Kevin Montalbo

Welcome to episode 60 of the Coding Over Cocktails podcast. My name is Kevin Montalbo. Joining me from Sydney, Australia is Toro Cloud CEO and founder, David Brown. Good day, David!

David Brown

Hi, Kevin!

Kevin Montalbo

All right! Our guest is the president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. He's known as a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities and honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 20 or so years. He's also the host of the Briefings Direct podcast. Joining us for a round of cocktails is Dana Gardner. Hi, Dana! Welcome to the podcast!

Dana Gardner

Hi, hello! It's great to be here.

David Brown

Hi, Dana! Thanks for joining us. What prompted you to make the transition from a journalist and editor to industry analyst and consultant all those 20 odd years ago?

Dana Gardner

Well, David, I sort of just followed the natural path. If you're a writer and an editor for long enough, you get past just reporting the facts and you start to get deeper into the trends and the analysis and what it means. So, it was sort of a natural transition to go from being a journalist to being an analyst. I also did it right at the time when the internet's first phase or arrival  was culminating. And there was a need for people to try to understand what this means.

And so it's about not just reporting the facts, but reporting the context and trying to help people reckon with what's going on around them. 16 years later, I made the jump to be more of a consultant and pundit, and taking the industry analyst step one degree forward.

David Brown

And of course, you’re still publishing content. So, I understand you studied journalism and then obviously, was practising in the editorial journalism space. And you're still producing content with your podcast as well. But you said that you were in with Web 1.0. You were sort of educating people as to what was going on and how to leverage the technology. So, it's interesting to get your perspective of the evolution of over those years from Web 1.0 to now, where we're talking about digital transformation and all those kinds of things.

Dana Gardner

Yeah. Well, the idea that things don't happen quite as fast as you might expect, but happen much more significantly with greater impact, I think has been the case. And while we knew that ease of web internet connectivity and web page delivery ushered in a whole new ease of distribution, of interesting ideas and news, and helped create a whole background for loosely coupled SaaS-type applications, which led to the cloud. We really didn't have a clue that social media would ride on top of that. Or that people's behaviours would be dictated by a small device in their hands that they'd be walking around all day looking into, and that would become globally pervasive crossing all sorts of cultures and have such a huge economic impact. So we actually knew that it was big, but we had no clue as to how big the change was gonna be.

David Brown

Yeah, that’s exactly my experience as well. I remember in the late nineties, when I was starting in this game, I was educating people when I was trying to sell them websites. I was actually educating [them] on how to use email. Like, it was really the very, very basics. And I was trying to convince them to start trading online in the late nineties. And so, it seemed like a hard slog to educate particularly small businesses at the time, the benefits. But like you say, you knew it was coming, but even then, the impact was just so significant. 
And some of these things, which we just did not anticipate, you've been producing high quality content now for several years. I'm interested in gaining your perspective, in terms of a content development expert, of what's resonating with your audience. So, maybe we can start with the C-level executives and the IT leaders in organisations, because I know you talk to a lot of industry-leading experts. So, what's resonating with your audiences? What I'm getting at here is what are the areas of interest which are engaging people at the moment?

Dana Gardner

Sure. Well, at the highest levels, it's still that strategy perspective of what to anticipate, trying to synthesise different trends and how they'll impact you and your place and your business. So, for those C-suite folks, their jobs are about predicting the future and anything you can do to help them do that. And they're also dealing with massive complexity and very rapid change, so any insights, any synthesis of disparate trends. And that's why I named my company “Interarbor”. It means between the trees. So, you explain the trees to the forest dwellers and you explain the forest to the tree dwellers. And  it's really about context. And so many people, of course, have to have their heads down and they're very focused on their jobs or they're very specific to a niche or a topic or a vertical industry.

But because these trends are mega global and, as we just pointed out, impactful over decades, you need to step back and be able to take that bigger picture. So, what we try to do is create content that helps the people who are trying to forecast the future get a better beat on that, but we also create content for those people that might be a little bit below that, in terms of specifying. They're looking for the next best technology. They're looking to solve concrete problems and one of the best forms of content to help them do that is to learn from other people. Word-of-mouth still works, even if we're doing it over networks, in small magical devices in our hands.

