Seminar Hosted by Tizbi: "Digital Transformation: Concepts to Execution" Raleigh, 8/17/2017

<v ->I'm Olga Polevaya,</v> project manager at Tizbi. Tizbi is the sponsor of this event. Together with our partners, Global Digital and CGO, we outsource content for this seminar. They consider to help us to organize and to have all of you here. Our company Tizbi specialized and sold in business problems with severe solutions. It's who we are at Tizbi. And today, in our seminar, we will have three speakers. And it will be one hour continuous sessions. We don't plan to have any breaks or intermission. So if you need to leave the room, you are welcome to do that. And the questions and answers session will be at the end of the seminar, because we can't go on to have this continuous session. I hope you will enjoy and it will be helpful for you. And lets start. And we want to start with our first topic. And I want to invite in this stage our first presenter, Mike McTaggart. Mike, as you'll see, is passionate about two things. Being a dad, and technology. He started his career as an engineer, was part of the .com boom in a team of consultants dedicated to digital transformation. His personal focus is of elevating and aligning IT as a partner to the business. Welcome, Mike. <v ->Thank you.</v> All right. Thank you, everybody. So, we are here today to talk about digital transformation. Just to let you know, I'm going to try to pack 30 to 45 minutes of content into about 30. So you're going to see I get worked up, I'm passionate about this anyway, but I want you to know a couple of things about me to start with. There's all the other bio stuff you can read and see my Linked In later. Most importantly, I think, for today, is you know I'm a lifelong geek. I have always been this way. This is me maybe nine years old at Christmas over the moon to get a dot matrix printer. (audience laughing) You know? And, if I recall, this thing is a beast. And it was definitely better at producing decibels of noise than dots per inch, all right? Some of you remember some of this, all right. Also, I'm a dad, as you heard. I'm a dad of just-turned-six year old triplet girls. I share that, not for the oohs and ohs, but thank you though. I just want you to know I'm not easily rattled. As we talk today, interrupt me, tell me that your neighbor stole your apple juice, the more of that, the more at home I will feel up here, okay? So, I want this is be as interactive as possible. So, getting into the meat. What are we here to talk about? Digital transformation. What is it? We want to start with concepts to executions. What is the concept? Well, if you ask someone to define it, you're going to get as many definitions as you ask people. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone has dedicated blogs on the topic. But if you ask someone in storage, like in a net app or an emc or such thing, they're going to talk about, well, it's all about big data, right? You've got all this data you've got to collect and store on our products. You ask someone that sells switches and routers, they're going to say its' all about everything being connected. So it completely depends on who you ask, which really doesn't help us today. So for the next 30 minutes, I want to try to create a unifying definition. So where do we start? Well, the one thing that everyone agrees with is that digital transformation is a megatrend. What is a megatrend? It's essentially a change that is so broad that it leaves no one and no thing untouched. It doesn't matter if it's an individual or a small business, like maybe yours or mine, or Fortune 100 from tired nations and economies. And that change is impactful to the degree of being permanent. And how impactful? Well, people smarter than me have done the analysis, and done these projections. This is the head of Cisco back in 2015. It says such a big change, that if companies don't adapt, 40% will die in the next 10 years. And he said this in 2015, so we're going on 3 years ago. The clock is ticking. So we know that it's a big deal, and it's going to affect us. How? Well, going a little further with creating a common ground definition so we can discuss the how, I'm going to propose this as a unifying definition for at least the next 30 minutes. Another speaker might disagree with me. That's cool. But for today, for right now, I propose the digital transformation is a process through which you differentiate your company using digital technologies to gain competitive advantage. I see some people nodding. So we agree so far. Let's unpack it a little bit and see if we all still agree. I read a marketing book like once, and it was called Differentiate or Die. It was a pretty good book, and it basically said that the whole point of differentiation is to gain competitive advantage. I see more nodding so I think we're all still on the same page. We can agree that that part of the definition is sound. So let's expand a little further. Some of you that have worked with me, some of you are clients in the room have heard me say that digitization by itself is not transformative. And in that I'm talking about companies that deploy tools, we install new software or we install new tools, and we think that leads to transformation. But it doesn't. We digitized, we're going paperless, we're going electronic, that's great. But without addressing more than the products and services, and the process inside the company, without addressing your people and your culture, you won't achieve transformation. So I propose that we define for today your organization or your business as the sum of product, services, and people or culture. All right, more nods, good good. So last, and this may be the most contentious. I propose that we define digital as software. And there's probably some hardware people in the room, but I'm a software guy, so I'm naturally bias. And I feel hardware is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. The iron in the servers themselves are getting virtualized. They're software-defined. Networks are software-defined. The sensors in the hardware we depend upon are also becoming commoditized. It's easier and cheaper to get those and procure those. So everyone has the same hardware. What differentiates you then is the software that drives the hardware. How do you use the hardware? And those are often software-driven. So, I'm a software guy, but I like to define digital as software. So that really means that the sum of our definition, at least for the next 25 minutes, is that digital transformation is to differentiate your company using software for competitive advantage. Nodding? Everyone's still there? All right! Good, so today I'm going to cover three facets of digital transformation. There are a lot. There's a lot of different ways. We've already