CIO CIO

00:00 Hi, everybody. Welcome to Global Tech Tales: What Buyers Want. I’m Keith Shaw here to moderate a discussion with other editors from around the world about technology and leadership topics. Joining me for today’s show. Matt Egan, my co-host, the global content editorial director at Foundry. He is representing the UK and Cathy O’Sullivan, she is the editor in chief of APAC for CIO and CSO coming to us from tomorrow in New Zealand. And you get to joke if you know about your geography. And Valerie Potter, she is the managing editor of features from Computerworld, also in North America/United States, somewhere in a in a bunker, right, right. Val, exactly. All right. Welcome everybody to the show. Hey, you can just wait. Thanks. Okay, so Matt, this episode, we’re on the third episode now, and we’re talking about IT careers in this one, it’s a little bit different from our other episodes, where we were covering a specific technology, such as artificial intelligence or cloud computing was our last one. So why is this the topic that and why do we think that this is still important from the IT leader perspective? Sure.Well, as you know, Keith, we talk to it buyers every day in the world’s top markets across the globe, are hundreds of journalists are talking to IT and business leaders, professionals, operatives, and they’re doing that to understand the real world, lived experience of those who work in it. What matters to it buyers. It’s in the name of the show, right? And so in this series, that’s what we share, a deep understanding of the real views of real it buyers in all the world’s major markets, around key topics and careers is a huge topic for IT leaders how to develop their own careers, maintain their own careers, but also, and I think maybe even principally, how to build, maintain winning teams. And I’ll give you a small piece of evidence for that in our latest CIO pulse survey, which we did late last year, when asked CIOs, said that skills was the most important thing that their organization was the least focused on. In fact, only 20% of CIO respondents strongly agreed that their organization had the right level of focus on skills, on developing their teams, on staffing. So you can see that as we head into 2025 like all aspects of careers, from building those teams to managing our own careers are hugely important to it buyers, all right, and and we usually start to show off with some statistics.So as I was doing research for for this episode, I did find three different surveys from from either different articles on the foundry sites or out there in the world, and I just wanted to just pepper the conversation, or start the conversation with these three statistics. So the first one is that IT organizations are reporting that burnout is having a big impact on companies. A new survey from the Upwork Research Institute said that 71% of full time employees say they are burned out, and 65% said they are struggling with employer demands on productivity. In addition, 81% of global C suite leaders acknowledged that increased demands on workers over the past year the second the second one is that it recruitment firm Harvey Nash has said that CIOs are decidedly pessimistic about it hiring in the new year with only 36% saying that their IT head counts would increase in 2025 which is the lowest sentiment since 2011 and then the third stat that that jumped out at me around this this topic was nearly three fourths of women in it have said that they work longer hours to improve their chances of career advancement due to in part, to gender bias and discrimination. And a Corona survey said 71% of respondents said that they work longer hours in hopes of more quickly advancing their careers, and 70% said men in it were likely to advance their careers or received promotions more quickly than women. So with that framework like, what are your thoughts on the market as we head into 2025 around either looking for a job, retaining a team and Val I know that computer world just recently published its best places to work in it, and a lot of these issues came up when you were discussing the companies out there that are, that are great at a lot of these topics, absolutely.Well, in general, I’d say, I mean, the mood is pretty grim out there, you know, among, you know, sort of anecdotally seasoned IT pros who were laid off over the past couple of years are really having difficulty finding new work, and at the same time, companies are saying they can’t find tech workers with the right skills and experience. So there’s a real disconnect there that’s not so prevalent among the best places, companies, you know, those. These are the, these are the companies where IT pros want to work. So, you know, it’s not quite the same situation for them. But even they are saying there’s, there’s some pessimism out there about the economy and, you know, uncertainty. Be there’s a lot of disruption going on in the world right now, and I think companies just are a little hesitant to go on any kind of big hiring sprees at the moment. So that’s left everybody feeling uncertain.Yeah. Cathy, what are you hearing about from your neck of the woods, in New Zealand and Australia, in that whole area?Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, there’s been an increased focus on costs. So and certainly IT budgets aren’t what they were maybe in the in previous years, certainly around the pandemic times. So with that in mind, people are being asked to do more. They’re certainly being asked to do more with less, and that has an effect both on IT leaders and their teams. And it is interesting, though,

