How agile Enterprise Architecture builds agile business advantage

The next BriefingsDirect digital business trends discussion explores how Enterprise Architecture (EA) defines and supports more agile business methods and outcomes.

We will now learn how Enterprise Architects embrace agile approaches to build competitive advantages for enterprises and governments, as well as to keep those organizations more secure and compliant.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about attaining agility by the latest EA approaches, we are now joined by our panel, Mats Gejnevall, Enterprise Architect at minnovate and Member of The Open Group Agile Architecture Work Group; Sonia Gonzalez, Forum Director of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group; Walters Obenson, Director of the Agile Architecture Framework at The Open Group, and Łukasz Wrześniewski, Enterprise Architect and Agile Transformation Consultant. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Mats, what trends are driving the choice and motivation behind a career in EA? What are some of the motivations these days that are driving people into this very important role?

Gejnevall

Gejnevall: Most people are going into EA because they want to have a holistic view of the problem at hand. I do think that EA is a mindset that you can use to apply to any type of issue or problem you have. You look at an issue from many different perspectives and try to understand the fit between the issue or the problem and potential solutions.

That’s human nature to want to do, to look at things from a holistic point of view. It’s such an interesting area to be in, because you can apply it to just about everything. Particularly, a general EA application, where you look at the business, how it works, and how that will affect the IT part of it. So looking at that holistic view I think is the important part -- and that’s the motivation.

Gardner: Łukasz, why do you think agility particularly is well addressed by EA?

Wrześniewski: I agree with Mats that EA provides a holistic view to understand how organizations work and can enable agility. As one of the main enablers for agility, EA changes the organization in terms of value. Nowadays agility is the trend, the new way of working and how the organization transforms itself for scaling the enterprise. EA is one of the critical success factors.

EA’s holistic point of view

Gardner: It’s one thing to be a member of this noble profession; it’s another for organizations to use them well.

Mats, how should organizations leverage architects to better sustain an agile approach and environment? It takes a receptive culture. How do organizations need to adjust?

Gejnevall: First of all, we need to distinguish between being agile doing EA and EA supporting an Agile approach. They are two very different things.

Let’s discuss being agile doing EA. To create a true agile EA, the whole organization needs to be agile, it’s not just the IT part. EA needs to be agile and loosely coupled, one of the key concepts, applied both to the business and the IT side.

But to become agile doing EA, means adopting the agile mindset, too. We talked earlier about EA being the mindset. Agile is also a mindset – how you think about things, how to do things in different ways than you have been doing before, and to look at all the different agile practices out there.

For instance, you have sprints, iterations, demos, and these kinds of things. You need to take them into your EA way of working and create an agile way of working. You also need to connect your EA with the solution development in agile ways. So EA and solution development in an agile way needs to connect in the long-term.

Gardner: Mats, it sounds a little bit like the chicken and the egg. Which comes first, the EA or the agile environment? Where do you begin?

Change your mind for enterprise agility

Wrześniewski:

Wrześniewski: Everything is about achieving the agility in the enterprise. It’s not about doing the architecture. Doing the architecture in an agile way is the one thing, but our main goal is to achieve enterprise agility. EA is just a means to do that. So we can do the architecture in a really agile way. We can do the sprints, iterations, and apply the different agile methodologies to deliver architecture.

But also, we can do architecture in more traditional way, the understanding of how a system is complex and how to transform the system in a proper way, the organization as a system, and we can achieve agility.

That’s a very important factor when it comes to people’s mentality and how the people work in the organization. That’s a very big challenge to an organization, to change the way of working, to change the mindset, and really the Enterprise Architect has to sometimes take the shoes of the psychologist.

Gonzalez: Like Łukasz said, it’s the mindset and to change your mind. At first, organizations need to be agile based on Agile principles, such as delivering value frequently and aligning with the business strategy. And when you do that, you also have to change your EA capability to become more agile, starting with the process and the way that you do EA.

For example, using sprints, like Łukasz said, and also to be aware of how EA governance can support agile. As you know, it’s important to deliver value frequently, but it has to be aligned with the organization view and strategy, like Mats said at the beginning, to have the overall view of the organization, but also to be aware, to handle risk, and also addressing compliance. You may go through an agile effort without considering the whole enterprise, and you are facing the risk of different teams doing things in an agile way, but not connected to each other.

It’s a change of mindset that will automatically make you change the way you are doing EA.

Value stream helps express the value that an organization produces for its stakeholders, the outcomes it produces, and the different stages needed to produce that value. It provides a concept that's less detailed than looking at your individual business processes.

Gejnevall: As Łukasz was saying, I think it’s very much connected to the entire organization becoming agile. It’s a challenge. If you want to do EA for an agile organization, that’s something that probably needs to be done. You need to plan, but also open up the change process so it can change in a correct and slower way, because you can’t just come at it top-down, to make an organization agile top-down, it has to come both from top-down and bottom-up.

Gardner: I also hear people asking, “I have heard of Agile development, and now I am hearing about agile enterprise. Is this something different than DevOps, is it more than DevOps?” My impression is that it is much more than DevOps, but maybe we can address that.

Mats, how does DevOps fit into this for those people that are thinking of agile only in terms of development?

Gejnevall: It depends on the normal way of doing Agile development, doing something in short iterations. And then you have some demos at the end, retrospectives, and some planning for the next iteration. And there is some discussion ongoing right now whether or not the demo needs to be something executable, that it’s used quickly in the organization. Or it could be just an architecture piece, a couple of models that are showing some aspect of things. In my view, it doesn’t have to be something executable.

And also when you look at DevOps as well, there are a lot of discussions now about industrial DevOps, where you actually produce not software but other technical stuff in an agile way, with iterations, and you do it incrementally.

Wrześniewski: EA and architecture work as an enabler that allow for increasing complexity. We have many distributed teams that are working on the one product in DevOps, not run on Agile, and the complexity of the product, of the environment will be growing.