And so, we try to create user testimonial, use-case discussions. So, somebody who faced a problem rationalised it, got all the information, they tried some technology. Recognising it does involve people, process and technology, some of which are products, some of which are services, some of which have to be integrated on the fly. And then how that worked for them. What did they get? What were the metrics of success? What were the challenges? What did they have to overcome? So, whenever you can learn from someone else's journey, that's very pragmatic, very practical. We have people who are soaking that up because this is yet another time when we're all faced with decisions, we're all spending money and trying to do it wisely. And we're all trying to predict a future.

David Brown

And it's interesting, not only the success stories, but some of the challenges and failures as well. We can learn from those equally. You've spoken to a lot of C-level executives, about their experience with their digital transformation related projects. Are any of those case studies? Do any of them stand out to you, some of those success stories or failures, unexpected failures?

Dana Gardner

Well, one of the recurring challenges is trying to find the intersection between human behaviour and motivations, and technologies, capabilities, and shortcomings. And there's often a lag between what tech knowledge you can do and what people in their habits and their culture do. And then there's sometimes where culture trumps technology and the technology needs to adapt, even though somebody may have come up with a list of requirements that they thought people wanted.

So, we've actually been in quite a long period of mismatch between what technology can and should do and what people want, can, and have to try to adjust to. And getting in the middle of that and teasing it out offers up some lessons and these are old lessons because human culture and behaviour hasn't changed too much, right? We're still the form, the function, the  calculus that we've been for thousands of years, but trying to motivate people and to make sure that the horses are in front of the cart and not vice versa, to make sure that people are motivated in a positive way.
So, a carrot rather than a stick, and showing them the productivity benefits of making the difficult changes that sometimes we have to do. I mean, we all sort of seem to be on like a Newtonian momentum. We like to go in a straight line that the direction you've been in, it's hard to change. So, you have to help people understand why the difficult process of change is ultimately worth their while. And we've got plenty of lessons over the past 20 or 30 years as to why sometimes it's very fortuitous for you to change early rather than later, but you can't change so early that you get it wrong. You go down a blind alley or you use technology improperly. So it's a delicate balance, and those are the lessons that are, and in some ways, keep coming up over and over again. There's almost a pattern of adoption that every time there's a new type of technology, it’s like peeling back an onion and you get another layer and then another difficult transition for people in groups in complexity. It's kind of fascinating that these trends are recurring, but everything else is so different.

David Brown

Yeah, because I'm guessing the issue of implementing technology with people and processes is not a new challenge. We've always had that challenge for decades. So, what is it? What's different about the digital transformation era? Is it the size of change? Is it the pace of change? Is it how much it's impacting culture? What's different about it?

Dana Gardner

I just think there's more variables at work and they're more dynamic and they're changing more rapidly. I mean, how could we have predicted three years ago that COVID and the reaction to it would be driving the work-at-home dynamic to the degree that it is? We're seeing 40%, 50% of people that are going to probably work at home for some significant amount of the time. And they may have gotten there on a technological basis earlier, but the behaviour and the culture and the idea of allowing people;  that level of independence wasn't even close to being ready. And the technologies didn't change overnight about two years ago, but the requirements did. And people stood up and made those adjustments because they had to. And so, I think digital transformation has been foisted on people in the last two years, whereas before it was being introduced to people and people were accepting it at different rates.
And so the struggle now is to say, “Okay, we've got these imperatives rather than nice-to-haves. How do we make sure that we don't lose a lot of people?” And I think one of the big reasons for the major resignation, or what do they call it? The Great Resignation that we see in some sections of the world has a lot to do with a disconnect, an alienation between having to work technologically in front of a computer all day and really not being ready for it. And so people are saying, “Enough. I'm out.” So, that's, you know unfortunate if that is what's happening, an unfortunate result of trying to change too much, too quick. 
And also, of course, business is under different pressure. We have inflation, we have supply chain issues. We have onshoring and offshoring from different markets around different sectors like manufacturing. We've got delays in transportation and logistics, and we've had some pretty tough weather and natural disasters that have hampered business as usual. And so, business resiliency has become much more prominent. So, all of these things kind of come together and if you synthesise them, it's been a challenging and difficult time for many, many companies. Some have thrived and have really done well, but a lot have struggled.

David Brown

It's interesting. You mentioned business resiliency and you've written about and talked about operational resiliency before, how it's one of the top priorities that organisations should be taking a look at. So, tell us more about that resiliency and what does it mean?