We all have them. By “we” I mean we process optimization consultants, and by “them” I mean our pithy and entertaining stories of how, with little more than a nudge, wink, or perceptive squint, we were able to double a client’s throughput while cutting their process cycle time and marginal costs in half, all the while reducing defects along the way. My personal favorite entailed getting a client team to stop gumming up the works. It turned out they were getting their work done by misusing one of their company’s ERP modules, thereby polluting the ERP database. We had IT train them in the use of a different module instead — one that was designed to support the exact process they wanted. Problem solved, for not enough effort to even bother billing the client for our time. The purpose of triumphant process stories like these is to instill a perception that we can find examples just like them in a client’s operations, slaying that client’s inefficiency dragons without even breathing hard — especially but not limited to the legendary “Anything not worth doing isn’t worth improving” opportunities. source

Overview In this episode, we sit down with Shumon Zaman, the Chief Information and Digital Officer at Ali&Sons, to explore the most significant technological advancements and trends shaping 2025. Zaman shares his insights on the evolving landscape of AI, machine learning, 5G, and cloud computing, particularly within the Middle East. As industries in the region continue to embrace digital transformation, he highlights standout applications and opportunities while discussing the challenges businesses may face in the coming years. Register Now source

Where are those workloads going? “There’s a renewed focus on on-premises, on-premises private cloud, or hosted private cloud versus public cloud, especially as data-heavy workloads such as generative AI have started to push cloud spend up astronomically,” adds Woo. “By moving applications back on premises, or using on-premises or hosted private cloud services, CIOs can avoid multi-tenancy while ensuring data privacy.” That’s one reason why Forrester predicts four out of five so called cloud leaders will increase their investments in private cloud by 20% this year. That said, 2025 is not just about repatriation. “Private cloud investment is increasing due to gen AI, costs, sovereignty issues, and performance requirements, but public cloud investment is also increasing because of more adoption, generative AI services, lower infrastructure footprint, access to new infrastructure, and so on,” Woo says. Hidden costs of public cloud For St. Jude’s Research Hospital, the public cloud is a good way to get knowledge into the hands of researchers who aren’t part of their ecosystem today, says SVP and CIO Keith Perry. The hospital uses on-prem supercomputers to generate much of its research data, and the movement of that data into and out of the public cloud can become expensive. “The academic community expects data to be close to its high-performance compute resources, so they struggle with these egress fees pretty regularly,” he says. source