Architecture can put it in a proper direction. And I mean intentional architecture that is not like big upfront design, like in traditional waterfall, but intentional architecture that enables the iterations and drives DevOps into the proper direction to reduce complexity -- and reduces the possibility of failure in product development.

Gardner: I have also heard that architecture is about shifting from building to assembly, that it becomes repeatable and crosses organizational boundaries. Does anyone have a response to this idea of shifting from building to assembly and why it’s important?

Strong building blocks bring success

Wrześniewski: The use of microservices, containers, and similar technologies will mean components that you can assemble into entire products. These components are replaceable. It’s like the basic elements of EA when talking about the architecture and the building blocks, and good composition of the building blocks to deliver products.

Architecture perfectly addresses this problem and shift. We have already had this concept for years in EA.

Gardner: Anyone else on this topic of moving toward assembly, repeatability, and standardization?

Gejnevall: On the IT side, I think that’s quite common. It’s been common for many years in different ways and then new things happen. We talked about service-orientation for quite a while and then we started talking about microservices. These are all types of loosely coupled systems that become much more agile in certain ways.

The interesting thing is to look at the business side of things. How can you make the business side become more agile? We have done a lot of workshops around service-orienting the business, making it capability-based and sustainable. The business consists of a bunch of services, so capabilities, and you can connect these capabilities to value streams and change the value streams in reaction to changes in the business side. That’s much easier than the old way of having strict boundaries between business units and business services that are developed.

We are now trying to move the thinking from the IT side up into the business side to enable the business to become much more componentized as you put different business services that the organization produces together in new ways and allow the management to come up with new and innovative ideas.

Gardner: That gets to the heart of what we are trying to accomplish here. But what are some of the common challenges to attaining such agility, when we move both IT and the business to an agile perspective of being able to react and move, but without being brittle or having processes that can be extended -- without chaos and complexity?

One of the challenges for the business architecture is the proper partitioning the architecture to distinguish the capabilities across the organizational silos.That means keeping the proper level of detail that is connected to the organizational strategy, and to be able to understand the system.

Wrześniewski: One of the challenges for the business architecture is the proper partitioning of the architecture to distinguish the capabilities across the organizational silos. That means keeping the proper level of detail that is connected to the organizational strategy, and to be able to understand the system. Another big challenge is also to get the proper sponsorship for such activity and so to proceed with the transformation across the organization.

Gejnevall: Change is always hard for a lot of people. And we are trying to change, and to have people live in a more changeable world than they have been in before. That’s going to be very hard. Because people don’t like change, we are going to have to motivate people much more and have them understand why we need to change.

But change is going to be happening quicker and quicker, and if we create a much more agile enterprise, changes will keep rolling in faster and faster all of the time.

Wrześniewski: One of the areas where I ran into a problem when creating an architecture in an agile way was that if you have lots and lots of agile projects ongoing, or agile teams ongoing, you have to have a lot of stakeholders that come and watch these demos and have relevant opinions about them. From my past experiences of doing EA, it’s always hard to get the correct stakeholders’ involvement. And that’s going to be even harder, because now the stakeholders are looking at hundreds of different agile sprints at the same time. Will there be enough stakeholders for all of that?

Gardner: Right, of course you have to address the people, the process, and the technology, so the people, maybe even the most important part nowadays.

Customer journey from finish to start

Gonzalez

Gonzalez: With all of those agile digital trends, what is more important now is to have two things in mind, a product-centric view and the customer journey. In order to do that the different layers that aren’t traditional architecture are blurry, because now it’s not about business and IT anymore -- it’s about the organization as a whole that needs to be agile.

And in that regard, for example, like Mats and Łukasz have said, the right stakeholder needs to be in for the whole process. So it’s no longer saying, “I am the business, I am giving this request.” And then the IT people need to solve it. It’s not about that anymore. It’s having in mind that the product has services included, has an IT component, and also a business component.

When you are building your customer journey, just start from the very end, the connection with the customer, and move back all the way to the background and platform that are delivering the IT capabilities.

So it’s about having a more cross view of doing architecture, which is important.

Gardner: How does modeling and a standardized approach to modeling help overcome some of these challenges? What is it about what EA that allows for agility to become a common thread across an organization?

Wrześniewski: When it comes to the modeling, the models are different, so different viewpoints are just the tools for EA. Enterprise Architects should choose proper means to define the architecture that should enable the change that the organization needs.

So the common understanding -- or maybe some stereotype of the Enterprise Architect -- is they are the guys that draw the lines and boxes and deliver only big documentation, but then nobody uses it.

The challenge here is to deliver the MVPs in terms of modeling that the development teams and business will consider as something valuable and that can guide them. It’s not about making nice documentation, depositories in the tools, even if somebody is happy with some nice sketch on paper. It’s good architecture for the architect, because the architecture is about enabling the change in the organization and supporting the business and IT to deliver value, it’s not about only documenting every component. This is my opinion about what is the role of the architect and the model.

And, of course, we many different methods and conventions and the architect should choose the proper one for the organization.

Model collaborations create solutions

Gejnevall: I don’t think that the architects should sit around and model on their own, it should be a collaboration between the solution architect and the solution developers in some ways. It’s a collaborative effort, where you actually work on the architecture together. So you don’t have to hand over a bunch of papers to the solution developers later on, they already know the whole stuff.

So you are working in a continuous way of moving the material over to them, and you send it over to them in pieces, start with the most important pieces first or the slices of the architecture that is the most important and is most valuable, that’s sort of the whole Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) approach. You can create lots of small MVAs, and then together with the solution teams allow them to work on that. It continuously creates new MVAs and the solution team continuously develops new MVPs. And that will go on for the entire length of a project, if that’s what you are working on, or for a product.

Gonzalez: In terms of modeling, there are at least two ways to see this. One of them is the fact that you need to model your high-level landscape for the enterprise in order to have this strategic view. You have some tools to identify which items you should have priorities for, going into your backlog and then going into the iteration, you need to be aligned with that.

Also, for example, you can model high-level value streams, identify key capabilities and then try to define which one would be the item you would be delivering, in that you don’t need to do a lot of modeling, just high-level modeling which you are going to depict that.

