Miriam McLemore, director of enterprise strategy, AWS, joins Neha Pradhan Kulkarni for a chat on how enterprises can deliver on the promise of digital transformation (DX) and the pitfalls to avoid. They discuss what drives digital transformation for AWS’ clients, how to make the case for DX to senior leadership teams, and how to measure the success of a digital transformation strategy.
In this edition of Tech Talk, McLemore shares how enterprises can upskill to help their digital transformation journey. She also talks about the technologies that will help IT leaders to build business continuity plans in future.
Key Takeaways on How To Deliver Digital Transformation:
- Invest time in your people to train them on AI and machine learning
- Improve your company’s access to data and transparency of its supply chain
- Develop the company’s mindset to be a change maker
You can watch the complete conversation with Miriam McLemore, director of enterprise strategy, AWS in this video:
Here are the edited excerpts from our exclusive interview with Miriam McLemore:
1:29Opens a new window – Can you help us understand what drove digital transformation for AWS customers during the pandemic?
Yes, it’s I guess mostly a curse, but there’s some silver lining in this pandemic experience because companies had to make very quick decisions.
Initially, to enable their employees to work from home and of course to connect with customers and supply chain partners and other partners in a company’s ecosystem. And so that created an incredible demand for technologies that enabled that type of connectivity, whether it’s an employee connectivity or connecting to your consumers and partners. And so, this speed, which the pandemic drove is something that some companies have benefited from making decisions faster and leveraging technology more effectively.
3:35Opens a new window – In your view, which emerging technologies can provide a robust business continuity plan to IT leaders for a futuristic business strategy?
Yeah, absolutely. Cloud adoption has just absolutely had an impact of rapid adoption and growth, and a lot of the driver behind that is data and the ability to leverage data for better.
We just talked about speed making better decisions and making them faster, but data driven decision is certainly important. We’ve worked with just a wide variety of companies. I’ve had the opportunity to work with BMW, for example, in their efforts to improve their company’s access to data and transparency of their supply chain.
They have a platform called Part Chain that AWS and BMW have partnered on that enhances traceability of automotive parts and raw materials through their very complex global supply chain. So that type of information and visibility is critical to companies.
I think making better data driven decisions is one reason data is at the top of the list. Another is better customer experience; data being used to deeply understand customers and create better experiences.
I’ve had the great opportunity to work with Formula One. There is a great volume of data points that are thrown off from the cars and then leveraging historical data to build machine learning models pans closer to the experience. Another example is Disney Plus, expanding their content out there. So having reached across North America, Europe, Asia, Pacific, Latin America, is certainly based on having right information and then uncovering new opportunities that data can unearth for companies by using new insights.
Certainly, Amazon has been part of our reaching and striving for our sustainability goals and reducing packaging in our supply chain. So, data, I guess is my long-winded answer to your question.
See More: Key Skills Tech Employees Need for Digital Transformation
8:29Opens a new window – What are the possible pitfalls in a transformation journey that your peers can learn from?Â
We were just talking about speed and better decisions using data. All of that really is to unlock new opportunities to have visibility into things that might drive new revenue streams for your business. And it’s been interesting to have conversations with established organizations that are now thinking of themselves much more as technology companies.
For example, Goldman Sachs was part of some of the announcements, we made at our conference called AWS:Reinvent. They are partnering with AWS to collaborate on a new data management solution for financial services. A very established company in the industry is using cloud-based data and analytics solutions so that they can make new service offerings to their customers and have their institutional clients benefit from the experience and the vast amount of data and information that Goldman has.
So, I think that innovation is certainly the drive behind that. But the pitfalls were part of your question. So, keeping and maintaining momentum, something that I see, established enterprise sometimes struggle with. That’s because we all want it immediately. We’ve created a world that relies on immediate reward and satisfaction.
And getting data clean, getting the information pulled together, training people on leveraging new technologies, like machine learning and artificial intelligence takes time. You’ve got to invest in your people in that training and give them access to the tools so that they can really get the experience, and create those innovative, capabilities for you. It takes willpower to stick with that type of training, to bring a cultural change.
See More: Why DevOps Is at the Epicenter of the Second Wave of Digital Transformation
13:18Opens a new window – How do you make the case to senior leadership teams that moving to the cloud is a strategy that provides ROI?
I was at a customer meeting just yesterday having this very conversation. There are really I think four elements that you need to focus on. It’s often, conversation. You get in and you do the business case. I’m a fan of rip the band-aid off quickly.
But you know, if you keep yourself in two different worlds for too long, your culture is more likely to fall back to the old ways of working. So, to make a culture change happen, you need to be intentional. You need to talk about it. You’ve got to work through beliefs and values and behaviors that drive a new culture.