talked about some of those. It depends on who you ask. So, I'm just going to try to talk three in 25 minutes. But as I do that, I would love if you guys could ask yourselves three questions. First of all, as you learn about one of these facets, something might strike you. And you might, you know, might start to realize am I a disruptor or am I being disrupted? Part of what I want to achieve today is expand your peripheral vision. Make it more likely that you're the disruptor than the disrupted. Likewise, you may see inside your own book of business, your own relationships, your own clients, that there are new opportunities there, potential customers, potential partners, and maybe potential competitive threats. And then, lastly, I'm hoping that something in the next 25 minutes, or hour really, gets you inspired, gets you passionate. If anything, just a little bit of my passion kind of wears off on you, because what we're talking about is transformation. Transformation is change. Change is hard. And it consumes a lot of energy. A great source of energy is that inspiration and passion. So try to make note of those things so we can tap into it later. So three facets, three questions, we'll just jump in. Number one: your customers are evolving. And just a general disclaimer, I'm going to use embarrassing photos of my kids forever. 20s, 30s, I don't care. I'm going to do it as long as they let me. Once upon a time, in marketing, this was the general communications model. It was one to many. You think about broadcast media, print, outdoor advertising. You've got one message as the advertiser, and you are distributing it to everyone without real distinction of who gets it, when they get it, et cetera. It's a one to many broadcast. Now, the internet, we achieve something new. One to one communication. And those in marketing, particularly those in digital marketing, we kind of heralded this as this was like nirvana, right? This was the holy grail of marketing communications. And we thought that was fantastic. We could deliver an email message in a timely way with a personalized message. And it was all under our control. And even get the analytics back on how they responded. But then something happened. Our customers, our prospects, they went and changed. So, there's a study done by Microsoft in 2015 that said in the year 2000, our attention span was 12 seconds. But by the year 2013, that attention span had dropped to 8 seconds, which that's bad enough. You're talking about a 30%+ drop in attention span. But worst that that, in that time, sonny, you got passed by a goldfish. Nine seconds attention span for the goldfish, but eight seconds for us. What was happening? We were distracted by all these other things. Everyone was up taking selfies, you know actually, that reminds me, everybody smile. Okay, we're good. Ah yeah! All right, I'm going to tweet this later. You can follow me, tag yourself, that sort of thing, and maybe my kids might even tweet it out. And if you don't believe me, this is what digital natives look like. This is when they were two years old. Technology is a natural extension of their behavior, extension of what they're used to. Each of them have their table and could use it proficiently at age two. Before they could even talk, they were using touchscreen computing. So, what do we do? Well, it's not really one to one anymore, nor is it really one to many even though it looks similar to one to many. What is really is is what I call one to network. One to network has its pros and cons. But if we look at the opportunity that one to network represents, it's pretty profound. We have more channels by which we can engage, interact, with our customer or employee or prospect than ever before. We have more context and insights, their likes and dislikes, on them than ever before. So we can personalize and individualize that message in an unprecedented way. And to just top it all off, they actually want to share their experience working with us for free with all of their peers. So they want to do the distribution for us for free. Now, that sounds great, but how do you do it? Well, lets talk about one example. Who here likes McDonald's all day breakfast? Oh yeah, I've got the app installed on my phone, and I'm a big fan of the Egg McMuffin. So, not the only one. In fact, there were a lot of people like myself, that were once upon a time tweeting about how we couldn't get an Egg McMuffin after 10 AM, right? McDonald's heard that and thought okay, what if we consider all day breakfast? Their analysts said that could produce a little bump in sales. 2.5% in an otherwise kind of flack or declining market. But if we look at just the US alone, McDonald's is already the biggest consumer of eggs in the country. A little over 2 billion eggs per year bought by McDonald's in the US. So you start talking about rolling out all day breakfast, there could be some ramifications there, like in your supply chain. So if you're going to do it and you're going to have a 2.5% lift, which for an $8.5 billion company is just under a $.25 billion, you've got to win. So they went back to their base. Those same social media users that were asking for all day breakfast, and they engaged with a small army of people, and a library of assets, photos, videos, highly shareable content. And sent 88,000 individual tweets saying hey, you tweeted that you wanted this, we heard you, here it is, tell your friends. And the result was a 5.7% lift in sales. That's over a $.5 billion if you were to stretch it out annually. Far exceeding their expectations. That was just a quarterly bump. You see, change like this is really hard. This was innovative for them, but innovation is really hard. Which brings us to our second point. Why is innovation hard? A lot of questions I got when the triplets were born was how the heck do he get them around? This monster. It was awesome! It was as big as a small car. It felt like a go kart. In fact, it even had working steering, had four wheel independent suspension, like I really wanted to convert this into a cart or into a bob sled kind of thing after we were done. But it was a great example of innovation for a very niche problem. Yeah? <v ->I'm sorry.</v> How did you get that in your car? <v ->No, cars weren't an option.