Reflecting on Important Trends Shaping Enterprise Technology, From AI to Cybersecurity

Mike Reeves: [00:00:00] It's great to just kind of reinforce some of what's important out there and we're all, I think everyone's commonly sharing the same sorts of issues, so there's not a lot of unicorns out there in terms of problems that companies are experiencing. And when we get down to it, it's people, it's culture, silos in companies, it's communication. Everyone's theming on transformation, cybersecurity, and of course AI. This is one of the big ones.  

Marc LeBlanc: You want your teams experimenting and seeing what's possible. I think that's part of being a technologist today is poking at the edges of these things and seeing what's the art of the possible  

Mike Reeves: At the executive level, the fear and or maybe the misunderstanding of AI and how to approach bringing that into the organization, because adoption's still really low and I haven't seen a lot of folks with great strategies or any ideation that's trying to formulate a plan as to how best to bring it into a [00:01:00] company.  

Marc LeBlanc: This is Solving for Change the podcast where you'll hear stories from business leaders and technology industry experts about how they executed bold business transformations in response to shifts in the market, or advances in technology.

In every episode, we'll explore real world strategies and technologies that fuel successful evolution. I am your host this month, Marc LeBlanc, and I'm joined by Michael Reeves, our other host.  

Mike Reeves: Thank you. I'm glad we're having this session today. It's been great to do the podcast so far and we've had some wonderful guests on and I think some insightful and some great conversation as well.

One of the things we want to talk through today was just some of the themes and things that we're seeing, we're noticing in the discussions. And I don't think any of them are epiphanies to anyone, but it's great to just reinforce some of what's important out there.

And we're all, I think everyone's commonly sharing the same sorts of issues. So there's not a lot of unicorns out there in terms of [00:02:00] problems that companies are experiencing and when we get down to it, it's people, it's culture, silos in companies, it's communication. Everyone's theming on transformation, cybersecurity, and of course AI. This is one of the big ones.  

So, I thought we'd take a little bit of time and maybe talk through some of those discussions that we've had. Maybe reflect on them in terms of, I think where we'll go in terms of future discussions, but maybe some anecdotes around just what experiences have been with a lot of our customers and helping them with the types of work that we do.

I know we talked about this before we got started here, but let's start with people. From your perspective, I know you have some pretty passionate views about the, the people portion of what's important. So, maybe you can spend a couple minutes talking about that and reflecting on it from your sessions.

Marc LeBlanc: Yeah, there's definitely been some consistencies, regardless of the guests that's been on, about the challenges they see and [00:03:00] it often comes back to people operating in silos. Not because they want to operate in silos. It's usually that they've maybe lost sight or don't clearly understand what the organizational goals are.

And how are these teams hearing that messaging? How are they making sure that they're aligning, they understand. You know, maybe as an an SRE or an application developer, how do they see the interconnectedness of what they're doing? Making sure that they understand where the company's going, understanding how they can contribute, and understanding how to leverage what each other is doing. That's one of the real main consistent themes I've heard.  

We've touched a little bit on skillset and skills gap in certain areas as well. I think that there's ways that organizations can support and facilitate the upskilling. I think that has to come, it still comes back to, where's your organization going so that they know where to invest in the skills and that people know what skills to invest in.

That's the big thing that I've [00:04:00] been hearing.  

Mike Reeves: And if you maybe unpack that a little more just with, and you can use our company as an example. Because you've been working on trying to transform our service delivery and the people and how we do things. And so, if you look at it, we've got infrastructure folks, we've got cybersecurity folks, we've got app dev, app modernization folks, I'll call them. DevOps, DevSecOps--all those things exist within the walls of our company that we provide services and have expertise around for our customers.

And trying to integrate that together in terms of a collaborative approach for how we're trying to solution for our customers. And it's the same construct that exists in our customers in terms of them trying to solve that problem. I know you have some ideas as to how you try and cajole that, or try and bring that together.

So, maybe you can spend a minute talking about that.  

Marc LeBlanc: You know, in my head I'm thinking it's--well, you're trying to bring your teams together as one team, one dream. But that takes a lot of work and making sure people [00:05:00] are comfortable with that. And it probably comes back to just people having a fear of change, right?

There's you know, "I've done this job for so long and this is how I do it, and this is the tool, tools I use, and that's kind of the land I'm comfortable in." And how do you make people feel okay to branch out. And there's one element of making people comfortable to be vulnerable and knowing if mistakes happen or if there are stumbling blocks, there's no boogie man in the closet coming to get you.