00:00 Hi, I’m Lee Rennick, executive director of CIO communities for cio.com, and I am thrilled to be here at the CIO 100 and Symposium in Colorado Springs with Marykay Wells. Marykay is the CIO of Pearson, and I’m really looking forward to interviewing you today. Marykay. So, I was hoping you might be able to introduce yourself and tell us about your your career for having me.00:00:32:31 – 00:01:04:01UnknownThanks. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. So I am a CIO, as you said at Pearson. Yeah, I’m part of the, executive management team and I’ve been working there now I can’t believe for ten years. So congratulations. A lot of change. Yeah. Pearson is, digital education company. Yeah. And, like I said, I ran the infrastructure for enterprise, technology and anything that’s common around our product platforms.00:01:04:01 – 00:01:26:57UnknownI we run that in our team. And I’ve really enjoyed my time there. Personally, I’ll just tell you a little bit. Yeah. Myself. I live in North Carolina and, have two, adult daughters and a wonderful husband. Oh. That’s wonderful. That’s very nice here. And I know you mentioned you’ve been in Canada quite a bit. I’m Canadian and you’ve traveled up to our country as well, which is fantastic.00:01:26:57 – 00:01:47:13UnknownI love Canada. Well, you’re welcome anytime to come visit. Well, I appreciate you being here today. Mary Kay, thanks so much for joining us. And congratulations on your CIO Award winning project. I’d love to learn more about it. It’s called meeting the challenge of technical debt through innovation. So a lot of the CIOs are talking about technical debt.00:01:47:13 – 00:02:10:10UnknownI’d love to hear more about the project. Yeah. So first of all, we are honored to be, awarded this, a CIO 100 award. It’s and it’s it’s really a collaborative effort across many people at Pearson. And so I’ll tell you where we started with the award. So, when we had a lot of there was a lot of chatter.00:02:10:11 – 00:02:40:03UnknownAnd at the end of 2022 around, you know, airlines having a lot of tech debt, you know, really impacting the business and the customers. And really we used that as a platform to say, you know, we talk about tech debt, but no one really measures it. So we wanted to really understand how we really attacked it. And to reduce the, the tech debt that we had a career center Pearson is 180 years old.00:02:40:08 – 00:03:02:59UnknownReally started out as a holding company when I joined. We own the Financial Times and a lot of a lot of properties that weren’t even education properties. And so typically companies have, the that that are really holding companies have done a lot of acquisitions really. You know, they acquired tech debt over a period of time, even though we’ve done a lot of transformation at Pearson.00:03:03:04 – 00:03:36:20Unknown So what we did is we said, you know, how do we really start to measure our technical debt. So we looked at our security posture, we looked at the number of customer impacting incidents. We looked at our ability to make changes to the technology and how quickly we could do that and be responsive. We looked at, end of life servers, what was in our data centers, and we came up with an algorithm to really understand, you know, we we, we formulated a score and that wasn’t just, wow, enterprise technology.00:03:36:20 – 00:03:58:23UnknownThat was for all of our technology across Pearson. And we we really got everybody on board with understanding, you know, making sure that we first of all measured our assets. We understood where our software did what our software did, what was what was facing customers, what was really, revenue generating and really critical to the business.00:03:58:23 – 00:04:23:20UnknownAnd we, we like I said, we formulated an algorithm and we we provided that tech that score out. And then we set goals for everybody to eliminate their tech debt. And so that was across the organization. And now we still we used ServiceNow as our platform. Yep. Right. And it was it’s a great platform to actually start to measure and run your technology organization.00:04:23:25 – 00:04:34:55UnknownAnd we’ve used ServiceNow for quite some time. So it was it was a great it was a great, platform for us to really innovate on and, and really start to measure our effectiveness.00:04:35:02 – 00:04:44:45 UnknownWell, it sounds like and I was just thinking, while you were saying that you’re an educational organization, and it sounds like this whole process was an educational process across the organization.00:04:44:45 – 00:05:09:39UnknownAnd correct, it absolutely was, because, you know, it’s it’s really easy to talk about. Yeah. And it’s really hard to really, you know, we need to really not just make everybody understand the critical nature of why it’s really important to make sure that your technology is current and we’re really yeah, nurturing our, our technology just like we would any other asset.00:05:09:44 – 00:05:29:44UnknownYeah. Company. And so we were able to really achieve, a tremendous amount of value from doing that exercise. So we reduced our incoming, our incoming tickets by 60%. Wow. And we. Wow. Are, are,00:05:29:44 – 00:05:40:29Unknown55% of our of our applications are products that we called, you know, had high tech debt because we had a cut cutoff, we reduced those to.00:05:40:29 – 00:06:07:08UnknownSo we were able to really, eliminate about 40% of our end of life servers. So and then we’re able to now be, a lot more responsive to customer issues. Wow. That’s fantastic. It just sounds like such a very important project to the business. And it’s been hugely successful. So congratulations and congratulations on the award. Okay, so I spoke to your colleague Nathan, who is helping set up this interview.00:06:07:08 – 00:06:29:03UnknownAnd we were talking about questions. And I said, well, I’d love to learn more about sort of diversity in technology. And he said, oh,

