The Smart IT Podcast

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Dan Holden, VP, Cyber Security from BigCommerce. For IT, the focus on defending its organization from cyber risks is led by the security team. When an organization is fortunate to have that team led by a CISO, focus can be directed to managing cyber risk that frees the rest of IT to focus on keeping the lights on and help their businesses innovate. We talked about the evolution of the role of the CISO, including what he has seen over the last three decades in this industry. We discussed several insightful areas, starting with Dan’s origin story in cyber security to the responsibilities of the tech industry to all of our security efforts. Interesting topics like data privacy, who should pay for logging, espionage, and the inevitable wave of new regulations were also covered.

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Douglas Ferguson, President @ Voltage Control, to the show. We talked about facilitation. What it is and why it’s important, along with some of the techniques and tools that can be used by leaders of meetings to drive better team outcomes. Improving our ability to facilitate team collaborations and meetings effectively is critical to IT’s ability to thrive. To get things done, you must have great working dynamics in and among teams. For IT, getting everyone bought in to the mission and initiatives with active participation is critical to excelling at helping businesses innovate. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

-Facilitation, a way to make work “easier”. Viewing “soft skills” as “people skills”.

-There is no straight path into facilitation as a practice. Often used in design sprints. Use these skills to show up for real leadership and solve real problems.

-Tackling the misnomer of the perceived ease of getting people to do what you want. Shouldn't it be easy to get people to do what they do? You don't get people to do anything. Rather, you can set the conditions for it to happen. You can set the initial conditions to get good results.

-Providing clarity and a safe environment for people to fail.

-The example of a marker for a whiteboard as a symbolic way of sharing power. It invites others to participate in the discussion.

-You must define objectives for the meeting. Too often, people misunderstand the intentions of the meeting. Clarify beforehand and reinforce during the meeting its purpose. For example, will there be a decision that will be made here.

-For the engagement challenge, look at the expectations not being set.

-You need to intentionally design the meeting to be engaging. The experience of the meeting can be more important than the agenda itself.

-Tooling for capturing ideas - “If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen". Stacking effect of "stuff" can be disjointed. If you visualize + capture, you build structure. When you can see, clarity starts to emerge. Capturing in real time as you go becomes a reminder not to forget something shared. Opportunity for your ideas to be explored.

-Always communicate upfront, how decision is going to be made, the need for advice, idea sharing; let everyone know upfront whatever you're thinking.

-Group decision making doesn't happen enough. Delegation superpower when whole group decides. “Authorship" is "ownership", they are in driving seat for dealing with a problem/opportunity, more likely to support decision even if not your choice. Can find wrong choice faster. Stop selling stuff, but rather invite them in.

-Ways to get team unlocked: dot voting, majority, supermajority, gradient voting. Helps get out blame game. Benefit of how decisions are made.

-Is there a wave of transformation? Not just yet. Potential budding. Microsoft has a Chief of Facilitation. More companies will bring in facilitation roles. For cross-team leadership, such as project manager, program leader, design/product lead, or technology leaders.

-These people's skills really matter! Facilitation skills have power. How are you showing up for people?

-Change how you show up for meetings. Have more empathy for those running meetings. You can influence by asking clarifying questions to help everyone better align. What are we trying to get out of this meeting? What’s a good outcome? You can help people be better facilitators as a participant.

-The importance of doing the work in the meeting. Born out of idea of rapid prototyping of design community. Mockups, prototypes, iterating on these. Reduce batch size and cycle time decreases. Helps answer questions. Metaphor of house. What can we bring to the meeting too? For example, presentation, open PowerPoint, and make changes in real time, mapping our arc of stories, divide and conquer, to asynchronous work. Multi-threading work in shared collaboration tools.

Not enough teams doing intentional facilitation. Try to avoid screen share. Everyone gets their hands dirty. It's a beautiful thing when everyone is quiet and working together in a meeting. Create this condition. We have an opportunity to intentionally structure our meetings to get more active participation and get more ideas explored.

Show Notes

Douglas Ferguson on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasferguson/

Voltage Control

https://voltagecontrol.com/

Facilitation Lab

https://voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab/

Hashtags

#facilitation #meetings #leadership

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I did an overview of the Smart IT Framework. Smart IT is an approach to getting the important things done by transforming the way traditional IT thinks, works, and leads. It supports the disruption of the status quo, simplifies the complex, and mitigates risk. This is the next generation of information technology.