Dana Gardner

Yeah, the timing for operational resiliency is perfect. And the idea is that you don't get ready for any specific problem, but you get ready for dealing with problems. And you put into place contingencies and you make redundant supply, logistics, human resources, and of course, technology resources so that… You can't predict the future. All you can do is predict that you're probably going to have to adjust rapidly under difficult circumstances, so get ready for it. And it also means putting into place the resources and the leadership and the company that can step up and be ready to bring out the crisis playbook. And while it could be a natural disaster, it could be an economic crisis, It could be currencies and financial crises or a massive healthcare issue or all of the above.

And so, that's where operational resiliency I think is really important. Now, the nice thing about the timing too, is that we have the ability to use big data analytics and cloud platforms. So, we can gather, store, and crunch data better, faster and cheaper than ever. And so one of the wonderful things you can do is learn very rapidly of if what you're doing is working in an operational resiliency situation or application or use-case that's super powerful because you can't wait three months or six months to do a post-mortem and decide whether what you did was good or fair or middling. You can use big data analytics and cloud platforms, gather data at the edge around the world and learn very quickly whether what you're doing is accomplishing your goals or not.

So, it's really an interesting combination of need and technology and data analytics that come together to make operational resiliency much more attainable than it had been.

David Brown

And of course there would've been a bunch of organisations that had some of those pieces in place before the pandemic. When you're talking to your C-level executives, are you finding that those that had some form of resiliency in place responded better as you anticipated?

Dana Gardner

Yes. I think the COVID-19 pandemic caught many companies unaware of needing second, third, fourth sources that just in time, manufacturing and agile and lean principles of production, weren't the end-all-be-all. That sometimes, you need to have plan B. And organisations that had already made the move towards digital transformation, that could be cloud-native, cloud-based working with data analytics very assiduously and applying that to their problems, I think did better. Organisations that were on the dragging edge rather than the leading edge of technological and data transformation, I think probably are catching up, and if we do have a financial crisis, the old adage is that you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Some of the companies that may be just struggling and hanging on, if they face some additional financial pressure and haven't made that digital leap might find themselves at a great disadvantage because if their competitors have, there's not gonna be a lot of wiggle room for them to survive.

David Brown

And of course, you've also been a great advocate for a security-minded culture as well. What does a security culture look like when more and more organisations are embracing remote and hybrid working environments?

Dana Gardner

Yeah. So, your security risks have gone up dramatically because more and more people are doing mission critical activities with technology that's going out across public networks and they're using devices in their homes, at the edge, in ways that the corporation can't control. There's really no firewall, literally or figuratively. Everything is loosely coupled. Everything is out in the open internet. So, you need to have a different security posture. You need to think about, “How do I secure things in a way that recognises that we're probably going to be under attack constantly?” There are going to be breaches but we need to be able to react quickly. So, it's sort of like that same operational resilience, having the means and the plans in place to react to what should be anticipated, but can't always be.

So, we're seeing things like zero trust. We're seeing things like air gapping, we're seeing technologies that require people to do multiple authentic levels across multiple applications multiple times a day. But we're seeing that, even as malware has taken off and this Log4J and Log4Shell vulnerability and an open source utility that's so widely used is another indicator of, you know, the vulnerabilities are going to be not diminished. They're going to grow in number and complexity. And so it's incumbent upon us not to just think that we can throw up a garden wall and be immune from it, but how do we coexist and how do we reduce the damage very quickly? And how do we make sure that the data that's most important, the personal, private, health-oriented and financially sensitive information is always protected first and foremost? These are the steps that people have to go through.

And again, there are laggards and there are people that are suffering terribly from ransomware attacks. And there are people who are losing the ability to use their devices in their homes or remote locations. That is a huge impact on productivity. So, security is not an afterthought. It's not separate from digital transformation. It is a part and parcel. So, if you want to transform digitally, you're going to have to transform into a much more security-minded culture. And it has to be pervasive. It has to be your developers, your operators. It's your regulators and the people that are in compliance modes. The people who are thinking about resiliency need to also have a role in that level of resilience. You're resilient against attack and against data breaches.

David Brown

You mentioned productivity briefly there as well. It'd be interesting to get your thoughts. There has been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years about the productivity benefits or otherwise of remote working. So in your futurist talks about what's happening in 2022, you talk about how we've got to adapt to these new operating models we've learned over the last couple years before we get into how you think we're going to start leveraging those operating models. What are your thoughts on productivity gains, all losses associated, and how to mitigate those in a remote working environment?