</v> We went minivans. We were a two minivan family now, so my man card was surrendered as I got the keys to the minivan, but now I actually like it. So innovation. It has been a challenge for a long time. People smarter than me struggle with this idea, why do we struggle thinking about how to solve our problems? Part of it is using the same thing that created those problems. In the corporate world where I do most of my work, this is kind of the thing that I see. I'm an ex-engineer so I've been on those teams and I've been in that environment where you have a great idea, and your peers, your colleagues, are like okay, yeah, good luck. I decided to do some research, and you know research to me is part Google Search, part peer review. But I came up with some images. I asked people how is innovation described inside your company? And you see images like this. Each steps being a gate, your idea has to pass through that gate before it can proceed. So how many ideas make it all the way through? Because if they don't, they're dead and will never be heard of again. And this is one of the simpler ones. I've seen plenty of flow charts. I got sent this one. This one describes just how to fund an innovation. It doesn't even touch on the production, deployment, communication and adoption. I was sent this one. I tried to understand what was going on here. I still have no idea what you're supposed to do with this and how you're supposed to navigate this process. The point is, we make innovation really hard in business. And it doesn't have to be that way. So, I want to take us through a little exercise, just really quickly, of essentially a sample project, a fictional project, but one that, you know, is fairly relevant. Oftentimes we get asked to move stuff from point A to point B. It doesn't matter if it's physical items and inventory or if it's bits of data. So, traditional approach is we create an architect, a plan. I'm an engineer, so my clip art skills are only matched by my Cad skills. And that is our plan to move stuff from point A to point B. We start out, we have the team assembled, we hit our first milestone and we deliver something to the customer. We have created the wheel. And we are proud of ourselves, because technically speaking, that was quite an achievement. The customer, on the other hand, external or internal, doesn't think so. It hasn't really helped them, has it. We say okay, that's fine, bare with us. The next milestone is going to blow you away. Because in the next milestone, we have figured out how to automate that process and make more wheels. That still doesn't help them move those things from point A to point B. And so we keep going. Eventually we motorize the platform, partly. You see, we've got something that is partially complete, but wholly unusable. And here we are 75% of the way through the project, and the customer hasn't really seen any benefit yet. And this is where a lot of projects die. I've been on those teams. Funding gets pulled. Someone says, all right, I'm not seeing value. I've got to spend this money somewhere else. If we make it through, if we survive that, we've got a great internal or external customer, they're very patient, we can deliver on that vision we created maybe 12 or 18 months ago, right? But it doesn't have to be that way. Borrow it from that software world once again, we start applying what we call agile principles. Now, I'm not an agilist, but it kind of goes like this. Let's experiment. Let's prototype something really fast. Let's just throw some wheels or some castors onto a pallet and see if that helps. No, it doesn't really help, okay, let's motorize it. Now, let's iterate. Let's learn very quickly how we can please our customer, how we can improve our design. Ultimately, not only do we provide value more quickly to the customer and cheaply, we also may wind up with a superior product in the end. Now, some of you clapped when I said agile and such, and there are 1001 agile philosophers out there. And systems and things that you can adopt. I'm not here for that. I'm going to try to boil it down to four principles. Think big, act small, fail cheap, because in business terms, failing fast really means failing cheap, right? And learn fast. And that's the most important one. I don't want to under-emphasize that. Learning fast is the most important benefit and reason to embrace an agile mindset. And again, people smarted than me have figured this out. Here's the CIO for InterContinental Hotels Group. He said it very simply, "It's no longer the big beating the small, "but the fast beating the slow." <v ->So we're gonna take a jump now into this third concept,</v> and this one is a little bit more technical. This is where I satisfy a bit of my internal geek, and hopefully some of you guys out there as well that are CIS admins or network or technical people. It's the notion of everything being connected, and clearly everything being connected does not always please or create a great experience. In fact, I'm a big smart home guy. I've got sensors all over the place, everything's automated, when I go to bed, when I get up, when kids start moving around. I have not yet achieved this. I wish I had that machine, that would be awesome in the mornings. They just started kindergarten and it's chaos. I have, however, seen this. We have to wait for our fridge to upgrade Windows so I can switch from crushed to cubed ice. (chuckle) Yeah, so it's slow going at times. Actually, I lied, this is not my fridge 'cause if it were my fridge, I'd probably burn the house down and start over. But the point is, we have everything being connected now. Things you don't expect, like fridges and toasters and vacuum cleaners. There's a 1000 and one studies like this, just like there are agile philosophers. I picked this one because the methodology was fairly sound, and they produced a number for 2017. 20 billion connected devices by the end of this year. So to put that into perspective, the population of Earth is 7.5 billion, so that's like two and a half devices per every man, woman, and child on Earth, and this number is growing faster than the population. That creates some problems. In one of my other talks, I talk about how the Internet itself is a legacy system. A part of that is what's called "Internet Protocol," or IP. Some of you heard about IP numbers and maybe the move to IPv6. So if you're not familiar with IP, it's kind of like your phone number. If I call your phone number, your phone will ring, not his phone or her phone, and the entire network knows that that phone is yours and it belongs to you. So it's how we identify devices across the net. Currently, IPv4, it's a 32 bit number, so if you work out the math of all the combinations, two to the 32nd power, you've got roughly 4.3 billion possible combinations. That's the unique number of numbers that you would use to identify a device, and that's way less than the 20 billion devices we're gonna have, right? So we're gonna ignore there's internal and external networks and other nuance, but everyone saw this is going to be a problem, and it has become a problem. So we're moving to IPv6. It's a 128 bits, so in fact it's so much bigger than the current 32 bits, that the powers that be actually decided, "Hey, let's split it in two. "Let's take the first 64 bits and call