This approach models a different way of thinking by framing principles on how we work. It is much more than a play on the mnemonic of SMART goals. It goes beyond a sense of natural intelligence or being good in school. It’s a way of thinking and working that is open to everyone in IT.

This Smart approach to IT is a construct for the profession of information technology. It frames the conceptual aspects of thinking about one’s role in the larger organization and the nature of the work itself. It illuminates the larger forces shaping the drivers of the challenges we face and the creation of new opportunities. This is a guide to inspiring the change that is needed in our professional world.

Smart IT is a way of working and being. It is about being conscious of our environments, new enablers, and opportunities to help our organizations.

IT teams can leverage this framework to see useful information other people can’t see or don’t notice. They then draw accurate, useful conclusions from that information. These teams design useful goals that take advantage of the information. Finally, they create an efficient and effective plan of action to attain these goals.

Smart IT is resilient, agile, and thoughtful. Smart IT can be viewed from the perspective of four dimensions: purpose, development, intentionality, and realization.

Show Links

William D. Reed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cciewill/

Smart IT info: https://www.williamreed.info

Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thesmartitpodcast

Podcast Homepage: https://the-smart-it-podcast.captivate.fm/

#smartit #leadership #innovation

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Katherine R. Dollar, Lead Storyteller and Content Strategist @ Moxie Blue Media, to the show.

We talked about improving communicating with others by using stories. Effectively communicating across different teams is a vital skill in today’s fast-paced and highly connected groups of teams. To get things done, you must develop greater relationships with other internal and external teammates. That requires being good at getting our ideas, thoughts, and insights across to other people in a way that they understand your meaning or intent. For IT, we have been known to communicate in such technical manners that normal users at times don’t understand us. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• The power of a story is the ability to let one explore and relate to other people' lives and conditions that are not our own. 
• From the standpoint of vendors and solution providers, stories have the power to help companies to better position the value prop of their technology solutions to IT teams. 
• It is important to understand the mindset of your audience and what they care about to better align how to convey your message. 
• Katherine offered us the approach of defining a goal, a problem, and a plan of action to use in our communications patterns. 
• The ability to craft stories is a powerful skill we should all strive to gain and improve upon in our careers. 
• Better communication has the power to decrease the time to value for our organizations by getting things done faster. 
• In addition to story, we can make use of analogy and metaphors to get your messages across. It allows us to make our ideas relatable using something the audience already knows. 

We have an opportunity to practice with family members at home to get better at the critical skill of effectively communication ideas that are technical.

LINKS:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinedollar/

Moxie Blue Media: https://moxiebluemedia.com/

Not So Science Fiction: https://notsosciencefiction.com/

#story #storytellying #communication

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Daniel Stillman, Founding Conversation Designer @ The Conversation Factory, to the show to have a chat about conversations.

Conversations are that fundamental thing all of us do every day. For IT and what it must do to deliver for its organizations, being heard and understood is especially important. His vantage point as a designer of communication was invaluable to provide insights into the everyday challenges that workers have in getting their intended messages across to each other. Considering the criticality of increased collaboration to get things done, this is a problem that needs a fresh approach to address. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• Daniels origin story of getting into this field. The wonders of even the concept of designing a conversation, from his start with interaction design with machines, experience designer, and designing services.
• Every conversation has a purpose. The cost of bad conversation can lead to bad meetings. There is a financial cost to business of “crappy” meetings.
• All conversations are designed, some intentional and some ad-hoc. It is beneficial to do this design on purpose.
• The talk-thinking gap, where we can think faster than we talk. Humans can think at 4,000 words a minute, but only speak at 125 words a minute. You could not say everything you wanted to say. As a result, there is the need to intentionally design for this reality.
• Question if organizations are being set up to maintain the status quo. The reality is that misunderstanding is the default. We need to find a better container for better conversations. 
• Some techniques to address challenges are the use of a talking stick, rounds, or passing the “stick” in interactions such as retrospectives. Also, could use the approach of thinking alone before thinking together, giving everyone the time they need to collect their thoughts. This will help protect the introverts from extroverts, and extroverts from themselves.
• The concepts of golden listening triangle and triple loop learning.
• Leaders must create the conditions for innovation. For example, writing down what I meant has a better chance of being understood.
• As long as leaders believe they are the smartest one in the room, they will keep the status quo. To address the challenge of getting the whole room involved, there are options like having silents, meetings having written conversations, or making use of “placemats” to ensure everyone is producing.
• Inertia with trying new approaches to better communications.  There is tension between command and control and emergent methods. Requires advanced skills to push ahead and create openness.