It’s a good idea to establish a governance policy supporting the framework. This includes the creation of landing zones, defining the VPN, gateway connections, network policies, storage policies, hosting key services within a private subnet and setting up the right IAM policies (resource policies, setting up the organization, deletion policies). Creating awareness of the policy of least privilege and addressing frustrations when cloud users ask for more to play with, and as a cloud CoE team, you are rightfully holding your ground that comes with it. The cloud CoE team should collect feedback from the users and tweak policies along the way as they deem fit. As the enterprise user community matures through this learning curve, the CoE team has a pivotal role to play in engaging them proactively, supporting them, meeting their needs and helping them address their pain points to lay a strong foundation for building a robust cloud infrastructure that is scalable to deliver business value.  Partnering with the enterprise architecture team in this stage of the cloud journey can speed up cloud maturity and buttress the foundation further on solid bearings. The cloud CoE team of architects should work with the EA to align with the reference architecture patterns that the CoE team would like the application teams/product teams to follow in their solution design. This strategic and collaborative work serves as a blueprint for the architects to ‘show and tell’ the concept of designing cloud-effective solutions and shape mindsets towards the ‘making money with the cloud’ vision. Every company that wants to succeed in scaling AI solutions and capabilities today needs to get this design thinking working for them. Otherwise, it’s like the story of ‘sour grapes’ with high cloud cost bills coming their way with little value added in the AI domain as it has been for a lot of companies in 2024.  3. WALK FASTER: Develop cloud adoption planning and migration roadmap   With the CoE and EA teams working in tandem, it’s time to engage the business stakeholders/product owners and develop the plan and roadmap. Understanding business constraints and priorities, and evaluating domains that have opportunities to expand their revenue and grow exponentially upon moving to the cloud are the key parameters to keep in mind. I recommend a structured approach for this phase of the journey.  source

Starting in the second quarter, IBM will offer “RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server” to help enterprises migrate their SAP applications from Power servers on-premises into the cloud in as little as 90 days, working with its own IBM Consulting or other SAP partners. To further speed things along, it will make its new IBM Transformation Suite for SAP Applications available to other SAP partners. This includes a bundle of software and services for assessing existing IT environments, migrating data, and automating testing. The new offering provides “another option for SAP customers who want to move to the cloud and run S/4HANA to utilize the IBM Power Virtual Server,“ said Scott Bickley, advisory practice lead at Info-Tech Research. ‘Unique advantage’ says IBM According to a product advisory from IBM, RISE with SAP “brings together outcome-driven services, Cloud ERP with SAP S/4HANA, and additional platforms to rethink the enterprise operating model. IBM Power Virtual Server offers a unique advantage to the enterprise that run SAP landscape on IBM Power Servers: It is designed for a faster and non-disruptive move to RISE with SAP.” source

The management of Software GmbH, which will continue to act as the holding company for ARIS, Adabas & Natural (A&N) and the central functions of the Software AG Group, has been transferred by financial investor Silver Lake Partners to Martin Biegel, Martin Clemm, Robin Colman and Toktam Khatibzadeh with immediate effect. Important contribution to development and decline In his role as head of the company, Brahmawar has a mixed record — but Silver Lake is not entirely innocent of this. Taking over as CEO in August 2018, Brahmawar was instrumental in Software AG’s transformation from a legacy software company to a modern subscription and SaaS business focused on recurring revenue growth. He also spearheaded the acquisition of StreamSets, combining it with webMethods into a unified AI-powered platform, Super-iPaaS. At the same time, however, he also played a leading role in the subsequent sell-off of the company led by Silver Lake Partners. While Software AG hoped for support in its growth plans when the financial investor came on, the opposite was ultimately the case:  After completion of the takeover, the investors sold the newly created integration business to IBM for €2.13 billion with the help of Brahmawar. The CEO was also instrumental in the spin-off and divestiture of TrendMiner, Cumulocity and Alfabet.  source

