First of all, Congratulations to Gene Kim and IT Revolution team for the launch of #IDEALCAST.
The inaugural episode titled as Digital Disruption, The Five Ideals: Peter Moore and Dr. Mik Kersten is a conversation about the five ideals from Gene’s The Unicorn Project book. The interview filled with fascinating points, discussion about the flow, DevOps, Digital Transformation, inspiring stories between Gene Kim, Mik Kersten and Peter Moore.
My first impression as a listener of podcasts on a variety of topics related to IT, Performance, DevOps & Digital Transformation, in #IDEALCAST Gene’s intro, quality of the conversation, voice over and the background title music — scores well and makes its mark. Such a pleasure to listen.
My top takeaways from this episode and some of the lines that I enjoyed listening to multiple times:
#1 Digital transformation is an oxymoron. It is not about digital transformation; it is about business transformation, which is enabled by in many cases driven by these disruptive digital technologies.
#2 As a CEO, he took over in the year 2000, the share traded at $40 a share, he stepped down in 2014, trading at $40 a share. During the CEO’s entire fourteen-year tenure, the stock never traded over forty dollars a share. How could that happen? The stocks are now trading at $186 a share today.
#3 The organisations have gotten stuck where there is no locality & no simplicity. The leadership has to understand how to get there. There is no chance or anywhere near to this ideal of “Locality & Simplicity” if you treat IT as a cost centre. The only way to align your software architecture, your team structure and your org chart — is around the customer and how your business value your customer.
#4 What is currently making for you & your team difficult achieve the desired business outcome? What we discovered quickly is that if you are in sales in your company and you want 360 degrees of the customer, you need to open five different applications. This triggered a program called “One Click One View.”
#5 The common denominator is that if you want the business outcome if you think that the technology could get that outcome, then you need to understand these people. Every CEO needs to know the Redshirt developers are the most valuable people in your Enterprise.
#6 CIO when he took over, he inherited an ERP software license, they were paying maintenance fee two million dollars a year to the vendor that given five hundred thousand dollars value. CIO went to CEO and asked for five hundred thousand dollars, and that is for paying our very best developers on their own time, over & above on top of what we pay, to build their ERP system to replace the vendor system. The team build the ERP system with 80% functionality in four-months.
Conclusion:
Thank you, Gene, Mik and Peter for the exciting & inspiring conversation with so many golden nuggets. For my friends, if you want to understand the context of these takeaways further, please tune into Gene’s #IDEALCAST, enjoy the conversation, so much to learn.
BMK 