Having lots of corporate architecture allows you to facilitate these different building blocks for changing. And there are lots of tools in the market now that will allow you to have automation in the things you are doing.

On the other hand, we have other models that are more solution-level-oriented and in that case, one of the challenges that architects have now in relationship to modeling is how to deal with the fact that models are changing – and should change faster now because trends are changing and the market is changing. So there are different techniques that can be used for that. For example, test-driven design, domain design, domain-driven design, refactoring, and some others that support agile modeling.

Also, like Mats mentioned, having lots of corporate architecture that would allow you to facilitate these different building blocks for changing. And there are a lot of tools in the market now that will allow you to have automation in the things you are doing. For example, to automate testing, which is something that we should do. It’s actually one of the key components of DevOps to automate the testing, to view how this facility really continues with the integration, the development, and finally, the delivery.

Gardner: Sonia, you mentioned automation, but a lot of organizations, enterprises and governments are saddled with legacy systems. That can be quite complex, having older back end systems that require a lot of manual support. How do we move past the restraints, if you will, of back-end systems, legacy systems, and still become agile?

Combine old and new

Gonzalez: That’s a very good question, Dana. That’s precisely one of the stronger things of our EA. Łukasz mentioned that is the fact that you can use it in different ways and adapt it to different uses.

So, you can, for example, if you have a bank where you usually have a lot of systems, you have legacy systems that are very difficult to change and risky to change. So, what a company should do is to have this combined approach saying, “Okay, I have a more traditional EA to handle my background systems because they are more stable and perhaps require fewer changes.”

Obenson

But on the other hand, if you have your end-user platform, such as online banking or mobile banking, that development should be faster. You can have an agile view on that. So you can have a combined view.

However, we also depend on the background. One of the things that companies are doing right now is to try to go over components and services, microservices, and outsourcing to build a corporate architecture for customer services platforms without having to change all the background systems at once because that’s very risky.

So it’s some kind of like a combined effort that it can be used in these cases.

Gardner: Anyone else have some insights on how to make agile EA backward compatible?

Wrześniewski: What Sonia said is really important, that we have some sort of combined or hybrid approach for EA. You will always have some projects that run in the agile part, some projects that have a more traditional approach that are longer, and that the delivery of architecture will take a longer time to reduce the risk when we are replacing some, for example, core banking system. The role of the EA is to know how to combine these different approaches and how to find the silver bullets to solve all the different situations.

So, we wouldn’t be always looking for the organization on the one perspective that we are agile and everything that was before is a batch practice. We try to combine, and this is the evolution of organization’s new approach. So we will have to step by step improve the organization to get the best results if we are completely agile.

Gardner: Walters brought up the important issue of governance. How can agile EA allow organizations to be faster, focused on business outcomes, and also be more secure and more compliant? How does EA and agile EA help an organization attain both a secure and compliant environment?

Security architecture essential

Gejnevall: You need to have a security architecture, and that has to be set up in a very loosely coupled way so you can select the security features that are needed for your specific project.

You need to have that security architecture as a reference model at the bottom of your architecture. That is something you need to follow. But then the security architecture is not just the IT part of it, it’s also the business side of things, because security has got a lot to do with the processes and the way a company works.

All of that needs to be taken into consideration when we do the architecture and it needs to be known by all the solution development teams, these are the rules around security. I think you can’t let go early in that, but security architecture needs to be flexible as well, and it needs to be adapting continuously, because it needs to handle new threats all the time. You can’t do one security architecture and think it’s going to live there forever; it’s going to have the same type of renewal and refactoring things happening to it as anything else.

Wrześniewski: I would like to add that, in general, the agile approaches are more transparent and the testing of the security requirements often is done in an interactive way, so this approach can ensure higher security.

Also, the governance should be adapted to the agile governance and some governance body that works in an agile way and you have different level of enterprise; I mean portfolio management, project management and teams. So, there is also some organizational change that needs to be done.

Gardner: Many times when I speak with business leaders, they are concerned about mounting complexity, and one of the ways that they are very attracted to trying to combat complexity is to move towards minimum viable products and minimum viable services. How does the concept of an MVA help agility, but at the same time combat complexity?

MVA moves product from plan to value

Wrześniewski: MVA is the architecture of minimum viable products that can enable the development of the product. This can help you to solve the complexity issues with the minimum viable product to focus on this functionality, the capabilities that are mandatory for the organization and can deliver the highest percentage of value in the software.

And also if the minimum viable product fails, we don’t invest too much for the entire product development.

Gejnevall: Inherently, organizations are complex. You have to start very much higher up than the IT side of it to take away complexity. You need to start at the business level, on the organizational level, on the process level, on how you actually do work. If that’s complex, the IT solutions for that will still be complex, so it needs to have a good EA and MVA can test out new things and new ways of organizing yourself, because everything doesn’t have to be an IT project in the end.

You do an MVA and that’s a process change or an organization will change, you test it out and you say, did it actually minimize our complexity or did it actually increase our complexity, at least you can stop the project very quickly and go in another direction instead.

Gonzalez: Handling complexities is challenging, especially for big organizations that have been in the market for a long time. You will need to focus on the minimum viable product for leveraging the MVA, and go by slices, like taking smaller pieces to avoid going into much modeling.

Handling complexity is challenging, especially for big organizations that have been in the market for a long time.You will need to focus on the minimum viable product for leveraging the MVA, and go by slices, like taking smaller pieces to avoid going into much modeling.

However, at the end, even though you are not conceding things to be only IT, at the end you have a platform which is the one that is providing your IT capabilities. In that case, my view is use of architecture is important. So you may have a more traditional EA for keeping the maintenance of your complex landscape. That’s already there. You cannot avoid that or ignore that, but you need to identify which components are there.

So, whenever you are deciding a new problem with MVA, you can also be aware of the dependencies there at the platform level, which is where most of the time the complexities rely on. So that’s in my view a combined use again of both of them.