That's a big part of the culture shift that has to happen to bring that team together. Because they're gonna stick their neck out into an area that's not their domain of control. That they feel like I'm the expert in. I'm, you know, I'm a network fellow. Why am I talking about automation? They have to know that they're not gonna be judged, they're not gonna be perceived as failing. They're just trying to branch out. How do you facilitate that? And a lot of the times it's looking at some of your more senior people and saying, "Hey, I need you [00:06:00] to express when you've made a mistake and make that public. And then they see that the leadership hasn't come down and said, "Well, you failed." It's not like that. It shouldn't be a, "Hey, you made a mistake, pack your bags and get out." It's, "Okay. Well, what did we learn? Let's move on. Let's maybe not do that again." Those are some of the sort of things that I try to implement.  

Mike Reeves: Do you have anything in terms of a, I'll call it kind of like a corporate architecture or a group architecture? You talk about the silos and trying to use technology to build the collaboration in addition to other things around trying to get people to collaborate together. You know, in automating processes and trying to get everybody to understand what the whole supply chain looks like. Do you have some best practices or ideas there in terms of. If I take that and we talk about, in terms of infrastructure team collaborating with the app dev team, collaborating with the security team and [00:07:00] trying to create a, I'll call it a business architecture, which leads to a technology architecture that allows you to kind of integrate, I'll say a more seamless, less contentious, less friction, approach to collaborating and delivering work.  

There's a lot there, sorry.  

Marc LeBlanc: There's a there's a lot there. I believe a lot in iterating.

I don't believe that you can put out the final solution. I don't think that what you think is a final solution today, by the time you're three days from now, is gonna have changed at least three times.  

So I think, even when we're out consulting with our customers and we're trying to bring in some sort of a change, you often look for a group that it clicks with. They get it, they get what you're trying to do, and they're behind it. They're excited about it. The passion's there. Because it's hard to insert that passion. If the passion's already there, half the battle's over. So, what's something that gets people really excited and you kind of build on that and you iterate out.[00:08:00]  

And so maybe thinking of some really basic examples. Maybe you have a lab infrastructure that you're doing something in cloud. You want people to start labbing in GCP or in Azure or in AWS. You want that to be seamless. You want someone to be able to say, "I want to do something in Google. I want a lab like that." Snap their fingers and there it is.  

So, what's gonna get us there? Today, maybe that's, I take it with IT service desk and they go in there manually creating your lab. Well, we wanna stop that. We want that to be a pull request in through GitOps, that's how we want our teams to evolve. Because it is consistent, it's scalable, it's on-demand as they're moving a lot of those menial tasks. Like, someone going into a GUI isn't great value.

I don't wanna hire people because of their ability to use a browser. I want to use people that are thinking through, what am I gonna get? So, maybe today it's a manual process to get them a GCP lab, tomorrow it's a GitOps driven view. Okay, well what's the next iteration from there? Well, I need to set up [00:09:00] maybe it's an OpenStack lab. Maybe it's an OpenShift lab. Okay. So let's extend that landing space within GCP. Let's build some automation in, but I'm gonna need two people for that. I'm gonna need someone that understands the infrastructure. So, you're gonna pull them in. And I need somene that understands the automation, and I'm gonna pull them in.

All of a sudden, they're iterating over a common goal and it's very small steps, but you're moving the needle each time you iterate over that.  

Mike Reeves: That's the other thing I left out when we started talking business and technology architecture, which you're talking about right now--is the people architecture being probably the most important element of that. And are there personas that you look for? Are there personality characteristics or traits that you try and look for? Beause there's lots of variety of people and personalities and so you're always gonna have people that wanna try anything, will do anything, don't care about failing. [00:10:00] Those are the easy ones, I guess, to work with. Maybe a little bit more difficult to kind of contain at times. But, then you got folks that are maybe a little more hesitant or reserved and don't want to step up.  

And you do want to grow a team. You don't want to just grow an individual. Sure, you want to work with people and help them develop, but ythe whole idea is to build something in concert here in terms of teams. Do you have a kind of a people architecture that you suggest? Or maybe it's persona driven, that you kind of look to in terms of when you're trying to put build teams?

Marc LeBlanc: I don't know if it's that clear cut. I think that there's things you have to have and the rest can kind of fall in place.  

I mentioned, in my previous answer around passion. You have to have somebody that's excited about the technology. Because if you don't, there's no... You need a cheerleader. Yeah, you can develop someone into a cheerleader, but it's very contagious.

If you have that cheerleader or something you're trying to do for a cloud native program, for an observability program, any of these [00:11:00] technologies, it doesn't matter. If you have someone that's really excited and passionate, the way they talk about it, the way they share, the way they demo, the way they are just always trying new things.

It's very contagious. It's hard to shut that out. You have to have that.  

Mike Reeves: That's well said. I know we'll spend a lot more time talking about that because I think some themes for future episodes will be, how do you start to bring some of these things together?  