I was recently speaking with a client who stated, “We’ve been doing RPA (robotic process automation) for years. What’s the difference with agentic AI? Should I really care, or is it all part of the GenAI hype?” Valid question. With the buzz around GenAI, it’s easy to see where this confusion and skepticism comes from. However, understanding the differences between RPA and agentic AI — and how they complement each other — can unlock major benefits through automation. A key tool for organizations striving for an edge, automation has become a cornerstone of operational efficiency and innovation. OK. So, what is the difference between RPA and agentic AI? RPA refers to software tools designed to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks by mimicking human interactions with digital systems. It operates through predefined workflows, handling structured data in tasks such as data entry, invoice processing, and report generation. It’s particularly effective in industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics, where efficiency in routine processes is paramount. Agentic AI, on the other hand, represents more capable autonomous decision-making, learning, and interaction. Unlike RPA, which executes static instructions, agentic AI adapts dynamically, processing unstructured data, analyzing context, and interacting conversationally with users —making it more suitable for complex problem-solving and decision-making scenarios. Since people like lists, let’s differentiate the five key ways RPA and agentic AI differ, and then I’ll wrap up by discussing how they complement each other. It’s not a binary choice (RPA or agentic AI); it’s more blended. Five key differences between RPA and agentic AI Scope of automation RPA: Focuses on automating highly repetitive, rule-based tasks that mimic human actions. Examples include copying data between systems, generating invoices, processing claims, or assigning permissions when employees are hired or leave an organization. It operates within well-defined boundaries and workflows. Agentic AI: Expands beyond task automation to include decision-making, planning, and dynamic interactions. It excels in environments requiring analysis of unstructured data, such as customer support or supply chain optimization. Agentic AI can interpret nuances, learn from interactions, and adapt its behavior over time. Flexibility and adaptability RPA: Operates on scripts and rules, making it rigid in adapting to new or unexpected scenarios. If an input or process deviates from predefined parameters, the system may fail or require manual intervention. Agentic AI: Exhibits flexibility by learning from data and interactions. It can analyze complex situations, infer context, and adjust workflows on the fly, making it resilient in dynamic environments. For instance, agentic AI could detect anomalies in a supply chain and recommend alternative routes without prior programming. Integration and orchestration RPA: Integrates with existing systems through APIs or user interfaces but often requires significant setup and maintenance. It performs specific tasks in isolation, with limited orchestration across diverse platforms. Agentic AI: Acts as a connective layer across legacy and modern systems, orchestrating processes autonomously. It ensures smooth data flow and efficient operations by making intelligent decisions about which systems to engage and how. For example, an agentic AI system managing customer support could simultaneously pull data from a CRM system, a product database, and an ERP system to resolve complex customer queries. Decision-making and context awareness RPA: Executes tasks based on fixed rules and predefined conditions. It lacks the ability to interpret broader contexts or make decisions beyond its programming. Agentic AI: Brings context awareness to automation. It analyzes intent, weighs multiple variables, and makes informed decisions, such as identifying fraud patterns in financial transactions or optimizing energy consumption in a smart grid. User interaction and autonomy RPA: Typically requires human oversight to initiate tasks and address exceptions. Its role is that of a digital assistant, working alongside human operators to enhance productivity. Agentic AI: Can operate autonomously or engage users through conversational interfaces like chatbots. It provides a more interactive experience, collaborating with humans or independently performing tasks like conducting customer surveys or troubleshooting IT issues. Complementary potential: Pairing RPA with agentic AI While these differences highlight distinct strengths, RPA and agentic AI are not mutually exclusive. Pairing them can unlock additional levels of efficiency and effectiveness for organizations. Here’s how: Enhanced workflow automation RPA can handle straightforward, rule-based tasks, while agentic AI addresses complex decision-making and dynamic interactions. For instance, in a customer service scenario, RPA might extract and populate data from a CRM system, while agentic AI analyzes customer sentiment and provides tailored recommendations during live interactions. Scalable error handling RPA systems often struggle with exceptions or unstructured inputs. By integrating agentic AI, organizations can build systems capable of interpreting and resolving exceptions autonomously, reducing the need for manual intervention. For example, an RPA bot processing invoices might hand off unusual cases to an AI system for context-based analysis and resolution. Dynamic adaptation in operations Agentic AI’s adaptability can complement RPA’s precision. In supply chain management, RPA might execute routine inventory checks, while agentic AI adjusts procurement plans based on market trends, weather conditions, or geopolitical developments. Enhanced customer experience Combining RPA and agentic AI can elevate customer interactions. RPA automates back-end processes, such as retrieving account details, while agentic AI engages customers through personalized, conversational interfaces that anticipate needs and provide proactive solutions. Intelligent orchestration across systems In IT operations, RPA can perform tasks like logging incidents, while agentic AI correlates data from multiple sources to identify root causes and recommend resolutions. Combined, they enable a seamless, end-to-end automation ecosystem. Conclusion: There is no “versus” for RPA and agentic AI RPA and agentic AI are technologies that address different aspects of automation. RPA excels at optimizing repetitive, rule-based tasks; agentic AI has the potential to deliver value in environments demanding flexibility, decision-making, and context awareness. One is not innately better than the other. They have different limitations and complementary advantages. By integrating RPA with agentic AI, organizations can build more robust, adaptive systems that combine the precision of rule-based automation with the intelligence and autonomy of AI. Learn more about IDC’s research for technology leaders OR subscribe today to receive industry-leading research directly to your inbox. International Data Corporation