And the other key thing here is having the good integration and automation tooling, because sometimes you need to do things manually and that’s where it takes a lot of time, so you just make some automations of that, then it will be easier to maintain and to allow you to handle that complexity without going against an agile view.

Gardner: And before we start to wrap up, I wanted to ask you what an organization will experience when they do leverage agile EA and become more adaptive in their business in total, holistically. What do you get when you do agile EA? What do you recognize as metrics of success if this is going well?

Deliver value and value delivery

Gejnevall: Each one of these MVAs and minimum viable products is actually supposed to leave us some business value at the end. If you look a the framework like the TOGAF® standard, a standard of The Open Group, there is a phase at the end where you actually look at to see, “Did we really achieve this value that we expected to?”

This a part of most product management frameworks as well. So we need to measure before we do something and then we need to measure afterward, did we get this business value that we expected, because just running a project at the demo, we can’t really tell if we got the value or not. We need to put it out in operations and measure it that way.

So getting that feedback loop much quicker than we did in the past when it took a couple of years to develop a new product and at the end of it we have changed and we didn’t get the value, even though we spent many million dollars to do that. Now we might spend a lot less money, but we can actually prove that we are getting some business value out of this and actually measure it appropriately as well.

Wrześniewski: I agree fully with Mats that the value is quicker delivery. Also, the product quality should be much higher and all the people should be much more satisfied. I mean the team that delivers the service or product changes the business, the stakeholders, and direct clients. This really impacts the clients and team’s satisfaction. This is one of the important benefits of agile EA as well.

Gejnevall: Just because you have a term called minimum viable product and you think it always needs to be IT that’s doing that, I think you can do a minimum viable product in many other ways. Like I was saying before, process changes, organizational changes and other things. So it doesn’t always have to be IT that is doing the minimum viable product that gives you the best business value.

Gardner: How about the role of The Open Group? You have a number of certification programs, standards, workgroups, and you are talking with folks in the EA field all the time. What is it that The Open Group is bringing to the table nowadays to help foster agile EA and therefore better, more secure, more business-oriented companies and governments?

Open Group EA and Agile offerings abound

Gonzalez: We have a series of standards from The Open Group. One of the subsets of that is the architecture portfolio. We have several activities going on. We have the Agile Architecture Framework snapshot, product of The Open Group Board Members’ activity which is already in the market for test and comments, but it’s not yet an approved standard. The Agile Architecture Framework™ (O-AAF) covers both Digital Transformation of the enterprise, together with Agile Transformation of the enterprise considering concepts like Lean and DevOps among others.

On the other hand, we have the Architecture or the Agile EA one at the level of the Architecture Forum, which is the one Mats and Łukasz are dealing with, of how to have an agile EA practice. There is a very good white paper published, and other deliverables, like a guide about how to use or make the TOGAF framework an agile sprint using the Architecture Development Method (ADM), so that’s another paper that is under construction, and there are also several that are on the way.

We also have in the ArchiMate® Forum, we have Agile Modeling Activity, which is precisely dealing with the modeling part of this, so the three activities are connected.

And into a separate working group, even though it is related, we have Digital Practitioners Work Group, aimed to address the digital enterprise. Also there is connection with the Agile Architecture Framework and we just started looking for some harmonization also with EA and the TOGAF standard.

In the security space, we recently started the Zero Trust Architecture product, which is precisely trained to address this part of Zero Trust Architecture, which is securing the resources instead of securing the network. That’s a joint activity between Security Forum and the Architecture Forum. So, some of those are the things that are going on.

And also at the level of the Agile Architecture Framework, there is also conversation about how to handle security and cloud in an agile environment, so you see we have several moving things at the table at the moment.

Gejnevall: Long-term, I think we need to look into agile enterprise much more, but I think that all these efforts sort of are converging up to that point sooner or later that we need to look to see what would an agile enterprise looks like and create reference architectures and ideas for that. And I think that that will be sort of the end result somewhere, but we are not there yet, but we are going in that direction with all these different projects.

Gardner: And, of course, more information is available at The Open Group website. They have many global events and conferences that people can go to and learn about these issues and contribute to these issues as well.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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Busy work is a dumpster fire and it’s time for something completely different

Worker productivity gains -- despite 30 years of computing technology roll outs -- remain hard to define by economists.

Ask a worker, however, and you are increasingly likely to get a hard, cold assessment. A huge amount of time these days, they say, is wasted on the inefficiencies of technology run amok. Only a sliver of time is going to the creative and innovative types of work that employees crave -- and employers gain the most value from.

The next BriefingsDirect future of work discussion explores new ways of exploiting what technology does best to deliver intelligent workspaces that prioritize and personalize tasks.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn how the newest digital work strategies help unburden those saddled with deflating productivity, we sat down with Fouad ElNaggar, Vice President of Future of Work Products at Citrix. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Fouad, why, when we walk through the front door of our office buildings are we being teleported back 20 years?

ElNaggar: Well, it’s kind of crazy when you think about it. Every one of us has this nice black rectangle that sits in our pocket, and when you think about what that rectangle enables us to do, it’s crazy.

In the world we live in today, I can push a button and a car shows up and takes me wherever I want to go. I can swipe right and I am on a date. I am old. I remember when you had to go up and talk to people at a bar or restaurant or at a concert and do this big dance to get them to go out with you for a meal. Now I am swiping right.

Life is great; work is a grind

When I started working, I used to memorize five different routes to work. I would get together with my friends and we would share secret shortcuts on how to save two or three minutes off of our commute. Now I hit a button on Waze, type in my address, and I am getting to work and back home in the fastest way possible.

ElNaggar

I can push a button on my phone and a pint of ice cream comes to my house so I can eat away the disappointment of another Philadelphia Eagles loss. This is magical. The world that we are living in today is magical.

If I had to explain this to a young Fouad in the mid-1990s and say, “Imagine this. Imagine this world.” … When I started working, I remember showing up to my office the first day and laughing at people still using typewriters, okay?