it a network number, "and another 64 bits can be assigned inside that network." So if you think about just the half of it, 64 bits, 64 bits or two to the 64th, that's not two to the 32nd doubled, that's two to the 32nd squared. The entire Internet right now is 32 bits. This 64 bits represents the Internet squared, and that's the number of networks that can be assigned and identified out there. How many is that? What is two to the 64th? Well, it's that. Does anyone wanna take a crack at saying that? (chuckle) It's 18 quintillion, 446 quadrillion, 744 trillion, 73 billion, 709 million, 551 thousand, 616. And that is the second half, also, of that IPv6 number. That means, that's the number of smart bulbs I can have in my house. Pretty cool, huh? We see it gets complicated because from a business perspective, that's also not just light bulbs. That could be sensors out there on the floor, it could be out in the customer's world. It could be my employees' devices that I need to manage and secure and patch and update, and it's not just 18 and a half quintillion devices, it's actually 18 and a half quintillion networks of 18 and a half quintillion devices each. That's a lot, that's a lot. I've talked to IT managers and groups that service security, and their reaction is like, "No, make it stop! "Do not do this." But that's the magnitude that I want us to understand of the change that's coming. When we say everything is connected, we're preparing for 18 and a half quintillion networks of 18 and a half quintillion devices each. So, a little recap. What have we decided upon or arrived at together today? First, digital transformation is essentially the process of differentiating your company, using software, to get strategic advantage. We all agreed on that. Hopefully, you jotted down some notes, I've seen some of you are writing down things or nodding, so you know what, these are some competitors, some opportunities that we see here. Here's where I could be disrupted, where I see threat. Here's where we could be the destructor. And hopefully it tapped into a little bit of inspiration. You might even be a little bit scared. That's okay. How do you tackle this? Well, you tackle it one bite at a time, alright? What does that mean? Well, for the three facets we discussed today, it was focus on your customers. They're evolving, yes. We think about when to network and we focus on our customer that can help us identify where we need to innovate, where we need to preserve that customer experience, where we need to meet new expectations. Secondly, learn fast. As much as anyone tells you about agile, it all boils down to taking small bets instead of big bets, and learning as fast as you can. He who learns faster than his competition will gain strategic advantage. Third, you're already doing it by just showing up here today. You're connecting with each other, with peers, and experts in the business. The reality is digital transformation is new to everyone. Everyday we see companies that are showing new breakthroughs in their industry, and really innovating in a new way. So that means connecting and communicating internally is one of the greatest things you can do, maybe even in what's inside your own organization. You do those things, and you will transform your business, your thinking, your bottom line. Those are the keys. So before we leave, I wanted to introduce one new thing, and this is something that if you were in one of our last seminars they didn't really get. There is something called Pearson's Law, some of you may know it. It's basically summed up and often quoted and misquoted as, "That which is measured improves," and there's sometimes an addendum that says, "That which is measured and reported regularly "improves exponentially." But how do you measure digital transformation? So my company and Tizbi are gracious sponsors today, actually joined up and said, "How do we tackle this problem? How do we answer that?" We created a meter. We took all of those metrics and facets of digital transformation, boiled them down into some simple questions. So you're able to say, "Okay, these are the top five facets "that are important to my organization." And then in five minutes, get a read of, "Okay, if I'm doing this, I'm doing well. "If I'm not doing these things, then I have some room "to grow in opportunity," and you'll get a score based on that, and that can be your baseline. I encourage you to do that and even send it to other members of your leadership team, CIO, CTO, etc. and compare notes because where you feel you stack up may vary across the organization. So take that first minute, it takes five minutes, and it'll show where in those four stages of transformation, cognition, utilization, digitization, and then ultimately transformation, your organization may be. And I am out of time, this is my contact info, and I'll be here later. I would love to talk to you and answer your questions. Thanks guys. (clapping) <v ->Good afternoon digital transformation skeptics.</v> (audience chuckles) Not too many people respond, okay, try again. Good afternoon digital transformation supporters. (audience cheers) I am Sasha Birger. I am COO of Tizbi for the last 18 years. We are a custom software development company. We are based in the Triangle, we call ourselves enabler of DX for local, national, international customers. That's my story, I stick to it. 75 highly skilled engineers. We have tightly controlled processes, quality and budget. 20 years of success tracking record, and hundreds of case studies in the Triangle. Every customer is a reference, and I am witnessing some of my customers here in the room. Thank you Greg for coming and Dan and John. So I gonna key on what Mike just has said, right? And my laptop which I was hoping to use for slides is still in I think it was the same it was used for your refrigerator, right? So I am glad I have Volga who has a copy of the Power Point. So DX opportunity that's what I kind of want to switch from DX to DX opportunity. What I'm talking about is for somebody, DX may be pie in the sky, for us it's very much right here, right now here in North Carolina, here in this room. And it's happening, and we believe in this that is why we are so patient with this, that is why we are getting this seminar together with a couple of our partners. I want to define what we in Tizbi define, it's our definition of DX opportunity. Driven by the customers, not a gradual improvement of old processes, introduces qualitive changes, provides new competitive edge, and last but not least, profitable for business. That not always works right away, but if it's the right DX, it does. What I gonna do today is a little unusual. I'm doing it for the first time so excuse me if something goes wrong here. I picked seven of our customers, most