wherever they are located.”

Creating a culture of agility at Siemens: “Go out of your comfort zone”

For former CIO Helmuth Ludwig, Siemens isn’t exactly as it might appear to be from the outside.

“It sounds a little old-fashioned,” he commented after I described Siemens as a one-hundred-plus-year-old company with four-hundred thousand employees. “There might be a misunderstanding: Siemens is actually a start-up...created in the Berlin start-up scene in 1847.” Ludwig was half-joking, but that perspective he espouses is an important one: Start-up-like creative thinking has been essential to Siemens’ successful digital transformation, as well as its lightning-fast pivot to remote work in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

When it comes to driving innovation, Ludwig counsels IT leaders to “Go out of your comfort zone,” because the learnings are “enormous.” “Driving [that] innovation,” concluded Ludwig, requires “being a real partner to the business.”

As their stories attest, effective enterprise digital transformation requires new ways of thinking, new ways of communicating, and new ways of collaborating. IT stakeholders who can do that are setting their organizations up for success, and leading their companies into the cloud-first future.

That cloud-first future will be on display December 8-10 at Zenith Live 2020. This year, the premier global cloud summit goes virtual, with all sessions available online and free for attendees. Join me, as well as Nicole Darden Ford, Larry Biaginin, Helmuth Ludwig, and more inspiring speakers for what is sure to be an exciting, insightful, and valuable event. Learn more at ZenithLive.com.