The world we live in today is so insane and amazing. But then you walk into the front door of your office, guess what? That Fouad from the mid-1990s, starting out in New York, would 100 percent recognize that office: Bad guest Wi-Fi; signing in on a clipboard where people are writing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck; plugging a laptop into one of those light bulb and fan projectors that’s got a VGA adapter on the end of it, and working on some horrible, crappy laptop that takes two minutes to open a big Excel file. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

The Fouad from 20 years ago could not have imagined the consumer world we are living in today, but he was actually working in the same work world we are in today. It’s amazing, every one of as a consumer has these amazing experiences with our devices. But then you walk through the front door of work and it’s like taking a wormhole back to the 1990s. It’s insane.

Gardner: It’s like we took what used to be client-server business applications, put a web interface on them, and gave up. Not much has happened since then.

So what’s the solution? How do we move from this inertia of workplace innovation? Do we just keep adding on more old stuff, or do we reinvent?

ElNaggar: You bring up an incredible point. I live in Silicon Valley, so it’s probably the worst year -- where people are bringing out medieval bugles and blowing the horns to celebrate the wonderful world of software as a service (SaaS) software. And the crazy thing is, they think that because they took Siebel Systems and put it into a web browser and called it Salesforce, and they took PeopleSoft and put it into a web browser and called it Workday, that they are somehow dramatically changing how work happens.

When you actually look at those systems side by side, it’s the same tabs, menus, and workflows. Salesforce is celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, and literally nothing has changed. The way you use those systems is the same way you used those systems in the 1990s. Like you said, they just took client-server apps but put them on the web.

It’s sad when you think about it, because for the first 30 years of enterprise software -- the investments that went into digitizing the back office, of giving people personal computers, connecting those computers to the Internet so we had email and could communicate with people in our companies or around the world any time of the day -- those investments changed the way we worked.

Those investments drove huge changes in the employee experience, in employee engagement, and in employee productivity. You could do so much more. We were doubling individual productivity every 20 years. Think about that. It used to take two Fouads to do what one Fouad can do today.

And so we had all of this incredible investment and innovation -- and then all of a sudden we hit a roadblock. Look at the last 15 years of enterprise software, and what’s really changed? Again, it was taking a client-server system and putting it into a browser, and then taking some crappy, over-bloated implementation of those same systems to a mobile device that nobody wants to use. That’s not really innovation, right? That’s not changing how we work.

And so when I think about the future of work, I think we are going to have to attack that fundamental problem -- our processes and workflows haven’t really changed. That’s where you have to start.

Gardner: What’s changed for me is instead of spending just two hours a day on email, I am spending five hours a day on texts, chat, Slack, Teams, and email. But I don’t seem to be getting anything more for it. Am I unusual?

Interruptions disrupt productivity 

ElNaggar: That’s exactly right. Collaboration is a big part of work. When you think about the whole premise of a corporation, and about why corporations were even formed, the idea was that if we put specialists in different functions together as a group we could achieve more than we could as individuals.

Yes, collaboration is important, but also being able to deliver on your special skill is important. And as we keep layering on more “collaboration tools,” we have ended up in a world where there is just a ton of noise.

To your point, it’s … “Great, I have an email notification. Great, I have a Slack notification. Great, I have a Teams notification. Great, my salesperson just texted my phone.”

There was some research that came out earlier this year. We are interrupted 1,100 times a day at work -- 1,100 times. Think about that for a second, it’s insane. How can we even get any work done? To your point, you used to do email for two hours a day. Now, the typical person does about 17 hours of email a week, okay?

And then on top of that, we have all of these other systems and vectors for people to interrupt us, to try and communicate with us, try and collaborate, and a lot of times it’s just noise.

I don’t know if your email inbox looks like mine, but mine is like a dumpster. It’s an unprotected place where people can sit there and buy my email address off of Rainking and Discover , right? Or they can just guess it and try one of those ways to get to me.

And so what does my inbox end up looking like? Well, I have random vendors and people that have my email and are spamming it. I have Groupon in there. I have Nigerian prince scams. My wife maybe auto-fills an email and it goes to my work email instead of my personal email. And in the sea of all that noise and distraction I am expected to get my work done?

I have talked with CIOs at some of the biggest companies in the world and they measure what happens in Slack and Teams -- and it's a bunch noise. It really hurts the employee experience, and it kills employee productivity.

And these chat clients? I have talked with CIOs at some of the biggest companies in the world and they measure what happens in Slack and Teams -- and it’s a bunch of noise. It’s like, “Hey, guys, there is a cake in the kitchen. Hey, guys, here is a funny new animated GIF, here is a meme.”

It’s a bunch of noise. And so we are adding a lot to the noise and distraction levels. What’s been lost in the mix? It really hurts the employee experience, employee engagement, and it really kills employee productivity.

Gardner: Sadly, my solution was to work on Saturdays so that I wouldn’t be interrupted.  I would wait and do all my creative work -- and actually get something done. It allowed me to concentrate on the same subject for more than 20 or 25 minutes. But that’s not good because now I’m working six days a week.

How else do we let workers be creative and exploit what their brains were designed to do? How do we get out of this interruptions rut?

Going through the motions

ElNaggar: It’s a great point. What I will add to it is that you are actually engaged in your work. You love what you do. You want to work on your skills to be successful, so you work on the weekends to get your stuff done.

But what I should frame this whole discussion with is two-thirds to 80 percent of employees are not engaged with their work. They are not emotionally aligned with the mission or goals of the company. Whereas you will sit there and say, “Okay, I have to get my job done. I want to be great at this. I want to be exceptional at this. I am going to sit there and work afterhours and on the weekend to get things done.” A lot of people don’t. They are punching the clock. They are not engaged with work. They are disengaged with work. And that’s a huge problem.

Part of the reason they get disengaged with work, where they hate how they work, is because a lot of these systems we have put in place create friction for them. They increasingly create busy work and the kind of work that they did not sign up to do.

We talked earlier about people being specialists in corporations. Each one of us has a special unique skill, what we put on our résumés, and we put in our LinkedIn profiles.

