“You need to be able to change quickly, but in a way that preserves security and quality. And it's difficult, it’s a difficult balancing act, and it can only be achieved by driving Agile, you know, the Agile development release processes that include continuous quality assurance and continuous security scanning.”

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host, Tim Butara, content and community manager at Agiledrop. 

Tim Butara: Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm joined today by Linda Kahangi, chief information and operations officer at Nomadix, provider of networking technology solutions for hotels and other MDUs. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how chief information officers can navigate the new post-COVID digital reality. Welcome, Linda. Thanks for being our guest on the show today. Anything you'd like to add before we begin? 

Linda Kahangi: No, nothing to add. Thank you for having me. 

Tim Butara: So let's start with this. Since we're talking about the role of the CIO in the new post-COVID reality, let me first ask you, how has Covid and everything around Covid affected the priorities of chief information officers? And have these been evolving throughout the pandemic as well? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah, Covid and other outside factors have really been playing a dominating role in that priorities and timelines for CIOs over the last year and a half. I mean, early on, we all had to go way down Maslow's hierarchy of needs and really focus on the basics. How do I keep my employees safe? How do I get employees to a basic level of productivity working from home? And how can I ensure my supply chains, even functioning in this challenging COVID environment? 

So in many ways, it felt like we were going backwards and having to go back to the basics. But on the flip side, COVID has really been kind of a transformational accelerator in many ways, too. In 2020, many cloud migration projects and other digital transformation efforts, the teams might normally take 24 months to do, they only had a few weeks to do out of necessity. And so they were kind of forced to go faster and think more quickly. And instead of being an aspiration, Agility itself has really become an absolute requirement. And IT teams have had to very quickly rework the processes and infrastructure to support this. So, kind of a balance. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, that was a good point about how Agility has become a necessity for anybody that wants to succeed in this new reality. So in this line, what would you say was the most impactful change from the past year and a half for chief information officers? 

Linda Kahangi: Really I think the Covid environment elevated and shone a really bright spotlight in the area of cyber security, cyber security concerns. You saw them kind of entering mainstream consciousness with the number of high profile hacks and incidents have taken place in the last year ransomware, et cetera. And it's not just Fortune 500 companies. I'm reading that 60% of small companies actually go out of business after just one major cyber attack. 

So really in this new remote work environment, CIOs were faced with the challenge of having to secure access to company systems and resources from essentially anywhere, because employees are everywhere. They-- newly overloaded VPNs had to be upgraded or services moved to the cloud very quickly to make them accessible from employees’ homes and other places. 

Multi factor authentication and user training such as phishing and social social engineering became even more critical. And really CIOs needed to not only beef up their own security teams, but really think of every person in the company as part of the security team and figure out how to get them trained and to get them in a place where they could contribute positively to the security environment. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, like with a lot of things in digitalization and digital information, the people factor is super important, right? So is with cyber security. 

Linda Kahangi: Yes. Definitely. 

Tim Butara: So, yeah. Cyber security was definitely one of the top most challenges for CIOs in this period. So maybe what were the other big challenges that they had to face? And how did they face them? How did they tackle them? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. I think one of the biggest challenges for CIOs, for myself I know, is you really had to be in kind of reactive mode during the last year and a half. Things kept changing. The endgame kept changing. So you couldn't count on a certain time period where things would get back to normal. The normal kept changing. And what was worse, changes were urgent and immediate, and you had to go and put infrastructure in place without going through your normal processes, your research and analysis and business case process. You really had to make sweeping decisions and implementations without a lot of time to prepare and evaluate. And in some cases, take educated risks knowing that you might have to go and unwind some of these changes or change them in the future. 

Now, the big challenge is kind of trying to transition back into more of a proactive mode while you're simultaneously looking at the infrastructure that was rolled out in a hurry and trying to be sure that it's secure and supportable and scalable and we'll meet the needs of the business going forward. And as I said, in some cases, that might mean unwinding and replacing or dramatically changing what you had to put in place to support the business in the last year. 