of them are local, a couple of out of state, and I gonna, with a 10,000 foot and as fast as I can talk without choking, I gonna show seven DX key studies in my time. Start with The Mailbox. It's a fifty year old teacher's magazine. It's a print publication based out of Greensboro. Started at '79 by two educators who were frustrated with the lack of print materials, good materials for the classroom. So they picked up the magazine, started printing it, it got quickly elementary school teacher subscription growing. Very inexpensive because K through 12 audience But hundred of thousands of subscribers, good content. When we joined them, Tizbi and The Mailbox started working together, Kimberly and Kate were our champions here in Greensboro. And DX opportunity rewind to the previous slide, survival or extension really for the printed publication. Subscriptions were not doing so great. Every printing edition is kind of in trouble in the whole world right now, right? But in addition to that, early online version of the magazine not so flexible, falling below the expectations and clumsy, and unfortunately a lot of budgets of the company which is already kind of challenged were tied into the licensing and support of legacy data systems. On the positive side, great content, still loyal readers, and still fantastic creative team as well as management team was wonderful. So what happened, we worked together. So we are now a fully featured online media publication with full interactive support for multiple features, printed packages, quizzes, flash cards, more, browsable content, searchable content, customizable content, and the most important money maker for the magazine is gold subscription. Gold subscriptions are growing, and creating a growing stream of revenue for declining print subscriptions. So I would call it DX accomplished. This is a number which we plotted. It shows number of users, see this, impressive, right? Well don't get too excited. The gold subscription cost $29 a year. It's teachers, right? Okay, still a lot of numbers. Not 18 quintillion but, it would be nice. Straight to the next one. The Produce Box. Local farm to table company. Courtney Tellefsen used to be stay at home mom with two small children, she's really DX champion. She organized the local moms in the subdivision with mini vans, and she built a relationship with them as well as couple of farms, and started delivering the food in the boxes. These are the questions, here is opportunity defined. It speaks for itself, I don't think I need to speak more. Where is my food coming from? Am I supporting local farmers? And this is what we have right now. It's a digital subscription system. Still boxes in the mini vans, but the number of clients, 70 farms supported, 90 artisan food stores, from one to 200 moms and dads. Triangle, Wilmington, Fayetteville and the Triad, and I think the number of user subscriptions last time we checked was around 11,000 in these areas. Quite big of the business. This is very well known name but ZT extension if you don't know it, it's for non-credit. It's part of NCSU but it's teaching the textiles to not, the official daytime students of NCSU, that's what other departments are doing right? Our champion is Jon Rust, Dr Rust. Here is a DX opportunity. ZT has already owned fantastic digital content over the textile composite materials. They have phenomenal digital classes already done. But these classes were not so much used, especially not used in the form of credit. And another part is they had relationship with foreign universities and built a bunch of relationships with the business. Companies are coming to them for knowledge on textiles. And this is phenomenal source of knowledge. Textiles, ZT they have amazing content. So the qualitative, the new idea, like a jump which I call a DX two, lease existing digital content to an other organization. That other organization may be a university of Istanbul, university in Brazil, or a company or maybe Ivy League university here in the States. Lease for a number of students, there are some examples. This is how the content looks, some snapshots. And we created together, with Dr Rust, a registration system and the content leasing system in a matter of seconds, you can register a university or a company, define the semesters or duration, define the number of students, how many students per semester, and there is a price, metrics driving over the financial part. So price is defined by ZT. We create a new stream of revenue for the ZT, for the textile university, and you can see how this content looks for the final consumer, for say student of the Portuguese university. Fun fact, government of the Ecuador came to them and leased the content. It's a governmental-- These are the metrics here, right? I'm gonna switch to static. 33 universities, 47, that's the last time we checked this year. Total number of users, 1,794. Number of use, 28,000 so far. Is it a DX, guys or not? Leasing the content out, right? <v ->Let's jump to a totally different industry, insurance.</v> Have you heard about that? DSS is out of state. Our client, where is her picture? Miss Dorna, Dorna Brown. So for those of you guys who don't know what is OCIP, don't be scared. Owner Controlled Insurance program, or wrap-up program coordinated insurance program for construction projects. It's when the building official insurance policy is used to cover a contractor for a short period of time, so they don't have to buy their own policy. That's called wrap-up insurance, quite creative and quite interesting. So what Dorna and DSS is working on is wrap-up administration, third-party peer review services, risk assessment services, and a bunch of other things. And she's really an expert and her team is an expert, so. Opportunity. In 2004, well some people call it a program. Dorna, she reads that commercial insurance industry research indicated the lack of quality, dependable, responsible, responsive, and integrated services. So there was a problem. So she thought, her team put their minds together. Now you see OCIP online in the workflow, digital, streamlined. This is OCIP (mumbles). There are separate projects under the contract. And there is a thing called third-party peer review, which makes a lot of risk to go down. But online it's giving information from the field to the headquarters, in the framework of the contract, fast and precise. So it's all streamlined, and they're really cooking with grease, a lot of contracts done every day. If something goes wrong, we immediately get a call. That's how we know. The call, it doesn't take 10 minutes before they call us. So these are the metrics. I wanna just kind of key on this number. Number of trades, close to 7,000. We worked for them for just probably five years old, right, something like