If you go and look at my LinkedIn, you can check it out, what you are not going to see are any merit badges on there because I often use Concur. You are not going to see any credentials that say, “Fouad is really good at finding information on Tableau.” You are not going to see anything in there that says I am “unbelievable at using the procurement system to make things happen.” None of those things are my core skills. None of those things differentiate me in the marketplace.

But that’s how are people spending their time today. They are spending more than half of their time on what they consider busy work. There is BS stuff like expense reports, performance reports, and finding information across different systems and from meetings that don’t matter to them.

They are doing a bunch of copy-and-paste work. I saw some data about two months ago that says at work on average we copy and paste 134 times a day. I saw this and I said, “That can’t be true, that can’t be true.” And so I started to actually track myself and you know what I discovered? I copy and paste like 180 times a day at work. And that was frightening to me. But you realize these things and it’s like, “Oh my God, how many times am I in one system and I copy a piece of data and put it into an email or I copy something out of an email and put it into a form field on another system?”

All day long we are sitting shuffling information between different systems – even though each of us has a unique, special skill. You know what human beings want to do when they work? They want to develop that skill, to hone their craft, and to get better at what differentiates them, because that’s what’s going to allow them to create more value for their organization. And it also set them up for a promotion, a new job, and to make more money. And these are the things that excite people at work.

Employees prize purpose, potential, and play

There is a lot of research out there around total motivation and what really drives engagement. What they have found is that people want to have a feeling of play at work. They want to feel like they are using their adaptive brains to be creative and solve problems. They want to have a sense of purpose. They want to know why they are at their companies and why are they doing their jobs.

There was some research that came out recently that said more than 70 percent of people don’t know why their jobs even exist. Think about how frightening that is. Like why does my job even exist?

So again, they want some kind of purpose. They want to know the work that they do contributes to their organizations and how.

More than 70 percent of people don't know why their jobs even exist. Think about how frightening that is. Like, why does my job even exist?

And the other thing they want is potential. They want to know that there is a pathway for them to develop their skills. People want to spend their time working on their skills sets and on individual projects in unstructured time.

If that’s a developer, they want to work and have a nice big block of time to code. If you are a writer, you want a big block of time to focus on research and crafting beautiful documents. If it’s a salesperson, they want to spend their time in front of customers evangelizing their vision of the product and evangelizing how they can help the customers achieve their goals.

Every one of us has our skills that we want to work on. Working with a team to achieve something greater -- that’s where people want to spend their time, because that’s where they get a sense of purpose for their work. They get a sense of play in their work because they are being creative and solving problems. They are setting themselves up for reaching their potential, and so to move up the wage pyramid, get a promotion, and get that next job.

Gardner: Well, the good news is those types of creative functions are exactly what artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) can’t do. So it’s good that people want to do that. The problem is there is no one app that allows me to do that. I still have 45 apps that I have to cut and paste from. So how do we bridge this, of going from umpteen apps to having more of what’s a creative and appropriate environment for people to be creative in?

App overload 

ElNaggar: It’s a great question, and it’s the question that we had six-plus years ago when we started my company, Sapho, which Citrix acquired about a year ago. And we were looking at this landscape -- the number of applications -- when I was the chief strategy officer at CBS Interactive. And my co-founder, he was the chief technology and information officer there, and we were looking at our universe as a Fortune 100 company. We looked at the reality of our day-to-day jobs and we said, “Oh my God, we have all these incredible apps installed.”

I think Symantec just released a report saying that the typical enterprise is managing 928 applications. Some of the banks that we work with have 8,000 applications. So there is this incredible set of application programming interfaces (APIs). And by the way, the Symantec report says the number of apps has grown by 60 percent in just the last three years. We are not deprecating these old workloads, we are keeping them, and we are adding more cloud-based point solutions on top of it all.

So clearly work is becoming more complex. The typical person is using 42 apps to do their job, and it’s growing. It’s becoming more complex.

We looked at that. And, to your point, we said, “Well, okay, how do we stop the context switching? How do we stop the copy and paste, and how do we shift time away from busy work and toward value creation?” And what we came upon was this idea that -- because of the evolution of APIs, of ML, and of identity access -- there is an opportunity to build a system of engagement and intelligence that sits horizontally and plugs into all of those systems to create a single, harmonious experience for the end users.

And that was our big “aha” moment and that translated over to Citrix and the Workspace product. The idea is that for 30 years in the enterprise there has been the concept that the front end and the back end of the systems that you buy have to be stuck together.

So, for example, as an enterprise I go and I buy an SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and I get this incredible backend, it’s amazing. It solves all these problems, like two-phase commit. But guess what? You are stuck with that SAP front end, the best that German engineering can imagine, which of course is not necessarily like a modern user experience.

How to cut through the noise 

And so, for 30 years in the enterprise there was the view that if you have a system, you have to take the good and the bad. And what we came along and said is, “No, no, no. Keep the good, the backend, but let’s also take advantage of the API economy and what we are seeing with that level of integration. Let’s connect into these things, abstract them into their tasks, and then create a harmonious experience, a beautiful engagement layer that allows anybody to do their work from many systems from a single point.”

They can live in Messenger, in email, in the Workspace app -- but there is one chokepoint that delivers your work to you, that delivers you your information. It will help you make better decisions.

Step one, we shift the amount of time you are spending on busy work and non-value-creating work, which today, by the way, is 80 percent-plus of your time. We can we flip the script on that so that people are spending less than 20 percent of their time doing that stuff, and now spending 80 percent-plus of their time creating value, being creative, and using their adaptive minds to solve problems and create value for their organizations. That’s step one in the journey. That’s what we are doing with the Citrix Workspace now.

The next step is actually even cooler. It addresses how to supercharge the worker so they are even better on the value-creating stuff. But those are two steps in a journey that we are helping some very large customers through right now.

Gardner: I understand what you need to do. But why is Citrix the right organization to help do it?