Because I know those are fundamental challenges that everyone's trying to address within their companies, their organizations. So, looking forward to that. And that'll be, again, across people, process, technology, and culture that we'll have some discussion around all of that.  

Maybe well spend a couple of minutes talking about AI. I'm almost fearful of it, to talk about it. But, we should.  

And the fearful theme was more tongue in [00:12:00] cheek. And that's around, I've had Mike DeVenney on a couple of times now and he does great consulting, and the analytics that he does, it really gives you rich insights into the people inside of an organization, from the executive all the way through.

You know, one of his big findings--and it's not really a surprise--is at the executive level, the fear and or maybe the misunderstanding of AI and how to approach, bringing that into the organization. Because adoption's still really low and I haven't seen a lot of folks with great strategies or any ideation that's really kind of trying to formulate a plan as to how best to bring it into a company.  

And then you've got all sorts of tools and things happening in the wild that people are trying inside of companies, but it's really kind of cloak and dagger stuff. It's really not mainstream, not supported.

There's not a culture or a strategy to be able to have people feel comfortable about trying these things. And so, [00:13:00] then you get the fear and the fear and uncertainty that gets put around it as well around security and data, and all those things. And I'm wondering if maybe you just wanna spend a minute talking about that. Because I know we did talk about it quite a bit as I think most people do.  

Marc LeBlanc: There's so much in there. You know, I think one of the worst things I think we're seeing is when that fear takes over and people are just not doing anything. I think that's probably about the worst thing you could do today. But how do you educate your staff so they know how they can go and try things in a safe manner? You want your teams experimenting and seeing what's possible. I think that's part of being a technologist today is poking at the edges of these things and seeing what's the art of the possible, because we don't know.

It is such early days for AI. It's evolving literally every day. It's gone from a very basic conversation around ChatGPT to now we're starting to talk more about AIOps and there's more and about AI [00:14:00] agents, now it's shifting and morphing. So what does a business want to do with AI? Well, I don't think they even know that, because it's evolving so fast.

So thinking about what are the easy wins. Coming back to, just like I was saying, with figuring out who's passionate, where the champions are. There's somebody that wants to do something, whether that's bringing higher productivity in because they're using some sort of LLM to move faster. Whether they want to be more efficient in their operations, bringing in something like AIOps. What is it and get behind that and build a program around that. But just saying, labeling it broadly, and saying, "We want to do AI." I think that's not gonna get you very far. Just getting specific. What is it you want achieve with it?

Mike Reeves: Yeah. That's where I think you can circle back to, as an executive team, as a leadership team, you gotta sit down and kind of figure out, "Okay, from a business perspective, [00:15:00] what do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish? What outcomes are we looking for?"

And then you can look at how you want to look at use cases and bring AI into the organization. And then, as Mike would say, you have to bring that communication plan and be very, very clear on the communication and the support to everyone in the company. To support them through trying to bring in the technology to be able to apply to whatever business problem or outcome that you're trying to address or get to.

So, there's a lot in there. I think we'll have a lot more discussion around that as we move through the next few months of some of the sessions. And the other thing I think we should talk about around that theme--I was at a conference not too long ago.

And, in terms of ideation and notions of how ]you can look at bringing highly automated agents and agentic AI [00:16:00] into an organization and start to nurture this culture and this environment of trying things and embracing the technology to try in the wild, in business and use cases for the business. And, it's this whole idea of, you don't have to think of everything in terms of production. You know, being an application that you're gonna put into production. Maybe you have a citizen development environment internally that people should be able to just go into en masse and have access to try things, to learn, to get that comfort. And to build those elements into the culture of the organization to try and I really think that's important that companies sit down and really think that the people and the culture piece through to start to kind of build on that executive strategy. To go through some of the transformational initiatives that people are trying to get through to leverage the benefits and the scale of the technology for business benefit.

We'll spend a lot of time on that. The whole [00:17:00] agentic AI theme is really, really starting to take off in the last couple of quarters in particular. I'll pause there. We'll cut it off on the AI piece, but if you have some comments or anything you wanna say around agentic in particular, I'll give you the opportunity.

Marc LeBlanc: Nothing around agentic, in particular. I think thinking back about how fast AI is moving. It'll be interesting to see where we are two or three quarters from now even, right?  

You see it more. You go on different platforms, you go on LinkedIn, different blogging systems. You can tell people are using it. And I don't think that that's because people want to sound like it was generated by AI. I think they're leveraging it to polish their content because there is some great stuff being put out there. It just, it looks and feels like it was AI generated. So are we gonna get to more of a human element? I think that's one part around sort of the LLM kind of usage, like the ChatGPTs.

