Category: Thought Leadership

Leonardo da Vinci’s reflection, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” is timeless wisdom gained from his remarkable breadth of studies ranging from history to art to science to innovation. 

By Linda Maclachlan

Simplicity. It’s absolutely essential to the quick adoption of new technologies, new products and even new ideas. Simplification in design, rollouts and use is also where the future of IT is headed, not only because it creates economic, organizational and resource efficiencies, but because it creates faster, easier adoption. Yet, for many IT leaders, simplicity becomes an evermore-difficult practical goal as our world evolves.

Take a look at Amazon’s AWS, which transformed, and is continuing to transform, the way companies deploy and consume computing power. However, there are still countless legacy systems chugging out day-to-day operations on internal data centers with some rather odd integrations to these new cloud applications.  Likely not optimal.

Here’s another example. The rate of mergers and acquisitions has been on the rise since 2009.  Yet, the timeline for completing the business side of the acquisition generally runs far faster than the time and resources needed to integrate the IT components most efficiently.

Simplicity and the C-Suite

Simplicity is no simple task, but a necessary one. How do I make it all happen – on schedule and in budget? How do I forge a path to deliver what the business needs? The promise of, “Someday soon we will go back and clean this all up,” runs counter to the unrelenting fact that life in the technology world only speeds up. And there’s no looking back.

As any CIO knows, simplicity is a nearly impossible challenge… some might even say Sisyphean. When you inherit an environment fraught with disparate systems that lack standardization and process, combined with the pressure to add more and do more, it’s easy to feel like you’re single-handedly pushing a boulder uphill. But savvy business leaders, regardless of whether they hold the title of CEO, CIO, COO, CSO, or Head of Sales, know deep down that the uphill climb of simplification is the right direction to point your boardroom feet. The journey to efficiency, profitability, and real competitive advantage may be a difficult one, but the resulting opportunity to launch innovative products and services is well worth the effort.

The Herculean task is to find order in disorder, and there are two initial steps to take that will help kickstart your IT transformation journey:  consolidation and standardization.

Step 1: Consolidate

Future-focused CIOs know that the first step is to cut out all unnecessary and redundant assets, including systems, applications, hardware, processes, and services. It’s a process known to many gardeners as “deadheading” – cutting all non-essential assets back to the lowest possible place on the vine and consolidating to a single system of engagement.

In an industry with hundreds of thousands of partners and vendors, the idea of a singular IT platform was once a pipedream, but CIOs are quickly learning the power of ONE:  One Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) that is accurate and contains all IT assets, one database of resources, one alerting system that correlates and escalates all monitoring alerts throughout the organization, one change management process to control all system-wide updates, and the list goes on.

A single system of engagement allows CIOs to see the unnecessary complexities, to discover rogue applications, to see wasted cloud storage and expense, and to begin to put 2 and 3 and 2 and 5 together and make 4, ultimately delighting the CFO and paving the way for a smarter way to deploy new ideas.

This process, while often tedious, arduous and even painful, is necessary for CIOs to spearhead in order to accomplish a single, high-level goal: simplify IT operations by creating a baseline for process consistency.

Step 2: Standardize

Once IT systems have been consolidated, the next step on the efficiency journey is process standardization.  While never anyone’s favorite job, the results in increased business profitability and scalability are worth the diligence required to do it properly.

Standardizing everything – from naming conventions to change processes to incident management processes – allows the IT function to operate quickly in response to ever-changing business requirements. System standardization inevitably leads to the golden nuggets of simplifying and standardizing processes.  After all, every organization, in essence, is really just an expansive set of workflow processes.

And it is here – in process simplification done on top of consolidated, standardized, and simplified IT assets – where the magic of the automation journey begins.

As CIOs think about how to move their organizations forward and help make their enterprises “future-ready,” the concept and the power of simplification may seem counter-intuitive when “more” is being asked of CIOs every day.  With apologies to my grade school English teachers, “do less better” is possibly the single-most important IT task to achieve in this era.

Simplicity.  The ultimate sophistication.

The Smarter Way Forward, Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond

By Linda Maclachlan

We decided to share some inside “secret sauce” with our audience. At Entara, our tagline is not just a marketing phrase; it’s the way we classify, organize, and execute work in front of us. It’s also the practical way we engage with our clients in developing and executing a roadmap to the future.

It’s a principle rooted in the Entrepreneurs Operating System (EOS) model. For those not familiar with EOS, it’s a business methodology that brings simplicity, organization, accountability, and ultimately traction to a company on their journey into the future.

One of the key operating principles of EOS is categorizing all ideas, projects, goals, requirements, and problems to be solved into one of three buckets:

• Starting with a 5-year horizon, what will the world look like?  What does our organization look like?  What technology will we need to have in practice then?  Etc.
• As we paint the picture of where we are headed in the next five years, what are the goals we need to achieve in the coming year to stay on course? What new systems need to be delivered?  What changes need to occur in the organization? What problems need to be solved once and for all?
• Then finally, to achieve our yearly goals, what needs to happen this quarter to stay on track?

We call these three buckets Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond, and it’s part of our everyday language at Entara.

It’s so simple, yet so powerful. And it works.

At Entara, we have plenty of those “beyond” projects, and they are listed on our own roadmap to the future so we never lose sight of the journey we are on ourselves.  In our disciplined quarterly meetings, they are reviewed one by one, and we can decide to take any of these actions to each project based on insights and work done since the last quarterly meeting:

• Move it to “tomorrow,” meaning it is now on the docket for the coming year.
• Keep it in “beyond,” either as is or with some tweaks.
• Remove it altogether.

We also have clear, measurable goals and projects for this year, our “tomorrow.”  And finally, we have those goals and projects that are right in front of us for this quarter, our “today.”

As life happens, and new issues arise and new ideas are generated between quarters, the temptation is always there to chase every squirrel, resulting in many projects in process with few completed, otherwise known as chaos.  Most of us have experienced environments like this, and it’s a losing battle. Morale goes down, there are not enough resources, and too often the projects have not been thoroughly analyzed before beginning the work. Of course, the real problem with squirrel-chasing is that the journey stops, and the promised business benefits of all the “work” being done aren’t there. Our disciplined process stops that vicious cycle.  Now, the response to that great idea is, “Fantastic! Let’s add it to the Beyond,” knowing it will be discussed by the leadership team in less than 90 days from today, and 90 days goes by quickly.

I went to Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Business, and I am grateful for what I learned there, the people I met, and the experiences I’ve had as a direct result. Entara would not exist today without that experience. However, the older I get, the more convinced I am that da Vinci was right: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

We’ve been using this simple EOS model internally for over three years with great success, and we are now embedding some of its crucial elements into the way we engage with clients as part of our standard, ongoing roadmapping process:

• Where do we need to be in 5 years?  (Beyond.)
• Where do we need to be by the end of this year? (Tomorrow.)
• Where do we need to be the end of this quarter? (Today.)

One last point on the specifics of what goes on the roadmap:  Keeping simplification projects on the docket for every “today” and “tomorrow” provides the space needed to journey with a steady foot into the “beyond,” where just as da Vinci realized, the power of the future lies in the art of taking our progressively complex world and finding the simplest solutions. No organization, no department, and no person can keep adding without subtracting and condensing at some point.

By following this super simple process, it’s magical how the “beyond” continuously evolves into “tomorrow,” and the “tomorrow” evolves into “today,” pointing the best way forward for all, along with measurable success.

To the journey!

The Smarter Way Forward

Today, Tomorrow and Beyond