Right time, right place for Citrix 

ElNaggar: It’s a great question, and I have spent a lot of time with customers. I think I have met about 250 customers in 2019, and they ask the same question, “Why Citrix?” They know Citrix and they go, “Oh, yeah, the gold standard in virtualization. That’s what you guys are known for.” And what I tell them is, if you think about it, Citrix has actually always been on the forefront of the future work because we have always sat between the end user and their systems of record.

As we talked about developing a system of engagement and intelligence -- of being that layer that sits between the end user and all very different systems -- guess what? Citrix has been doing that for 30 years. Whether you are talking about multiuser, MetaFrame, WinView, or any of these products that Citrix has rolled out for 30 years; whether it was remote desktop access or virtualization, Citrix has always been the engagement layer between the end user and those backend systems of record.

People know Citrix as the place to go to do their work. And now we are saying, “Guess what? The whole conduct of an application has changed. The whole concept of work has changed. And we are sitting in that beautiful position between the end user and their symptoms already, so why not bring the value that we are talking about to that layer?”

Can we be something more than just a thin client that sits between you so that you can access your desktop remotely? Can we be something more than the same client that sits between you and your virtual apps and virtual desktops?

Those things are still important. People are still going to need to access virtual apps and virtual desktops in a secure way. But, we are sitting there right now, ingrained with these systems already. We are trusted by 99 percent of the Fortune 500 already. Why not use this position to help shepherd businesses through their journey? And it’s always a journey. I laugh when I see people out there selling silver bullets or magical switches where they are going to solve the employee experience with the snap of a finger.

It is journey. We have that engagement layer already to help our customers through that journey of organizing work more effectively. Can we drive people through their work more effectively and automate their work more effectively? We can drive this needed shift and value-creation so that people aren’t spending 85 percent of their time doing busy work and garbage and can start spending 85 percent of the time creating value.

That’s Citrix, and hopefully it makes sense because there are a lot of people really interested in the Workspace. They look at this and say, “Oh, my God, this is the future.” Our employees have already been trained by consumer applications on what they can expect. They want a hub, a place that brings them stuff from all across the Internet to a single location so that they can consume it effectively.

They want AI to disappear into the background of the system and yet still make them better off. I talked earlier about Waze. I don’t think about Waze as consumer AI. I don’t want people to think about Workspace as enterprise AI. Waze just weaves into my natural experiences and makes them better and makes me better. It gives me minutes back in my life. I get somewhere faster.

That’s what we think about with Workspace, of weaving experiences right into the solution so it can empower people, help them focus on creating value, and help them do the work they really want to do.

Gardner: Okay, Fouad, give me the elevator pitch, in three minutes. Tell me what Citrix Workspace is, what it does, and why I should want it.

Workspace works for your work experience 

ElNaggar: Citrix Workspace is an experience-driven platform for work. We have done all of the work to make it easy for people to integrate into all of their different systems of record and unbundle those systems of records into micro flows and micro applications. We have done all the work building the intelligence at the user level so that people can build ML and AI to make work better. We have built the infrastructure to enable micro-automation from the ground up, not from the top down like RPA.

We have done all that so we can again organize, guide, and automate people to work. With the Workspace, when I can go there, it feeds me all of my different tasks and the insights and information I need to make choices. It allows me to work at the edge. I don’t have to log into 50 different apps to get my work done. My work comes to me. That’s the key. Bringing work to the individual, assisting them through their work, guiding them through their work, organizing their work, and reducing the amount of time that you have spent having to find stuff. Then you can spend your time doing stuff. That’s what we are about now. That’s the product that’s gone into general availability in November 2019.

And again, it’s a journey. It’s a journey for every customer because you have to really think about, “Hey, what’s our workflow and process today? How can we make it better? How can we unbundle it?”

That's what we are delivering, a chance for people to unbundle and rethink how work is done, to rethink how workflows are done, and to automate non-value-creating repetitive tasks and busy work to ultimately deliver intelligence augmentation to the end user.

That’s what we are delivering, a chance for people to unbundle and rethink how work is done, to rethink how workflows are done, and to automate non-value-creating repetitive tasks and busy work to ultimately deliver intelligence augmentation to the end user.

It’s a platform for work, a place where people can get their work done quickly so that they are not spending 20 percent of their time finding information or 50 percent of their time filling out testing procedure specification (TPS) reports. We want to minimize all that stuff so you can focus on your special skill, focus on your unique craft, and get better at your job so you can create value for both yourself and your employer.

Gardner: Thanks. If I want to customize my Workspace, but not to the point being an application developer, how do I address customization?

ElNaggar: It’s a great question. Being able to customize without being a developer or investing in a bunch of spaghetti code is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about. When we were at Sapho, and we [were] brought over to Citrix, we spent four-and-a-half years and spent $30 million building an incredible integration hub.

For a person who can at least use a business intelligence (BI) tool to develop a report, so maybe a business analyst, somebody who can build something in Tableau, for example, that level of person; we’ve made it really easy for that type of person. They can, number one, integrate into their systems -- whether that’s a software as a service (SaaS) system, an on-prem, off-the-shelf system, or a homegrown system. Incidentally, that’s where a lot of value is, in these wacky homegrown systems that have been around for 20 years but are still running critical workflows that you want to modernize or enable people to access on different devices and via different channels. We made it really easy to integrate those things, and to build in and inherit any business logic that you have to understand, “Hey, here’s the event that should drive a workflow.”

We made it really easy for people to unbundle the micro flow, build little micro apps, and get them into any of these different channels. We said, “Okay, every time we build an integration we want to make sure that we’ve got a bunch of build-out-of-the-box micro apps that are ready to go.”

These are things we see at lots of different customers. We say, “Here you go, customer. You now have a bunch of things that you can start using on day one. We already know they create value, that they hit use cases that a lot of people have.” But then on top of that we made it really simple with drag-and-drop tooling for people to go in and actually build a custom micro flow and micro app that they need on another system. Because a lot of times these are user-initiated workflows that people want to build easily. We have built the tooling -- and this is a new thing for Citrix -- but we’ve built this awesome tooling that makes it really easy for people to do that.