I think that, and we had our story on [00:18:00] with the Canadian telecom company bringing in some AIOps to bring in some better operations with their monitoring, their platform teams. We're gonna have more stories like that emerge. There's gonna be more wins. I don't know where it's gonna go for agentic AI. I think it's still early. But there'll be some good stories that come out of that as well.  

Mike Reeves: Yeah, I agree. Maybe next we'll touch on another very hot topic and continues to scale in terms of how firey it is. And that's security, cybersecurity. It's at the forefront of everything and every discussion in every company and our personal lives and we've got a lot of great partners in that space and we've got a great security practice, cybersecurity practice in the company with a great leader, with Ashif, that comes in in part of your organization and I wouldn't mind spending a couple minutes talking about that.

Because you've [00:19:00] got all the traditional issues around the architecture and all the tools and the lack of integration across those tools. And then you mentioned AIOps and automation and the continued scale and growth of the data. But also the platforms that have been built to try and support that and try and create better postures and more visibility with companies.

And I know one thing that we've been focused on, this a little bit of an advertisement, and it's you would think initially when you start talking OT security and you think maybe critical infrastructure, but it's pretty much every organization has devices now that need to be protected.

And so, the threat landscape has evolved and changed so rapidly. And the need for that architecture to be able to have the right technology around it to give you the visibility into them is super important and I know you and the team have been doing a lot in that space, so I'll pause [00:20:00] and give you an opportunity to talk about it.

Because I've just noticed in the last few months in particular, it's really becoming a hot topic at least within our customer base.  

Marc LeBlanc: Yeah. And I think there's a few reasons for that. If I kind of on the spot, think of three ways people are approaching security conversations with us today. One conversation is around, "What do I need to do to be compliant with my security?"

That's one. And then the next one is, "Okay, well what do I need to do to be just a little bit ahead? Like, what's coming next?" And then the third one is, "Okay, well what, even though I'm not required to do it, what do I need to be doing to feel good and communicate to my customers and my employees that we are secure?"

Those are the three different ones, and there's a lot of pressure on that first one around how do we be compliant? Because there's laws and regulations coming out. They're saying, if you're not doing this, you can't operate your business. Especially with things, if you look at like oil and gas where there's critical [00:21:00] infrastructure. If they don't have answers to some of these, they're not actually able to operate their business and it comes with huge financial impacts.  

The second one I think is there's people being responsible, doing their due due diligence. They understand that security stances are not static. They are constantly changing, they're constantly evolving.

And then the third one I think is just a good operator.  

Mike Reeves: We're kind of winding down here in our time today because we just wanted to spend more time just kind of themating on, or some themation on the past and where we're going to go. But you take this whole discussion and one of the things that's jumped out to me, and again, no surprise, it's just nice to see the consistency of it. And that is, the interconnectedness of all the topics, interconnection of all the topics that we've discussed with all of the folks we've had on so far. And I know we talk about that--you and I have today and, and quite often. And, I wouldn't mind spending a minute, maybe that'll be toward the [00:22:00] end. Maybe we can use that as the wrap for today.  

But, you know, the interconnectednes of everything, it's back to: it's the people, it's the process, it's the technology, and the culture. And bringing all those elements together or people trying to figure out how to bring those elements together.

Marc LeBlanc: Yeah, there's so much to unpack in that. I'll use a couple of examples and I'm gonna use one around data. I'm gonna try to use one around security. And in one of the episodes we talked through data and we talked about sources and targets and building pipelines around data and needing observability for data.

And if you think about the complexity, that could be really small for a smaller shop, it might be really simple. They might just have, might be an Excel worksheet and they're doing something with it. To a larger organization where there's multiple databases and they're trying to bring all this data into a single spot and correlate it.

If you think of the complexity that is needed, you have to be bringing in some [00:23:00] automation. You have to be bringing in some observability to make sure that things aren't breaking, that they're consistent, and you have to think about how are you securing that data. That's just a really basic example, but all these things are so interconnected.

You can't have a good data strategy that's gonna be able to scale with your needs and be consistent enough if you're not bringing in automation. You're not gonna have the confidence that the data is safe if you don't have a good security stance around it. So, you have to be thinking through multiple angles.

Like, yes, you might need to be thinking about data because you want to use data, but all these other areas support data.  

Mike Reeves: Well said. There's a lot to bring together inside a company and their strategy to improve and all these layers or all these elements.

Again, we'll focus on a lot of these themes as we move [00:24:00] forward in the future podcasts. Thanks for having this discussion today and looking forward to the future and all the podcasts and guests and partners, et cetera that we're going to have on. So, appreciate the time today and I'll let you wrap.

Marc LeBlanc: Yeah, I'm looking forward to future episodes as well.  

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