Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

Highlights

• Check out Constellation’s October event: Connected Enterprise 2023
• What a great sense that things are ALWAYS exciting — but in early days of his career that exciting-ness was slower.
• “Smith” — highly common last name these days — tied to the old profession of blacksmithing. What’s the new “smith” these days? Probably producting software.
• Holger: why can’t email be done better? (Yeah. I agree here for sure. It seems like a useful holdover ripe for some kind of sea change.)
• The art is finding the right ratio between human and automation. Find the right pace of digital transformation for people.
• Stay until the end where Holger catches me forgetting what we’d discussed in the pre-show!
• The “money quotes” section below is intentionally truncated. Holger says so many little nuggets of wisdom that I found myself just transcribing the episode.

Money Quotes

Holger

It’s all about how we will work, what we will work on, what we will get paid to work on…and it’s changing rapidly. 

You have to reinvent yourself every 5 years.

You have to find the right balance between the skills of people and the automation you can provide them. Companies who do that right do amazing things.

SAP is like concrete: it’s great when it’s warm and moving…but [after time] you need a sledgehammer to fix it.

James

You’re seeing the veil between the back office and the front office be torn apart — but it’s also creating lots of consternation and hand-wringing.

Paul

It’s never been more clear than now that what you do for work and how you do it have the distinct possibility of changing right under your feet. Difference is faster, now.

Podcast Episode! Season 5 Intro: The Future of Work

James and I sat down to ruminate and prepare for our upcoming next season: The Future of Work. It’s obvious that GPT (and especially ChatGPT) has completely saturated everyone’s brains. It seems like we’re finally seeing the veil between front-office and back-office start to tear. But most of all, we are PUMPED about this season — as both a way to learn from great guests, and as a time capsule of a unique moment in tech history.

Money Quotes

James

You’re seeing a shift from systems being systems of record to decision support. 

The proliferation of low-code tools are making it much more accessible to interconnect front-office and back-office systems.

This is coming very soon: enterprise-grade GPT services that train on your data. 

Intranets are usually where information goes to die.

Paul

The future of work is about the new ubiquity of really good tech. There’s a shift going on in how much businesses believe they can actually do with technology. 

I see the lights turn on with more non-techie people now, when the conversation turns to what you can do with it in your business. 

The fact that the world is changing so fast means that there is such a thing as “The Future of Work”. 

ChatGPT made the magic of tech real to people who don’t give a crap about tech. We as techies live in a world where we have always believed [that tech could make a real difference], but now it’s clear to non-techies.

James and I closed out our season of exploring digital transformation and its various meanings with a wrap-up conversation. 

Awesome Episodes This Season

• Season 4 Premiere: Digital Transformation
• Continuous Everything with Jon Reed
• Digital Transformation as Improving Processes with Alex Jones
• De-Mystifying the Digital with Paru Sankar
• Innovation with Purpose with Diego Dora
• An Agile SAP Development Platform with Nestor Lara
• Compassion in Software with Dustin Bruzenak
• Season 4 Finale: Digitally Transformed

Money Quotes

James

In a healthy, modern enterprise, we should constantly be renewing ourselves…There’s no getting around the hard work that it takes to continue maturing your organization.

The compounding benefits you can see from “continuous everything”…it’s hard to quantify.

Paul

We still live in a world where experts are truly experts. That expertise can lead to things where, when we get in the room to do design…they themselves may not have agreed or have codified how they get their stuff done. 

It has never been the case where we have digitally transformed something utterly out of a human’s hands. I have never obviated the accounting department. 

If you do digital transformation, what is being transformed?

Make sure to get more from Christian at myNewsWrap and Twitter.

Podcast Episode! Season 3 FINALE

This is it! The end of season 3! Lots of solid leads on the question “Why can’t IT keep up with the business?” — and probably most importantly, a concession that the question probably started off a bit loaded. I think we came to several points of agreement, led by our awesome guests.

Highlights

• Yeah. It’s a loaded question.
• It really comes down to how much the IT job has changed. There are a lot of conflicting requirements.
• IT kind of winds up supporting systems that were shoved onto them, versus fully owning them
• ‘Prioritization is key to the whole game’, well said Wade at TSI

• Create your own APIs and consume them in your app. Make them fundamental.
• IT’s role 5 years from now:
• James: more integration, more facilitating data; fusion teams. Still places for pro-code developers, even as landscape shifts.
• Paul: need to grow more solution architects. Need to have more understanding of the solutions that are needed, even if I can’t know everything about the minutiae of every black box.

Money Quotes

James

When you start talking about complex hybrid landscapes…a lot of middleware and legacy warehouse solutions are showing their age. 

As long as I have that [integrations/interfaces], that’s like a safety net if the app doesn’t do what I need. There’s a lot of legacy systems that don’t have that. 

Paul

IT has a little bit less time to develop real ownership mentality of the solutions they provide to the business. 

Data is probably one of the key indicators of the whole mess these days. The value of data is greater and more challenging than it was before.

We have to participate in telling the whole story. Support and ongoing help — our whole industry will have to get better at that part of the equation.