May 07, 2022
Kannan Subbiah
FCA | CISA | CGEIT | CCISO | GRC Consulting | Independent Director | Enterprise & Solution Architecture | Former Sr. VP & CTO of MF Utilities | BU Soft Tech | itTrident
“New Ways of Working (NWoW) is our term. Of course, New Ways of Working requires quite a few catalysts in the form of culture and technology. "Culture: Retool your leadership in new ways of leading before you demand your organization be agile. Agile teams are empowered, cross-functional, and have the ability to move quickly and test and learn. The role of the leader is not to tell teams what to do but to create a fertile environment to innovate. The role of the leader is to create the outcomes and eliminate barriers. Train your leaders in these new ways of leading before you send your teams off to be agile. "Technology: Focus on agile infrastructure and data before you demand an agile work environment. Creating agile teams that are cross-functional and empowered is a good step. But this only works if you have embarked on your technical transformation and created the highways to safely and continuously deploy software. The combination of culture, technology, and agility is creating NWoW." -John Marcante, Retired CIO, Vanguard
Software development/design teams are simultaneously understanding problems while solving them. The team makes dozens of choices every day, ideally informed by business objectives and user testing and applied architecture and data cleanliness. ... Likewise, UX design frameworks are usually interpreted by team-level designers to fit the problem at hand. We’re constantly trading off consistent look and feel across the application suite against what will help users at this step. So in the software business, we’re usually solving and designing and implementing and fixing all at the same time. The hard part isn’t the typing, it’s the thinking. ... So hiring junior developers or offshoring to lower the average engineering rate misses what’s most important. Crafting better software should get us more customers and make us more money. Small teams of empowered developers/designers/product managers with deep understanding of real customer problems will out-earn large teams doing contextless color-by-number implementation of specs. The intrinsic quality of the work matters, which is lost in a command-and-control organization.
It’s up to executives to treat DEIB as a central business function, instituting and scaling their efforts. Degreed CEO Dan Levin, for example, describes it as a strategic imperative to integrate DEIB into all aspects of how we operate as a business, including at board level. ... Managers need to take big picture initiatives from the C-suite and use them to allocate work and opportunities in new ways. Those adept at these skills help their staff resolve conflicts and open their minds to new ideas. ... Two skills are especially important for both senior leaders and managers, study authors Stacia Garr and Priyanka Mehrotra write in the report. Respondents at higher-ranked companies for DEIB were more likely to say that people in both positions should excel at challenging the status quo and persuasion. I’ve seen leaders and managers faced with the task of convincing those under them to reconsider how their behaviors or words might make someone else feel excluded. Those who excel at these types of challenges have the skills to do so.
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Google said all the right things. Then over time — after like the first six months — it became like the Tinder Swindler. I was like, “What happened? Where is all this great stuff you said we were going to have?” It went out the window. Over time we were just one toy in the toy box. When you are bought for $3.2 billion, you would think people would actually respect and invest in the team as a new area of Google’s business. That is not how it worked. Apple is a whole different story, at least when Steve [Jobs] was there. It was respected when you did stuff. People took note and tried to make successes. It was my mistake. I did not realize that Google had gone through many of those billion-dollar acquisitions and just let them flail. They just said, “Oh, that was a fun ride. Moving on.” There was no existential crisis because you always had the ad money tree from search. Then it was just a matter of cutting their losses, as opposed to seeing that these are real people with families, trying to do right on the mission to build this thing. They just saw it more as dollars, at least from the finance side.?
When you look at networking and security, that really hasn’t kept up with the pace of the application transitions to the cloud. And if you look at what happens today, is many of these networks — and network and security elements in those networks — they are do-it-yourself. And the idea that the organizations are migrating, [that] we would be migrating from this do-it-yourself approach to as-a-service approach really allows the organizations to unleash the agility and the simplification that their organizations and enterprises are looking for. Now we have a lot of examples. Even in very recent times where these do-it-yourself approaches have failed to address the needs of the organizations, and one of the most prominent examples in the recent past is a variety of ransomware attacks. We all know that these ransomware attacks have been in the headlines in the recent news. Think about the reasons for these ransomware attacks. There could be many reasons. But one reason that I can think about is that the organizations that are hit by these ransomware attacks, and again, it’s not always black and white
A data governance system should restore control of data to the consumers and businesses generating it, according to this BIS Paper. Technological developments over the last two decades have led to an explosion in the availability of data and their processing. Consumers often do not know the benefits of the data they generate, and find it difficult to assert their rights regarding the collection, processing and sharing of their data. We propose a data governance system that restores control to the parties generating the data, by requiring consent prior to their use by service providers. The system should be open, with consent that is revocable, granular, auditable, and with notice in a secure environment. Conditions also include purpose and use limitation, data minimisation, and retention restriction. Trust in the system and widespread adoption are enhanced by mandating specialised data fiduciaries. The experience with India's Data Empowerment Protection Architecture (DEPA) suggests that such a system can operate at scale with low transaction costs.