Digital Transformation Use Cases – DZone DevOps

The customer panel, “Masters of the Modern Software Factory: Driving Results” at CA World provided four great use cases on companies and government making the digital transformation in a short period of time.

Daniel Tadeu Martinez Castello Branco, Technical Director for PRODAM, the state company owned by the municipal government of São Paulo, Brazil, which is in charge of all computer infrastructure and data processing tasks in the city, combined 47 disparate legacy systems in Amazonas. Amazonas is the largest state in Brazil about three times the size of the state of Texas, with four million people – two million in the capital city and the other two million in the rainforest. Seventy percent of the GDP is based on the technology and mobile phone industry. Daniel and his team put “Amazonas in the palm of your hand.” Doing so made a huge cultural transformation in the society for citizens and in the government. PRODAM is now providing the government-as-a-service platform that handles 5,000 requisitions per second for the school system, empowers all of the citizens of Amazonas while reducing the cost to the government. For every dollar spent on IT, the operational cost of the government is reduced by $3 since physical offices are no longer needed to serve the citizens. The money saved can be used to preserve the rainforests and promote the economic development of the state.

Mo Ahddoud, Chief Information Security Officer at SGN (Scotia Gas Networks) the largest gas distribution company in the UK and a regulated business serving 5.9 million homes and businesses shared how the company needed to simplify and manage multiple legacy systems and administrative accounts to facilitate migration to the cloud, improve efficiency and reduce costs. SGN made organizational changes to their operating model to adopt the new technologies. With the transition, the company was able to: 1) create smart metering as a new business unit; 2) use drones to inspect difficult to reach pipes; and, 3) use robots to inspect and repair pipes. Using CA’s Privileged Access Management tools, the company was able to prioritize risks to protect against and have the necessary tools to identify and respond to threats.

Matt Harman, Head of Enterprise PMO at Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and information company, leads a team of 10,000 with 1,500 project managers. He and his team had no insights and minimum data. He leads the charge for the company to implement best practices and then align stakeholders on the need to align to these best practices – a huge shift in corporate culture. The key driver was reporting as there was a need for data, insights, and the education of executives. After a six month implementation, 95% of all projects were covered in status reports. End of month reporting for 1,500 project managers has gone from 30 minutes to six minutes and the number of reports has gone from 250 to 12. The company has gotten rid of technical debt and is upgrading a major release for less than $20,000 using the latest tools.

Philip Guido, General Manager IBM Services, Infrastructure Services shared how he and his team helped the Commonwealth of Kentucky bring health and human services to market for citizens by migrating the department’s systems to the cloud.

A consistent theme from all of the speakers was in order to get business value, customers and suppliers need to work together. It’s not a single product solution. It’s pulling together the best-of-breed solutions to solve specific business problems and these solutions will vary by industry and by each business.

Q: What’s more significant: technology, security, or culture?

A: Culture eats technology; however, cultural adoption will cause stalls, as such you need management and marketing support for your change initiatives.

Q: These are huge projects, where do you start?

A: Look for a relevant service that serves the most people whether its citizens, internal or external customers. Identify the set of services with the greatest demand so you can make an immediate impact on the quality of people’s lives. Once they see the success you’ll be able to scale. Seeing business benefits brings faster adoption and then things go viral and drive cultural change. Fail fast, learn, and iterate. Have short feedback loops. You cannot wait two years, you need immediate feedback and results. As you learn, you will be able to accelerate faster. Constantly iterate and scale before you go live. Seamlessly transition from the old to the new way of doing things. See what elements fo the SaaS people are getting value from and iterate accordingly.

Q: What impact does this have on the workforce?

A: You’re taking employees to a more agile platform. You need to look for opportunities on the new platform to change what the workforce is doing. Take the opportunity to retrain and move to new departments to keep employees engaged. When we co-locate experience with innovation and knowledge we see tremendous innovation. The diversity of skills brings positive outcomes. The workforce is energized when they work together. New methodologies and context get people working together. This drives productivity and new levels of innovation.