The CIONET Cookbook comprises recipes for success from 25 of today’s most influential and dynamic information technology leaders, across all sectors of business.This is the result of our research and interviews with top Digital Leaders. The CIONET Cookbook uses the analogy of a five-star restaurant to explain the importance of optimally integrated technology.
Meanwhile dive in to the next recipe with our Masterchef Margaret Dawson, VP and Chief Digital Officer at RedHat.
Ingredients
Preparing the dish
For the past six years, Margaret Dawson has been vice president and chief digital officer at RedHat, a company founded in 1993 that provides open-source software to enterprises worldwide. With a background in marketing and journalism, Margaret offers a unique perspective on how open transformation delivers outstanding customer experiences. Working with her team of more than 100 employees, she promotes the benefits of open transformation both internally and externally.
Margaret says there are three vital ingredients for digital leaders who want to bake open transformation into an organisation: open culture, open processes, and open architectures. She believes this “three-legged stool” will be the foundation for all enterprise strategies in the future: “I am passionate about inspiring teams and colleagues to change the world for good. What is needed is courageous leadership and a shared vision.”
Building an open culture
Building an open culture at RedHat means breaking down organisational silos and hierarchies. The result? Great ideas can surface anywhere from the company’s 15,000 employee organisation and be shared amongst thousands of customers. The spirit of an open organisation is to foster individual passion, encourage collaboration between teams, and develop a risk-taking appetite.
“Open leadership is all about focusing on people and behaviour rather than pure technology,” says Margaret. Open leadership also requires a clear vision, which has been demonstrated by Barclays and its attempt to become ‘the bank of the future’, which is an echo of its earlier innovations such as being the first bank to introduce credit cards and cash machines. Airline Cathy Pacific has also fostered an open culture by adopting DevOps practices. This approach produces innovation through collaboration at 10 times the speed of traditional methods.
Margaret says an open culture requires diversity across gender, colour and background. Recent benchmarking exercises show organisations that encourage diverse collaboration can double the speed to innovation in only half the number of meetings. Margaret is on a mission to increase diversity within the IT sector, which remains disproportionately balanced towards men. She traces this imbalance to childhood inputs that encourage girls to steer away from STEM subjects.
Creating open processes
Open processes demand open ways of working. This openness must be baked into an organisation-wide view of what it wants to achieve and its measurement via clear metrics. That’s where modern tools, such as agile teams, DevOps and a fail-fast philosophy, can serve up dramatic improvements in workflow speed and efficiency, as well as genuine innovation in the way things get done.
A second important factor for creating open processes is to define where human effort should be focused and how repetitive and low-value tasks can be automated. Margaret believes that a large portion of office work can be automated, leaving humans to undertake high-value tasks that align with the company’s broader strategic vision.
Developing open architectures
Software is at the centre of modern business activities. The central role of software means
application development experience is fluid and often distributed across the enterprise and beyond. Open architectures can help developers to use the tools they want and to foster collaboration with any individual or team, regardless of location. Infrastructure is the enabling force for this openness, but it should remain out of sight of work teams.
Just as data is at the heart of modern business operations, so data is becoming the essential ingredient that helps enterprises make key decisions. However, many incumbents have accumulated multiple IT stacks over time, each containing different applications and data structures. Open architectures allow organisations to consolidate their data into a single integrated resource that is accessible by all. Such openness makes it much easier for organisations to use data to optimise business performance and customer experience.
Margaret says cloud, which gives developers the opportunity to move across different
environments, is the critical platform for architectural openness. RedHat is using containers and Kubernetes to make it easier to move and run applications and workloads across a range of cloud platforms. This approach also reduces the possibility of becoming locked in to a single cloud vendor.
Identifying key technologies for the future
As CDO, Margaret sees a rapidly growing pipeline of new technologies that will help digital leaders to achieve innovations in customer service while also overcoming current obstacles such as technical debt. She points to the following trends:
The rapid application of emerging technologies requires an open architecture that makes it easier to integrate these tools seamlessly with more traditional systems and services.
Defining the qualities of a Master Chef Margaret says the CDO is responsible for every aspect of a customer’s digital journey. They should inspire their companies to produce a highly personalised omni-channel experience across the web, social media platforms, and physical, face-to-face interactions. To achieve her ambitions as CDO, Margaret sets clear objectives for her team and discourages hierarchical behaviour. At an individual level, she helps people discover their identity and purpose.
She is also religious about achieving an operational cadence that gets things done. Margaret says success is dependent on attracting, training and retaining the best talent from across the globe. This can be achieved through a combination of demonstrating continuous growth, operating an open culture, and “doing cool stuff”. She recognises that her objective of changing the world can only be achieved by focusing on one person at a time.