that. So. And let's jump to K through 12. Everybody's a parent or somebody has a nephew, no money, right? School system is really poor. RTI's response to interventions. Interventions is a formal process that's in the K through 12 system when the children are falling behind. If they fall behind they will call intervention, they will put a meeting together. There is a meeting committee and a bunch of paperwork, and this paperwork is a bunch of paper, not online. They started using online systems and it made it worse because everybody's using different online systems and the world is really, it's like a spider, it's getting all over the place. So Brie, out of Charlotte, Brie Binnie, she is insider of the system and she came up with the idea how to make it consistent. Guys, this is not Glaxo, this is not IBM, this is K through 12 system. Big achievement is all documents are here in the time of the meeting, they are together, they are not lost. It's a huge deal, and meeting online is supported at the physical meeting, right, the other way. That system is quickly growing. It hasn't been yet two years but we have 15 school districts sold, 65 schools, 3,000 users influencing about 33, 34,000 students, and last year we had 25,000 views defined as usage of the document. And we are proud to have Ray in our room today, Ray Williams, we'll switch to music licensing industry. Ray, a few years ago Ray gave an advertisement in the London newspaper, and a very unknown person called Elton John walked into his room. They worked together since then. Ray managed Elton for awhile, through the first five albums and introduced Elton to Bernie Taupin, who became his lyrics writer. So Ray is now local customer, local partner, and Crumbs Music Media is the company where we are proud to be a provider of technology. And Crumbs Music Media is by far the easiest and the most cost-effective way to bring the hottest pre-licensed music to your media content. It is one-stop shop for all your music needs where you can search, listen, browse, and download. And it's tailored to musicians and to filmmakers and to many other consumers of the pre-cleared licensed music. This is Crumbs' music portal today. (techno music) You can find by genre, you can find music by genre, by mood, by many other parameters. There is a library of videos, and you can use Ray's invention called Assessor to try on music to the footage. You see Assessor right here. This is like a fitting room for the music. Isn't this a qualitatively new change to the licensing of the music? So we have approximate numbers. Number of tracks from musicians that's pre-cleared, authentic 5,000 tracks, and quickly growing. And my last case-study for today is Callaway Golf. We were fortunate to work with Callaway for a period of time. It's a golf company, all of you probably heard about this. The idea is here the club fitters. A golf club is a really sophisticated piece of equipment today, and it requires a fitters. Fitter is, practically, you can find a Callaway fitter in every pro shop in every golf club today. So the problem is all the opportunity. Matt Heneline was our champion on site. They're out of California. They would be flying 6,000 people every year to California for face-to-face training and that was worth the ticket for them. But we worked together on a video portal of the training system, training and certification for fitters. And this is how the system would look like. There are multiple chapters, on iron fitting and driver fitting and putter fitting. There is a quiz after each video and there is a final exam, and if you fail the final exam you can do it but only once. If you fail twice the system will make you start from the very beginning. And it's pretty tough. So number of views was 9,800. Unfortunately Callaway switched to another system right now but we worked together for a number of months, and the company reported for each certified fitter 14% market share increase in the given store, so a lot of money, a lot of tickets, a lot of views. I'm gonna wrap up right now and say what is industry going through DX next? Is it your industry? Are you ready? Is there any business or industry which is safe, exempt from DX? I know Microsoft is exempt, they're gonna always have Office but anybody else? And are you playing defense or offense? That's, I stole that from Mike. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) (audience applauding) <v ->Okay, so my topic is Managing Developers</v> For the Non-Developer. So my goal is to give insight. I'm gonna start off with a confession that I'm a geek. From Lord of the Rings, to comic books, to software development. That's what I've done my whole life. And I tell you that for two reasons. One is public speaking goes against my introverted nature. So if I stumble through things or mess up, bear with me, I will get through it. The other part is that I'm gonna be stereotyping software developers. Now certainly I know we're not all stereotyped. But when I do that I want you all to know that I am referring to myself and I fall into all these categories that I'm about to talk about. So the session goal is to give insight into software developers. How we think and how we behave and our general ideas. So I feel like if I could do that it'll maximize productivity and keep projects on track. Generally speaking I've been involved in a lot of projects. And I've come into a lot of what I call rescue projects. And it is rare, I mean exceptionally rare that I've come in and it's just not been a quality people and so they're failing because of a lack of skills or a lack of talent. Like I say, it's very rare. It's almost always about communication. In my opinion if you look at all the software development life cycle methodologies from Waterfall to Agile what they really are is just an attempt to communicate. An attempt to pass information from A to B to C and back around again. So let me move into software developers and our general traits. Generally speaking we're people-pleasers. As a whole that's what we are, that's how we think. We're non-confrontational, speaker relatively excluded and we're pretty intelligent. And you're looking at this list and you goin' wow, that makes for a great employee. But here's part of the problem. It actually works to our detriment. So I'm in a project, I'm in my sprint and I'm programming and I've got my priorities and I'm sticking to 'em. I'm in the coffee room and a product person comes up and says, you know, I was talkin' to a client the other day and they said how cool it would be if the map was actually in 3D. So these traits kick in. First, I'm a people pleaser, so what I'm wanna do is I wanna make that product person happy. I wanna make the clients happy. And the truth is I also like getting the attention. So I may abandon