To build a better interface for engagement intelligence -- that sits horizontally across these systems -- you have to make sure you can get into all of those systems. And every organization is going to have their little skeletons in the closet. They are going to have Workday, or Concur, or Microsoft Power BI, right? Sure, they are also going to have Salesforce, and that’s great.

We make sure we have the stuff ready for them for those. But they are also going to have something gnarly, like BMC Remedy or PeopleSoft, or some homegrown system that’s still running on an AS400. And so you have to be able to empower those customers, too, to build better experiences on top of those things. That’s what we do with the tooling, the integration layer, and event tracking, along with the micro-flow builder and orchestration layers.

All of these things are designed to make it easy to not have to sit there and write code to deliver these things, but to drag and drop components into place and that makes it possible.

Gardner: You mentioned that the latest Citrix Workspace becomes generally available in November, but you also mentioned that there is another shoe to drop around intelligence augmentation. Where does this all go next when it comes to augmenting the worker?

Intelligent augmentation in three steps

ElNaggar: Intelligent augmentation is the guiding North Star for Citrix. We want to have intelligence-assisted workers. I’m sure you have seen the research out there about AI in chess, for example. It was really hard for grandmasters to be AI-driven in chess against things like IBM Watson until they started working in conjunction with AI. Now they can use an average Elo-score chess player to beat a Watson because they are working in parallel with AI -- and that’s the world that we are trying to build.

By abstracting workflows out of these monolithic systems and turning them into simple micro flows and micro apps at the individual level, we are also building datasets around what happens at work. Because we are tied into the systems of record -- it’s not like RPA where we are screen-scraping and guessing at stuff -- we are actually connected into the system. So we can say, “Okay, this event is happening 1,000 times, this action is being taken 1,000 times. Okay, great, let’s hotspot that and get rid of that repetitive task.” That’s step one.

Then step two is saying, “Okay, what are these stacked actions that we see? What are the things that we know every time your vacation is approved, for example? What are the next four things that will usually happen?”

Well, for most people, number one they go to their calendar and they mark the days that they are going to be on personal time off (PTO). Then when they go on PTO, they change their away message to say, “I am on PTO, if you have an emergency, text me at this number.” Maybe a week before PTO, they will email their team and say, “Hey, I’m gone for the next week, if you have anything critical, let me know, so I can do it now.”

Maybe they will go into their Outlook app and create like a VIP escalation rule for an email from a customer so that it also goes to their boss. Now, because we have broken things down to that micro flow, micro app level, we can automate all of that. Once your PTO gets approved, we will do those next four steps on your behalf.

Now we have taken that customary workflow away from you via automation. But there is a next phase of automation that we call system-learned. System-learned says, “Hey, every time Dana gets an expense report under $50, he approves it without even looking at the receipts.” Because, guess what? You are busy, Dana, you want to work on creating great content, you don’t care about the time that you are spending doing expense reports.

So now the system says, “Okay, 50 times out of 50, Dana approves an expense report under $40 without looking at it. Why do I need to send him 50 notifications about expense reports under $40? Let me approve them on his behalf, and here are just the two that look riskiest.”

Now the system has automatically approved 40 expense reports on your behalf, and you get only the two that are potentially risky. Guess what? I have taken 40 notifications and approvals out of your life and made work easier. That’s system-learned.

Now, there is going to be another step, a third tier. Those first two tiers are like using an autopilot. But the next level is what we call co-pilot. These things help you become a better pilot, a better driver. At this point, the augmentation capability notices something across these two systems that you should know about that might be able to help in your decisions.

The system determines, “Oh, I have seen another group that’s worked on a problem like this, and here was the output. Let me serve that up to you in context.” That’s that next level of ML and AI that we have weaved into the Workspace because we have integrated at such a deep, personal level, at the task level, at the atomic unit of work level, so that we can see all of these things going back and forth. We can then build some really cool algorithms across a truly unique dataset.

If you think about it, nobody in the world has the dataset that we have. It’s a horizontal, cross-system-of-record view of what’s happening in an organization yet tied to an individual. That’s really cool and gives a lot of flexibility to shoot for the moon on what’s possible with new types of work.

Gardner: We are just about out of time, but how should businesses and individual workers prepare themselves for the future of work that you just described?

From book value to people value

ElNaggar: Number one, as an organization, you need to be committed to delivering an incredible employee experience.

For 100 years companies have been valued based on book value. They took the value of all the property, plants, and equipment – from photo copiers to the company jet -- and said, “Okay, that’s the replacement cost of your organization. Let me multiply it by five or six, and that’s what your company is worth.”

If you look at the S&P 500 in 1975, 80 percent of the market cap was tied to such tangible book values. But the world now is more about intangible values. It’s about human equity. The people who work for you are worth a huge value within your organization.

In the S&P today, for example, 80 percent of the market cap is now not based on physical assets, but people and the intangible assets. It’s about the knowledge that’s in the brains of people that work for us.

If you are an organization thinking about the future, it’s time to correctly value the people. I often hear people saying, “Oh, people are most valuable assets.” But I still don’t see a lot of these organizations actually treating people as assets, treating them as their most valuable assets.

But some organizations are having a cultural switch, where they say, “Shoot, human equity is what matters. I need to figure out how I invest in human equity. I need to figure out not just how to attract the best talent, but how to power that talent to be the best version of themselves -- and then keep them so that they are not turning over after just 22 months like many Millennials do.”

It's more important than ever for people to understand what their skills are, their craft, and get themselves mentally prepared to be adaptive.

That’s what organizations need to do. For individuals, it’s more important than ever for people to understand what their skills are, their craft, and then get themselves mentally prepared to be adaptive. They have to do adaptive problem-solving because that’s a value they can best create. The busy work and the other stuff that eats up 80 percent of people’s time today is going to disappear or be diminished.

Where you are going to shine and demonstrate your value to an organization over time is focused on: Here is my skill, here is my craft, how do I hone it, how do I get better? That’s what the individual needs to be thinking about over the next few years as the future of work becomes more relevant.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.

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