Dana Gardner

Well, it's hard to quantify these things. And many attempts have been made by economists and data scientists. So ,we're often left with anecdotal and personal experiences to help us understand this. And it's been my experience. And for those that I've worked with, when you give people responsibility and autonomy that are often intertwined, they can be very highly productive. It's when you try to, I guess, forecast how people should work and when they should work that sometimes you lose that culture of innovation. You lose the spark of being inclusive and people who want to be involved rather than just going through the motion.

So I do think that, because we're all juggling and this is another thing, David, that we couldn't have predicted 20 or 30 years ago is just how busy we all are. Right? I mean, some of us thought there'd be a four-day work week, or you know, a 30-hour work week. And in some markets, that's been the case, but in many places, people are working longer and harder than ever, especially when the blurry line between what is work and what is entertainment or what social interactions are, you know… There's not a lot of a concrete boundary between them. But I think if you give people that level of autonomy and agency, that if you tell them what you want them to do, but not how or when to do it, that productivity can be very powerful. And it's not just business productivity, it's personal productivity.

If you could be at home and take care of your household and your family, and have a level of natural activity outside the office and manage your time appropriately, that makes you very personally productive. You can have a better home, a better family, a better health – posture, and you can also do great things for your company. So I think it's a win-win. Many of the studies that some of my clients have done are pointing to that, that you want people to be, I guess, sort of inventors? They invent how they do the job in the context of their lives, rather than just taking instructions on how to do things.

David Brown

Yeah. I was actually reading an interesting article the other day that was initially an advocate of the productivity benefits and working the extra long hours for first stages of the pandemic. But then there was perhaps this bit of fatigue of working from home. And initially it was a bit of a novelty and so everyone was adjusting. And so they're working harder and longer because of that novelty factor. And perhaps a little bit of fatigue is set in, perhaps in certain job roles or certain functions and mentioned some statistics of certain productivity losses, particularly particular markets like Japan, I think was 30% and stuff like that, where they're estimating there's productivity losses. So, it's interesting. I think the challenge for business managers, when they do things, I try to set up a business meeting and they get a response, “I've got my yoga lesson at that time I can't meet up with you.” And it's like, “Well, hang on a second.” 
And so there's a lot to adjust here, right? It's an enormous change. You've talked about these, these changes and this new operating model and, okay, we’ve adjusted to that over the last couple of years. And now you've said, “Okay, now we're going to start leveraging that and create new business efficiency.” And this is where you're putting on your futurist hat for what's coming in 2022 and beyond. Tell us about that. What are you seeing?

Dana Gardner

Right. So, burnout is real. You can't push people too hard and you can't let them push themselves too hard. So, self-awareness about where productivity begins and ends is very important. But one of the things that we're also seeing of course, is the plethora of applications. Many of them are SaaS applications. They're loosely coupled; they're not in an integrated ERP stack [that] a lot of businesses were running themselves [on] you know, over the past 20 years, 30 years. And, you know, you're left as an individual, as a human trying to integrate multiple dynamic SaaS and loosely coupled applications. And that becomes, I think, a productivity hit. And, you know, one of the things we need to do is recognise that people are burning out on authenticating across multiple apps, dealing with multiple interfaces, having to be their own IT department and that the productivity can plateau and even diminish when that becomes prominent.

So, we have to focus more on making people work smarter, not harder. We have to look towards automation and intelligence to help anticipate what people's needs are, but also what their hurdles are going to be and let the technology help nurture what people do best and take on some of the by-rote work. The whole robotic automation and similar technologies are trying to do that. So, there's a lag. I think what we've done is sort of gotten on our skis a little bit too far when it comes to this work at home technology, and we need to bring the technology equation back around to help people be productive in ways that let the machines do what they do best; take advantage of data and analytics that can learn and analyse how people are actually working, and then reinforce what's good and start to weed out what's not good. But we're not there yet. So, I think if these are still early innings of that higher level productivity, where people should be given the tools to be making the decisions and doing the analysis and thinking about processes in markets and success and customer satisfaction, not spending hours a day making applications work or figuring out how to drag data from one place to another.