Parting thoughts on a great business case for improving communications to improve meetings to improve collaboration to improve innovation.

LINKS:

Daniel’s book, Good Talk: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bx1sW7YTNz20Ws2gMEjBeHuefuVDuT6CftV0oJ9RtsE/edit?usp=sharing

Daniel’s Podcast: https://theconversationfactory.com/listen 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2IPdj1X6J8BrYzNunCAvQv?si=cpb8bjTUQeeGSjSUItw4ow&dl_branch=1&nd=1

Book landing page: https://theconversationfactory.com/good-talk

Personal Site: https://www.danielstillman.com/

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielstillman/

Connect on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dastillman

#communication #meetings #leadership #facilitation

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Evelina Deleanu, Head of Experience @ ChaiOne, to the show. We talked about design, end users, and experience.

In IT, we often talk about the back end of the digital infrastructure that powers business services. It is important as well to take a step back and think about the experience of the people using our systems. We need to answer the question of what users are trying to accomplish in their daily tasks as they interact with technology. Design is more than aesthetics; it is the actual experience. We discussed user experience (UX) and the entire experience with a product or service. For example, buying an Apple product, from unwrapping device, to setting it for use. Experience encompasses the entire lifecycle of interacting with the product or service. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• When companies do not invest in experience, you have user complaints. Many digital transformation initiatives fail because they do not consider the user enough.
• Viewing the human experience holistically interacting with technology systems. The importance of designing the experience of technology for users. 
• A good experience working with a system is the result of thoughtful design. There needs to be a purposeful understanding of what users are trying to accomplish and design the technology systems to meet those needs as efficiently as possible. 
• Many users resist digital transformation initiatives and new solutions. The importance of focusing on being user centric to meet their actual work needs. If not done well, we risk lower user adoption rates and technology investments may not pay off for our businesses. 
• Part of the design process is collecting end user data using methods such as interviews, observation, and time motion studies. 

We closed out by discussing career pathing for those looking to get into design. 

LINKS:

LinkedIn - Evelina Deleanu

ADP List: https://app.adplist.org/login

Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/

Interaction Design Foundation: https://www.interaction-design.org/

LinkedIn - ChaiOne

#design #humancentereddesign #ux #experience

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Chris Norris, Chief Technologist Cloud & Datacenter @ Computacenter, to the show to have a chat about modern infrastructure.

Chris has seen a lot over the years in technology. His vantage point as a thought leader who spends time analyzing the trends in the industry was invaluable for our conversations. The evolution from organizations having their own datacenters to the widespread adoption of Cloud (and hybrid models) has changed how IT operates. From the increased flexibility and capability that the Cloud provides, it has also come with some challenges that must be understood. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• Busting the myth of Cloud as easy or cheaper. Multi-cloud brings in more complexity. Increased need for Enterprise Architecture and workload design. System thinking to understand all this complexity. 
• Organizational shift of how IT teams work. Distinct tools across cloud environment. Data protection strategies for how data is stored in various places. Need mature communication styles among teams.
• Shared responsibilities. You cannot hand off liabilities to someone else. Companies are still responsible for the protection and confidentiality of its data.
• The use of automation to pull human errors out of your systems. The benefits of building some code and automating. Want to avoid application drift by managing with automation.
• Platform Ops, embedding into other dev and ops teams to ease communication challenges and understand how they are integrating with the business.
• Changes in IT organizational structure. Changes in inter team communications pattern 
• Before automating, must get everyone on the same page for process, including approval processes, change control, monitoring solutions.
• Business imperatives to move fast to react to market/competitive forces, line of business see new tech and want to leverage it for themselves.
• Somebody must translate how new initiatives map to technology.
• Financial analyst role to understand and drive down Cloud costs. The dichotomy of agility/speed along with not blowing up the budget. Need to understand cost models to determine which one is optimal. Runaway tech costs could throw off TCO and ROI. 
• There are no IT projects, they are all business projects.
• Security implications of how new systems are designed and implemented. Is the new system more exploitable than it was before? Could we blow the budget by making it safer? 
• IT has moved passed managing infrastructure to managing service availability. 
• The app is king, the business does not care about the underlying infrastructure.
• CIO’s role has changed. Some have developer background. Must look at operating models, financial models, and infrastructure; and see how they all come into play. The CIO’s job is much tougher today.