And I think another big thing that's changed is the long term commitment to hybrid work, which has really been evolving and kind of become more prevalent in the last few months. I think that we need to accept going forward that we're going to have to maintain that flexible work from anywhere environment and really optimize our systems and infrastructures around that model. I think also giving employees choices for their return to work is important culturally, especially in this transition period where everyone's in a different place personally about their ability and desire to return to the office. I know we have stopped saying, how are we going to return everybody to the office and get back to normal? This is the new normal. And as I said, we need to optimize around that new normal. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. That's a good point. It's like we're already kind of transitioning into this new normal period. We didn't even know when it really happened, and now we're in it and we got to make it work somehow. And we also, with all this new understanding of the past 18 months, we kind of have a different outlook on the future. And I'm guessing that chief information officers are also realizing that. So I guess that they're probably already preparing companies and protecting, trying to protect them as much as possible from future risks, future uncertainty, future disruption. 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. That's-- we need to get ahead of the game now. We need to prepare for the future. And in addition to going back and kind of shoring up anything that we did in a temporary way, we have to carve out time to do four things, really. We really need to look at postmortem, you know, the last year and look at what we did and what worked and didn't work and make course corrections. But we also need to really focus forward, future proof the business by optimizing our systems and infrastructure. As I said for the hybrid model, because it's different. You assume the normal model is accessing services from anywhere. You don't necessarily think of logging into VPNs that are traversing corporate networks and that sort of thing. You really have to think differently about how you give employees access to what they need. 

I think we also need to prepare for the next global disruption by learning from what we've been through and applying those learnings to our business continuity and disaster recovery plans. In many ways, we all just went through and are still going through the biggest, most impactful business continuity scenario planning that you could possibly do. So I think that one of the small silver linings is all this is companies are probably more prepared than ever for future disruptions to their business and disasters just because they've learned so much the hard way through this time period. 

And finally, I think that all of this has really taught us that companies that can embrace and adopt change the quickest are the ones that are going to thrive. So we all just need to make that agility and that ability to change and that openness to change part of our core culture in order to be competitive in the future. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. That's a great point. And we're back to Agility, right? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. There we go. 

Tim Butara: Also, we all know the saying that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And it's true for companies in Covid, right. Either, either you succeed and come out better on the other side. Or, as was unfortunately true for a lot of businesses in the past year and a half, they went out of business basically. 

Linda Kahangi: Yes, I know. So Nomadix, we kind of decided early on, we're going to use this time period to try to double down in R&D, we’re going to up our investment and try to come out of this as strong as we could. And so that kind of added to the challenges that we were facing because we were trying to really increase our new products and use this time wisely. 

And we had to be really creative in how we did that, almost reminiscent of the early stories of Silicon Valley where you're developing things in garages because we're a hardware development company. And so normally we're sitting together in a lab and working on things and we had to really change and retool the way that we were able to do that, and at the same time not lose sight of the fact that we had to ramp up operations at some point once these new products, we're ready and have everything prepared for the transition. So it's been an exciting, but challenging year. 

Tim Butara: So for you, if I understand it correctly, one of the biggest challenges was finding the right balance between creativity and innovation on one hand, and kind of managing day to day operations and everything on the other hand? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And that's really an age-old problem, I think, kind of driving cost savings and efficiency and process improvement versus really supporting innovation and new products. It's a classic short versus long term trade off that CIOs have always had to make, and in many ways, Covid really let us jump start innovation by forcing us, forcing IT departments to think differently and move quickly, but in a very short term way. At the same time, balancing that, the security threats and heightened risk sensitivity have driven an environment of caution that's telling us, slow down, be careful, that sort of thing. So those forces are pulling against each other. 

And really, where the resolution comes is that changes. You need to be able to change quickly, but in a way that preserves security and quality. And it's difficult. It's a difficult balancing act, and it can only be achieved by driving agile, you know, the agile development release processes that include continuous quality assurance and continuous security scanning. That was, big focuses for us, both of those. 

And you just really need to step back and when you have the ability after all this is over, CIOs also just need to step back and think about longer term investment because we can get really stuck on hitting short term numbers and short term goals. But we really need to lay out the groundwork for all these changes, and we've had to do it incrementally one step at a time. And I know I have this burning desire to go back and chart out a big road map and feel like I'm farther ahead than just next week. So I think we all have that burning desire to get back in front of things. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. It was kind of, initially kind of force transformation, but because it happened because change was inevitable and it was happening, now, over the course of this period, we've adapted to it. And as we mentioned in the beginning, we've transitioned from being reactive to being more proactive and thinking more long term, trying to be more innovative and kind of putting a greater focus on this rather than just struggling to keep everything afloat. Basically. 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. Exactly. 