David Brown

Well, of course, I'm thrilled to hear you say that because at Toro Cloud, we do application integration and automation, so work for automation. So, it's great to hear you say that that's where you think the next phase is for a lot of organisations that need to enable productivity with employees, with remote working and the like. But of course, a large part of digital transformation is also - you touched on this - empowering the individual to not only just be more productive, but make better decisions with better access to data, so that they can actually transform the company by taking them in new directions with new customer service initiatives or new products and services, empowering that employee to make those kind of decisions. Are you witnessing that kind of thing as well?

Dana Gardner

Yeah, for sure. So take application development, for example. So some of the trends that are happening in application development involve things like low-code and no-code, more automation, letting the machines do the grunt work. And so, it's the creativity, and it's the out of the box thinking that humans can do the machines can't that becomes paramount. And I think we're gonna see analogs to that in other business functions. If it works in application development, if you can do it there, you could probably do it just about anywhere. 
But so yes, I think that we're going to need to rethink work literally and rethink about how machines and technology augment people, rather than repaving cow paths or taking processes and giving them minor improvements, just because they're digital and thinking about rather more dramatic and even radical types of shifts. Because, interestingly, right now, David, because of work at home, you can hire labour just about anywhere in the world. They, you and I are all talking from vastly different places, literally on the other side of the planet with ease for short money. So, the sky's the limit when it comes to how to best use human resources, and we can all attain technology off the cloud and analytics-as-a-service off the cloud. So, the sky is kind of the limit to what we can start to do. We shouldn't be timid. I think we should be bold and start thinking rather dramatically about how to refactor work.

David Brown

We had a guest recently where - because you mentioned people, process, and technology - our recent guest was talking about the merging of technology with people. Some of the challenges associated with that is an educational challenge where you need to upskill the people to be able to deal with technology. So, you mentioned yourself, various low-code, no-code tools, but there's still technology where all of a sudden, that citizen developer is now all of a sudden putting on an IT hat as well and then developing things, right? Are our expectations too high? How much of a people-process problem is there here?

Dana Gardner

That's an excellent question. I'm afraid that the digital divide is as deep and wide as ever and is probably going to get worse. Not everybody's a rockstar software developer, right? Not everybody can juggle three or four highly difficult complex processes simultaneously and synthesise them into a new process. So yeah, we do have to be bold, but we also have to be realistic. But I think you're right. Education also needs transformation, right? If we are still educating people to work in a nine-to-five type of a labour environment, doing manufacturing or assembly line or linear processes that may have been necessary 50 years ago, nevermind 30 but are less so now, I think it's important for people to consider that you can't refactor work without refactoring education and giving people all the opportunity that they deserve.
You know, one of the things that's hampering many businesses right now is they just can't find people and it's not just people at low, entry-level jobs. It's across the board from the highest to the lowest levels. And so therefore, we need to bring more people into this ability to be productive in this new kind of digital environment. And, I think, you know, free education incentives, paying people to go to school if really necessary. And it is a lot about incentives and a lot about helping people achieve and overcome obstacles. I mean, there are a lot of difficult obstacles to overcome, to be what we now define as a sort of a “digital warrior” or a “digital worker.” So, we need to level the playing field and we need to encourage and incentivise people to make the leap. And then if [there are] those people who don't choose to do that or can't do that, we need to think about helping them out too

David Brown

Enormous challenges, but exciting times. So, things haven't gotten boring in the last 20 years of studying the market has it?

Dana Gardner

Never. Never boring, no. That would not be the word I could use.

David Brown

Dana, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Can you share with us, with our audience where they can follow you? You have an enormous following on LinkedIn and of course you have your podcast. Can you tell our audience about this?

Dana Gardner

Yeah, I mean, most of the places, when I do publish, I always go out through LinkedIn and through Twitter. So my Twitter handle is “@dana_gardner.” And you can certainly just search my name on LinkedIn and find me there, but those are probably the best places to get a beat on what I'm doing and the type of content that we're creating and the subjects and issues that we're delving into.

David Brown

And of course your podcast is called Briefings Direct as well?

Dana Gardner

Yeah, Briefings Direct is the brand you could search on that as well. But everything I put up on Briefings Direct is also amplified out through Twitter and LinkedIn.

David Brown

Brilliant. Dana, thanks for your time today.

Dana Gardner

My pleasure, David. Thank you!