And if you’re looking for a data-driven culture, right at Amazon, we call them mechanisms. Those are behaviors of ‘that’s a better way to think about.’ That your organization needs to maintain momentum and getting the structure right, is another aspect to that.
You can talk about culture, but if people are still working in an old structure? That becomes a negative pressure against the change that you’re trying to create. So, anything that you can do to remove the distance of friction between the people that are working and trying to work in a new way is important.
Getting clear on the organization structure mechanisms and the processes is crucial. Getting those straightened out and scalable would be the third. The fourth is execution, because you’ve got to be able to use the tools and drive value.
So those, I think are four things that you must work through, and you must talk through as a CIO sometimes. It’s the people aspect, for as long as I’ve been in the industry, talk about people, process, and technology, and you got to have all three legs of that stool for it to stand up properly.
See More: Data and Analytics Is the Catalyst for Digital Transformation: Understood Chief Data Officer
16:53Opens a new window – Considering the need for rapid enterprise transformation, how do you measure the success of a digital transformation strategy?
Yes, it’s critical to be able to see that you’re making progress. And it depends on what your journey is and what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to migrate applications or data to the cloud units, maybe there are several applications in X period that you’ve moved and hopefully those are aggressive.
From a cost standpoint, if you live in two worlds too long, you’re paying for a parallel world. So, I think cost certainly is a metric and hitting your savings numbers are important KPIs. If you’re trying to create a new data-driven environment for some aspect of your business, see how many decisions are based on the models that you’re using, the number of people using those models, what data is being utilized. There are all sorts of metrics once you get into the world of data.
During the pandemic, we have had a lot of conversations about employee productivity as employees are remote. So, measurements around employee performance and productivity, I’ve seen measured as well. As a community, we need to put our heads up and market and share success stories and the KPIs that go along with those.
See More: How IoT Powers Digital Transformation for Enterprises: Tech Talk With Ericsson’s VP of IoT Strategy
20:39Opens a new window – How can enterprises upskill to help their digital transformation journey?
I’ll go back to talking about BMW. They have gone through a huge effort in training and certifications for over 5,000 software engineers. So that type of investment in training and up-skilling your teams is needed.
Not just retraining the established people but investing in training for your new talent is also a must.
So, a training and learning culture that is a way of working is, I think a mental transition that some companies need to make. Sadly, in my history, often the budget that got cut first, was the training budget. It seemed like a variable optional expense and the world of technology today moves too quickly to have training, be something that we’re willing to cut so readily.
So, I think it’s a critical investment that your finance team needs to understand, if you’re going to retain talent. In this war for talent, I have often discussed with HR leaders that having the right training programs will attract new and retain existing employees.
See More: Is Zero Trust the Catalyst for a Successful Digital Transformation?
23:30Opens a new window – How can CIOs decide if digital transformation makes sense for their company?
The term digital transformation, of course, has so many definitions and so, I’ll answer your question in this way. All companies must continue to evolve. It’s very hard to come up with a company that can stay status quo and be successful because the landscape that we are all operating in and the employee base coming into the market today, the consumers, the change in your partners and suppliers, the demands from an environmental and sustainability angle, it demands change. The world has changed. And if you don’t change with it, you’re likely going to be left behind.
Maybe there’s some pocket somewhere, where you can just, hunker down and block out in the world but I haven’t seen it in the companies that I’ve spoken to. We spoke about financial institutions like Goldman Sachs that is changing, auto manufacturers like BMW coming with the electric cars and all new technology.
The supply chain issues in the world today are driving the need for better information and are changing approaches to supply chain. I heard, during one of our sessions at Reinvent, Adam Lipsky was talking to our CEO about the importance of being an insurgent versus an incumbent. And I really liked that our mindset is to be a change maker and not the incumbent, who is getting battered by the winds of change.
About Miriam McLemoreOpens a new window :
Miriam is director of enterprise strategy and evangelism at Amazon Web Services (AWS), in her role she advises enterprise customers on their journey to the cloud and building speed and agility into their organizations. Prior to joining Amazon, Miriam held various business and technology leadership positions at The Coca-Cola Company and was a consultant with Accenture. When Miriam retired from Coca-Cola, she was the chief information officer, corporate. In this role with a 1000+ globally distributed team and $150M+ budget she provided global technology leadership across the enterprise business units and functions. Throughout her 26-year career with The Coca-Cola Company, and 6 years with Accenture, Miriam drove global enterprise technology strategy, digital transformation and data analytics focused on understanding and engaging consumers and customers, providing competitive advantage, and improving internal system efficiencies.
About Amazon Web ServicesOpens a new window
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions.
About Tech Talk
Tech Talk is an interview series that features notable CTOs and senior technology executives from around the world. Join us as we talk to these technology and IT leaders who share their insights and research on data, analytics, and emerging technologies. If you are a tech expert and wish to share your thoughts, write to [email protected]Opens a new window
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