everything I'm doin' to go work on that. My intelligence kicks in, goes wow, that's a really cool idea. I think I can make that happen. So If you've been around you know the cycle. At this point I'm diverted, I'm tryin' to split time, I'm running behind. I stay up all night trying to catch up and now problems start occurring. So why is relating to developers so hard? So the first thing I'm gonna do that makes this a little different than the other groups that you would deal with in this process is software development is a mystery. So if I go if a CEO is talkin' to a salesperson, the salesperson can say, well, I'm struggling because well, this is in jeopardy because a board member is actually works for a company that's opposing us. That's a digestible. We understand what a salesperson does when he goes in, not taking away. It's a very difficult thing to do and getting a signature of money is very hard. So I'm not saying it's not hard, it is. But the languages are very close to what we would typically speak to each other. It's not true with software developers. You know, we can talk about APIs, you know, everything we do is acronyms. They really don't make much sense. And we have a very difficult time explaining it in a way that does make sense to the layperson. And I'm not sure we even try that hard, frequently. Time estimates also don't make sense because of that. Because it is a mystery. You look over somebody's shoulder as they're working you see words, you see Word documents, PowerPoints. You may not understand everything in it, but you get it, it's not a mystery. You look over a shoulder of a software developer, you see code, HTML, you see databases or flippin' through screens. It just doesn't make any sense. And it comes down to time estimates. Because of that it doesn't make sense when we say something may take a day it may not seem like to change a label should take a long time. Other things seem hard when they really aren't. So this cartoon illustrates this. So you have the first person on the left who's a product or a founder saying you know, when a user takes a photo I want to know if they're in a national park. And the programmer goes, pff that's no problem. I'll just check the location. Give me a couple hours, that'll be done. And to a human they're goin' wow, that's incredible, right? He goes oh, by the way, check to see if there's a bird in the photo. And the coder says yeah, I'll need a research team and five years. It flies in the face of, it illustrates the difference between how a developer sees the world through a computer and how everybody else sees the world through human interaction. For a person to go bird nope, bird yes, nope, yes, no, it's nothing. But we all know from a computer it's a completely different thing. Misconception about software development. I think this is key to understand. When we give estimates there's no, zero mechanism for us to say if we can do two widgets in an hour, right? So eight hours we can do 60 widgets so we can plan our project. It doesn't exist. It's all we're guessing. And we're doing our best to guess and the more experience we have, the more educated that guess is, but we're guessing. It's closer to creating art. Where if you ask an artist or sculptor to create a sculpture they're not gonna say, well, that's gonna take me five days, you know, three weeks, five days, 200 hours. They're gonna say, ah, three of four weeks, depending on how things go. I could run into some problems. Software development's very much like that. But it's all a big guess. And I think from a software development perspective it's you know, I find that people forget that's it all a big guess. It starts with the CEO. The CEO says what's the future gonna be? What's the vision, right? They're guessing. They're doin' their best to figure out where they want to be in one, five, 10, 20 years. They go to sales, they go sales, here's what I'm thinkin'. Go check around. The sales come back goes, you know, that's resonating. I think we can add five million to the bottom line, right? And then turn to the product team and then product says you all go out and talk to people, find out what they think they want. You know, develop your specs, your functional, your product specs. They turn it to development and say now what do you think? And they say we think it's gonna take three FTEs nine months. It's all a big guess. But it's all the best information we have. So I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's the reality. And so what I'm preaching is the reality of software development is that you're guessing all along the line and all along the lines that circle is gonna change before that product walks out the door. So what I find people do is they get locked in on somethin' they cement on plan or an idea versus very much reacting to things as they come around, as things change. As wire frames are created and handed product they go back out. Well the users see that and go, ah, no, that's not really what we meant, that's gotta be changed. So embrace the change, it's inevitable. There will be issues, there will be delays, things out of our control even within our control. It's a given. The next one's a big one. Now I'm gonna go back to the slide that I had previously where I talked about us being people pleasers and non-confrontational. For you to be successful in dealing with change what you need is information. And from most, the other areas, it's a little easier. They're a little more adept at saying here's where I'm short, here's where I went wrong, here's what's missing, or here's a problem. Developers, because of our nature, exactly the opposite. Those aren't things we share. Our intelligence, we don't want to admit we don't know or we don't want to admit we're behind. So the challenge is to create an environment where we will come back and say you know, we're running behind. The difference is having that at the end of the project you have no choices, right? So if you're towards the end of a project and you're running out of time then you can't go back and make other choices. You can't say well what features we want to take out or can we add resources, or all the things that you would do, you'd fix if you found out early in the cycle. So you need that information to be successful. At this point it almost sounds like I'm saying that because it's a guess you just kind of free flow and go whatever happens happens. Well, it's really the opposite. I still do project plans, still do Agile, the Sprints. All that's important. Set goals, set targets and march to them. What I'm saying is make accountability about honesty. So what you want is as soon in the process as you can find out where something's going wrong. If development's behind create an environment where they can come back and go you know