The Big Themes:

• Keep it simple: Your projects are complex but you must be able to distill your progress into an executive summary that can be absorbed in a minute or less.
• Deliver the bad news as early as possible: Problems tend to snowball in these projects, so get them out in the open before they derail the project.
• Give ‘em the good news: Celebrate milestone successes and team members who made a difference. Showcase early impacts and user feedback.
• Do a post-mortem upon completion: Knowing that these projects never end, measure the final impacts versus the expectations of value going in.

The Big Quotes:

Mark Twain: “I was going to write you a short letter, but I didn't have time. So I wrote you a long one.”

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The Big Themes:

• Traditional on-premises databases to cloud databases: Gartner predicts that 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to the cloud by the end of next year.
• The terabyte transition: Go back 20 years ago and that was big data. Now it’s petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and yottabytes.
• Civil War times: Business intelligence has been using this since 1865. It’s still something that many businesses have not really mastered.
• Fast and furious: The Cloud Database Report can help everyone get a better sense of what’s happening across the market.

The Big Quotes:

“The cloud database report is available on Cloud Wars. There's no registration required, just go to Cloud Wars and you dig into the deep analysis that we're providing there.”

This episode is brought to by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• What does Remote 2.0 look like? As the world starts to open up what will office work look like? Many companies are announcing that they will offer remote work in perpetuity. Other companies have announced a choice between full-remote and a hybrid remote and office model.
• Commercial office leases are being severed at an astounding rate: But yet we also hear that there may be life left in the WeWork model, as companies will look to have a pared back office capability.
• The story of the COVID-19 pandemic: At some level it is a massive supply chain failure story. At the same time the story of the COVID-19 vaccines is a big data and analytics story. In both cases better use of advanced technology is the key theme.
• The automotive industry has become the electronics industry: Our data shows a remarkable increase in sourcing events for electronic components, sub-assemblies and related products and services.

The Big Quotes:

“And I think this idea of the customer experience is something that we've used a lot, but now it's becoming a North Star for many folks.”

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The Big Themes:

• Technical debt: If you write off $0.42 during a $100M bank reconciliation, I guess you created ‘financial debt,’ but so what? It’s the Enron’s of the tech debt realm that warrant attention.
• Whenever you don’t fix something: Technical Debt as a board level off-balance sheet issue is the systemic and long-term policy of neglecting your IT environment.
• Digital transformation: Just because it’s “digital” doesn’t make it transformative. Digital optimization is a good thing – it’s just not the same and distracts CEO/BoD’s.
• CEOs/Board of Directors: You need a translator to help keep the discussion flowing. Someone who can call BS on the “just ain’t so.”

The Big Quote:

“A CIO needs to be able to do all of those things. And then as their side job, keep all the tech plates spinning.”

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The Big Themes:

• Andy Jassy is now the CEO of Amazon: The force of nature that is Jeff Bezos is going to be executive chairman.
• Databricks and Snowflake are going neck-and-neck: Databricks closed a billion dollars of funding at a $28 billion valuation. That makes Snowflake look cheap!
• Oracle started the world’s greatest relational database: Oracle has spun out vertical solutions that can deliver impressive business value.
• Building a data lake or building a data swamp: The customers want to start getting business value from it, whatever it is.

The Big Quotes:

“The value proposition of the C-suite is we can take that data and change how your business runs to make it better, faster, and allow you to delight customers in new ways.”

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The Big Themes:

• Living up to the hype: Whether you’re talking about cloud applications, or cloud infrastructure, it’s a huge accelerator.
• Put it in a giant backpack: You just carry it over to the public cloud and empty it out. But if you’re a brand-new company with no legacy, that works pretty well because your backpack’s empty.
• It took 17 seconds for everyone to have a smartphone: The transition was easier – it was better. Everyone knows the cloud is better, but we’re at 15% market penetration.
• Not afraid of hard engineering problems: The thing about doing hard engineering is that when you get it wrong, it looks like a lot of egg on your face, but when you get it right, you build something truly magical.

The Big Quotes:

“That's our job. It's our responsibility. We've been that leader for 30 plus years. We need to be that leader now.”

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The Big Themes:

• The Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE): A roadmap for companies putting a lot of focus on providing solutions for customers, and to help them accelerate this with technologies such as AI.
• Immense amount of data: Successful companies have to figure out how to use this data and turn it into insights.
• We've been in business for over 40 years: We've partnered with our customers from different industry domains over the year, and we have a pretty in-depth understanding of many of the challenges that they face – and the opportunities as well.
• Optimistic and bullish on the future ahead of us: Last year was tough. But it taught us to pivot quickly and learned lessons that we took there that will make us stronger and more effective.

The Big Quotes:

“You're all in the technology business, regardless of what business you're in.”

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The Big Themes:

• Know your why. Don’t do projects with unclear outcomes or that do not solve a defined business issue/goal. Digital transformation only works if there’s actually a business transformation.
• Integrations.They’re more important that you think, take longer and can be problematic. The less spaghetti, the less mess.
• Your team will make or break your success. Pick the best partner, project leader, and internal team for your project, and if you don’t have a solid executive sponsor, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
• Control what you can control. Before your project gets approved, start getting your house in order. Clean up bad data before you start your project. Make sure you have a way to manage your project systematically throughout.

The Big Quotes:

“Customers and vendors celebrate this idea of go-live, like yay! And they have cakes and they take pictures and isn't that great. But the reality is that's really when the work begins.”

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The Big Themes:

• Not so Unified Communications. As many/most companies have shifted to some version of remote work, we’re seeing both the benefits but also the limitations of video communications.
• Virtual culture: We’re nearing a year of virtual, remote work for many of us. Nurturing, supporting and reinforcing culture is challenging in the best of circumstances. Ironically working remotely is forcing companies to be more intentional about their culture, causing some to reassess their cultural attributes and beliefs, and how best to train, nurture, and harness them.
• 5G, Cloud, Mobile, and IIoT are converging: To create a massive market transition. This is most acutely true in manufacturing, where we’re already getting glimpses of the future. While the news is mostly focused on the consumer impact, the reality is the B2B impact may be even larger.

The Big Quotes:

“There's another dynamic that we don't focus on, but I think is playing a major role here. And that's the dynamic of the multi-generational workforce.”

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The Big Themes:

• Authentic dialogue is dying in America: Stanford Research shows us that people are caring more about themselves and less for others.
• Good conversationalist vs. “selfie”: Many people think the purpose of a discussion is to win. At one point changing your mind was called “learning.” Today it’s called flip-flopping.
• People are told to shout their story: Not to listen. Not to collaborate. Not to learn. Not to teach. Just “tell it.”
• We will either have civil discourse – or civil war: This is the time to elevate the value of authentic dialogue. In person. And online.

The Big Quotes:

“We talk to each other and if we're human beings, we sort it out, that's the best mechanism, just be human with each other.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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