Tim Butara: Do you maybe have any concrete interesting examples from Nomadic of balancing this innovation and operations? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. Really, early on, we made investment in real time security scanning tools, and they're constantly looking for vulnerabilities, and we run them on everything from development environments, production, et cetera. And it's like a safety net. It gives you that comfort that you can make changes quickly and that something is looking out after you and we'll tell you if something has gone awry. 

And so that was a key piece of infrastructure we had to put in place. We also moved to weekly sprints for much of our internal system development, and that includes weekly prioritization sessions with the business so that we're all focused on the most important things and we're really more all-hands on deck. The lines have really blurred, I think, between IT and the business because they're participating so much more in this rapid development because we're constantly having to make trade offs and prioritize. 

And honestly, they have been much more hands-on in helping us test and helping us release and just feels like the IT team during this period has really gotten closer to the business and more integrated through this constant communication and interaction. It's not, spend months on requirement, definition and sign off formally and all that, it’s really you have to have that conversation all the time every week and really be in sync and work together. It’s, I think, been a positive thing. 

Tim Butara: It's really in line with Agile, with Agile principles and agility. And also what I grasped from that was that de-siloing is key to this balance between innovation and operations, right. You just said that the IT Department just naturally got more involved with the overarching goals of the record organization because they had, to didn't have a choice. They had to change. 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. Yeah. And it's really key to moving quickly because it's easier to get past the buy-ins and blockades. Everybody is really involved and working together. So I hope it's a culture that we're able to maintain as we come out of this because I think it's been a really positive contributor to the culture overall. 

Tim Butara: I think so, because I think it's something that has a positive impact both on customers and on their organization itself, meaning the people working for that organization, right. Because everybody wants to have a better working environment. Everybody wants to feel like their ideas and their input are valued and kind of see that reflected in the goals of the whole organization, rather than just maybe working mindlessly at a computer without knowing how this contributes to anything that the organization is doing. I think it's a positive impact overall.

Linda Kahangi: Yeah, I do, too. And it's kind of ironic that in these days we're all working remotely and don't see people in person that this environment brought us closer together. So kind of cool, but kind of ironic. 

Tim Butara: It's like you don't realize how crucial something is until it's taken away from you, right? Now we've been kind of deprived of the majority of in-person interactions, and we're just now seeing how key they are to our well being, to our business performance, and we try to get them whenever and wherever we can, basically. 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah, for sure. 

Tim Butara: Awesome. Maybe as a kind of final question, what would be your number one piece of advice for those CIOs who are maybe having trouble keeping up with all of this and adapting to these new realities? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. I was thinking about what advice I would give, and I think that one of the things that nags at me, and I think nags at others is you feel like, technology and environment is changing so quickly and so frequently that at any given time you're going to make a decision about rolling out a new tool or infrastructure or a process or what have you. And by the time you do it, there's a dozen more tools that do the job quicker and more efficiently and maybe less expensive. And though it's easy to go back and second guess yourself and say, why did I not know that? Or why did I not consider that?

But really, I think my piece of advice is really that digital transformation is really a mindset. It's not a project to be finished. It's really a mindset and a state of constant change that's driving you to just continuously search for improvement and ways to do things better. And I think if you think of it in terms of the mindset versus box that you're checking, then it's easier to feel like you've accomplished change in mindset and that you'll be ready to move forward and make good decisions. 

Tim Butara: That's an excellent piece of advice. And I think definitely the most effective and the most successful way to go about it. Awesome. 

Linda Kahangi: Thanks. 

Tim Butara: Just before we wrap up this awesome conversation, Linda, if our listeners wanted to reach out to you or to learn more about you, what's the best place for them to do that? 

Linda Kahangi: Yeah. You can find out more about Nomadix at nomadix dot com on our LinkedIn or Twitter pages and also find me on LinkedIn and via email, linda.kahangi@nomadix.com. 

Tim Butara: Awesome. I'll include all the relevant info in the show notes. Thanks so much, Linda. This has been an awesome conversation. I was really glad to host you on the show today. 

Linda Kahangi: Thank you. I enjoyed it. I appreciate it. Have a good day. 

Tim Butara: You too. And to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone and stay safe. 

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in. If you'd like to check out our other episodes, you can find all of them at agiledrop.com/podcast, as well as on all the most popular podcasting platforms. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes and don't forget to share the podcast with your friends and colleagues.