what? We underestimated this. It's two times longer than we thought. And then figure out what you can do. Put it up front. But if we get beat up on it, like anybody else, because it's already a challenge for us, then the more we get beat up the less we're come to you. The less we're gonna talk about it and the worse things are gonna get. It's just gonna snowball from there. Things that I find people do to try and compensate for all these issues in tryin' to deal with us as developers is they try and outguess the team. I would advise against it. A, the developers are gonna figure it out and then they'll just kinda revise their next guesses. So trust in your team and then go from there. Trust your team, get them to tell you what they really think. What I always do is say well, what do you really think? And they'll say I think it's gonna be three weeks and I'll go well, what's the risk in that? What are the risks that are a higher load? Then I may assign a risk factor to it. Don't set artificial dates. Common thing I see would be product has a feature list. You know they have 10 features that they need, that they would like done. And then they say, well we have to have these done by December 1st. And development's goin, we tell you it's gonna take to February 1st and they're goin' well I don't care, I have to have it by December 1st. We're gonna go okay, we'll give it our shot, you know? But it's not gonna do well. It's not gonna end up. Anybody that's been around knows this outcome and it's not very good. But we're not confrontational, we're not gonna get in your face. We're gonna say no way, it's not gonna happen. That's not our personalities. We'll just go away and go we'll try. Then we'll walk away go, there's no way. No way this is happening, alright? That's exactly what we'll do. The other thing they do, people do is try to dig into technology because it's a mystery. Because people don't understand what we do sometimes. I see product managers wanting to study the data base because they may not believe what developer's saying to them or learn HTML so they can talk head-to-head. You're never gonna do that. They do it for a living. They've done it all their lives. No matter how hard you work at it, unless you give everything up and do it for a living they're always gonna be able to out-talk you. And also in a negative way, simply, it's innate. So you're never gonna know enough to be on their level to have that discussion. So again this is a trust issue, it's a trust in your team very much similar to a CEO with a salesperson. They'll follow the salesperson in every office they go to. They trust what's in their office. They're doin' the right thing. Because of what we do I find people don't understand it so when we don't understand somethin' we fill up full of mistrust. It's just a natural human thing that we do. The other thing I find people do is because of our personalities we tend to stay in the back, we're introverted. They confuse that with a lack of interest. When it's really not the case. We're want to know everything. That's what we do. So what I find people do is they don't spend enough time with the developers, with the technology team. What's going on in the company. So for example you have initiative, you're 60% in and business close a huge deal, right? So what developers may hear is abandon all that, here's something new we're gonna do. Without the rest of the information, to us it would sound like well, they didn't know what they were doin' and they made a mistake. So now we gotta quit everything we just did. All the work goes away for what, right? So the solution to this is to include the developer. So I start off with my development meetings, because my role is generally bridging business with development. I start off all of my development meetings with here's what's going on in business. Here's what we're doing, sales are good, sales are bad. So when they see things filter down to them they understand why. And that's important to know why is that being abandoned, why has this changed? What changed that now we have to change our stuff? And it's a two-way street. So tonight, or today, I've talked to you a lot from a development's perspective, but actually when I work with teams I reverse the whole process. I talk to developers and tell them you have a responsibility to communicate out. And here's how you do it. Here's when you say this, here's what the CEO heard. Which is not what you meant. Here's how you have to phrase it. Here's the reports you need to give. Here's how you have to communicate where we are. More importantly I explain why. Why is it important to do this? And I'll tell you all of the things to complain about, all the things we just discussed, reverse it, it would be a complaint from a developer. So all those things that when you can complain about if you did these things then you wouldn't have that to complain about. Then you would find people would be more receptive when we're wrong on our estimates. People would be more receptive when we had to make decisions because we're out of time. But whatever it would be, I find in general that because of these mysteries, because of development, we are who we are. And we can be difficult to work with for all the reasons I've said before. That it almost becomes, I don't want to adversarial, but it does. So if something's going wrong, all of a sudden development code or something that product gave to them. And there's a miscon. It was, it starts the finger-pointing. And one of the things I do, I spend a lot of time on this goin' group to group is understanding it's all the same team. It's all the same goals. And all those are guesses and we're all making mistakes the whole time. The deal is putting them on the table very early. And for development it's an extra challenge. That's why I'm pointing these things out. It's an extra challenge to get that information. Okay, so I think they're gonna take my software development card. So I think I finished on time and under budget, so. (audience applauding) <v Woman>That's good.</v> <v ->Okay, so that sums up the theme for today.</v> I want to thank our sponsors, Global Digital, and CTO Outsourcing and NCTA for puttin' this together and helpin' Tizbi out. My name's Jim Turner, I'm the CEO of Tizbi. And obviously if you want to ask questions or would like to know more information about the DX journey feel free to contact us and let us know what your situation is and see if we can help. And again Mike and Ron and Sasha will stay here for a few minutes after this is wrappin' up. If there's more tea left I don't know but we can get more tea for your cannoli and dessert, but so we've got about 20 minutes, 30 minutes and I want to thank everybody else for comin' and enjoy the session today. Thank you. (audience applauding)