We wrapped up chatting about how much more there is for IT professionals to learn.

LinkedIn Page: Chris Norris

#cloud #enterprisearchitecture #platformops

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Gerald Caponera, GM Risk Products at ThreatConnect, to the show where we chatted about the value of IT to the business by pivoting to the challenges IT faces in communicating what it does it as opposed to its intrinsic value. That value is all work enabling innovative technology to work in a way that powers digital transformation. How that rapid rate of change in the business environment is driven by IT’s ability to introduce new capabilities. It is not just business that is innovative; IT is as well. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• There is a dichotomy at play: as it gets easier for the business to use tech, IT does an excellent job of masking the backend complexity. 
• How risk compounded in one area of the business can impact risk in another area. 
• Exploring the types of tradeoffs organizations must make between business timelines and security considerations. 
• Using common risk language communicated across various teams to help support strategic and operational decisions for deploying new capabilities into the field. 
• Decision tradeoffs between time to value and security, speed versus cost, quality versus cost. New and improved skill of balancing cost, schedule, and capabilities. Quality takes time, otherwise you can introduce new risks. 
• Need traceability for our decisions that can be defended. Must communicate this in a way that everyone understands. Making smart decisions faster with better collaboration. Managing risk better to feed in decision making process. 
• IT moves so fast, cyber must continue to adapt and security professionals must become risk practitioners. Money is an effective way to standardize the language of impact and tradeoffs as better linkage to the business. 

Parting thoughts on future professional skill development is too always keep learning. So many options to learn and improve soft skills like communication, teaming, and collaboration. Always be learning something new.

Learn More Information:

LinkedIn: Gerald Caponera

#crq #cyberriskquantification #unittesting #scrum #leadership #communication #team #teambuilding

On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Timothy Laudell Jackson, CIO @ Diamond Offshore, to the show to have a chat about what IT has been through over the last two decades and what professionals can do to be prepared for the next decade. His vantage point as a CIO was invaluable in this discussion. We talked about IT and its continued adaptation to changes in the business. He works for a company in the Oil & Gas industry and gave us insights into its business priorities and the nature of investments in IT; the effects on his team because of the challenges of economic downturns and the pandemic; and the big focus on efficiency as a driver for many of IT’s initiatives. One of those initiatives led to capturing and extracting more value from their data to help support the business with predictive analytics for their physical equipment. 

We discussed several insightful areas, including: 

• The other professional skills that are needed beyond technical acumen to be successful in supporting our organizations, communicating what is technically possible and the challenges of turning on new functionality quickly. 
• The strategy of leveraging Cloud and Managed Services to extend internal IT capabilities, transferring risk, and delivering new capabilities to the business faster.
• Improving decision making support through strategy and education to optimize how technology can be used to improve process or maximize profit. 
• Upskilling professional skills to stay relevant when technology changes is vital. Improving your understanding of user needs through process understanding and feedback elicitation. 
• Focusing on the design of systems to improve the experience of ends users interacting with the technology. 
• Improving teamwork, both internally and externally.
• Understanding team dynamics and inspiring action, ensuring the business goals are understood by everyone. 
• Importance of understanding business functions, the why and how your organization makes money and competes in the marketplace. 

Parting thoughts on the opportunities for IT professionals to prepare for what is next. 

For More Information:

LinkedIn: Timothy Laudell Jackson

NPower | NPower creates pathways to economic prosperity by launching digital careers for military veterans and young adults from underserved communities.

NPower: https://www.npower.org/

Genesys Works: https://genesysworks.org/houston/

#cio #oilandgas #efficiency #measurement #metrics #ai #blockchain #smartcontracts #cloud #managedservices #mentoring #leadership #team #business #businessanalyst #enterprisearchitecture #predictiveanalytics