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Multi-cloud environments offer significant business benefits from increasing agility to improving efficiency. The challenge, however, is that each cloud sits in an isolated silo with its own development and operating model, taxonomy, services, APIs and management tools. This lack of consistency across clouds forces companies to manage their multi-cloud environments through a patchwork of off-the-shelf, custom-built and native cloud service provider tools, which often require specialized developer and operator teams and skill sets to use. The lack of consistency across clouds also increases security risks.

Early on, VMware recognized the need to unify cloud environments. That’s why we created VMware Cross-Cloud services, our portfolio of services for application development, cloud management, cloud and edge infrastructure, security and networking, and Anywhere Workspace solutions. These services are built on a seamless abstraction layer that spans clouds, enabling organizations to build, deploy, run, manage, secure and access apps and infrastructure in a consistent way.

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Understanding Multi-Cloud Services

VMware and other software vendors have seen the same industry challenges of multi-cloud environments, and in response have released services to address various aspects of these challenges. For instance, earlier this year VMware CTO Kit Colbert discussed this very issue with the head of strategic partnerships at Snowflake, which is tackling the issue of managing data in a multi-cloud environment.

Multi-cloud services is our proposed nomenclature to address comprehensive multi-cloud challenges. As we define it, a multi-cloud service provides a consistent API, object model, identity management and other core functions across clouds, and it runs in one or more of the following scenarios: 

On a single cloud but supports interactions with at least two different clouds.On multiple clouds and supports interactions with at least two different clouds.On any cloud or edge, even in disconnected mode, and basic operations are fully automated.

VMware sees five categories of multi-cloud services: application services, infrastructure services, security services, end-user services and data plane services. These are broad categories, and over time we expect that our industry, collectively, will define more granular service categories as well as entirely new services.  

VMWare

In the multi-cloud services model, data centers, private clouds, public clouds and edge locations are verticals, and multi-cloud services are horizontals, providing functionality across these locations. These horizontal capabilities integrate with and complement the native services of each cloud while providing the consistency and standardization that development, operations and security teams need.

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Services

Organizations can use multi-cloud services to abstract and standardize cloud infrastructure and operations, development and security capabilities into one platform to reduce or eliminate the complexity of individually building or consuming the equivalent native services from multiple clouds. Some of the benefits include:

The business can realize quicker time to market and quantifiable improvements in app performance, efficiency and security. Operators can deploy, manage and monitor apps and container infrastructure in the same way for every cloud. This can minimize the need for specialized teams and skill sets when working with specific clouds.Developers can write apps using their preferred framework without worrying about the infrastructure or the cloud on which it runs.Security teams can apply policies consistently to every cloud and app. Companies in regulated industries can meet their unique sovereign cloud requirements and maintain jurisdictional control while achieving cutting-edge transformation at scale.

Learn More About Multi-Cloud Services

For a deeper dive into multi-cloud services, read VMWare’s white paper.For additional information please click here.

VMware

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The insurance industry is undergoing a sea change, with IT playing a crucial role in rolling out digital customer experiences for policyholders and agents, as in-person meetings all but vanish in the post-pandemic era.

This pivot to digital customer experiences has become a new insurance industry imperative, as John Aflac, Liberty Mutual, MassMutual, MetLife, and a host of other insurers have embraced digital strategies for interacting with and delivering new services to customers — in some cases, integrating advanced cloud technologies such as analytics and machine learning to design new insurance policies.

Bill Pappas, who joined MetLife as head of global technology and operations three years ago to drive the CEO’s customer-first strategy, exemplifies the new insurance CIO ethos.

“We are paying very close attention to trends from a customer perspective. We call our approach high tech and high touch, because that takes into account the very clear feedback that we’re getting from our customers — that they want digital solutions to take the transactional nature from our relationship away in a way that is intuitive and secure, but they want us to be there when it matters the most,” he says.

For Pappas, the customer has become the “North Star” in the digital era, and other insurance CIOs concur, as improving the customer experience and operational excellence — not revenue growth — tops the list of insurance digitalization initiatives in 2023, according to a recent Gartner survey of CIOs across 81 countries.

“The customer experience in life insurance has not been very digital,” says Gartner analyst Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, noting the very traditional human-to-human interactions in the industry. “Now it’s really more about [digital] customer experience and operational efficiency, particularly given we’re just coming out of COVID.”

The seismic shift toward digital services during the pandemic served as a wakeup call for the insurance industry, which by and large lagged other industries in technology modernization, analysts say.

“In the last few years, the [insurance industry] has taken us in some new directions, being more remote and virtual and changing behaviors than we would have seen in 2019 or before,” Harris-Ferrante says.

And for insurers like MetLife, digital customer-centricity means new approaches to serving agents and policyholders alike — without straying from the heart of the insurance relationship, the human touch.

“In some cases we are b-to-b; in some cases we’re b-to-b-to-c,” Pappas says. “We will digitize mostly the transactional nature of the product, but we do want to safeguard that ability for a person to be there for the customers where that matters the most.”

IT as industry differentiator

Insurers and financial services firms like MassMutual, of Springfield, Mass., are substituting face-to-face meetings with advanced, value-added digital interactions with customers. But the impact of IT in revitalizing what insurance companies offer their customers goes well beyond facilitating video meetings and digitized documentation.

Tara Long, MassMutual’s newly appointed CIO, points to the company’s patented enterprise data application platform and enhanced cybersecurity as integrated digital services that add significant value to its digital customers. For example, digital customers may use biometric login with Touch ID and Face ID for security.

Other key resources that benefit the customer experience include BI and analytics for anything from actuarial pricing to risk selection and customer intelligence, the CIO says.

“There are a lot of self-service capabilities and new digital portals that are going to help service our policyholders as well as our financial advisors,” Long says. “There’s a lot that goes into our digital transformation. It’s a journey with lots of components to it.”

Acrisure, of Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, uses artificial intelligence to build custom insurance policies and financial services for businesses as well as consumer policies. Matt Marolda, the company’s chief innovation officer who came on board in 2021, has played a key role developing AI models for “custom-tailored” insurance packages, for example.

The COVID wakeup call

For most insurance companies, the global shutdowns that followed COVID-19 were the tipping point.

When the pandemic hit, Aflac CIO Rich Gilbert felt like the firm’s insurance agent business could be a dead duck. Yet Gilbert tapped the company’s Hatch Innovation Lab to build a new virtual enrollment system that had its origin in the data center but was quickly redesigned for the cloud amid the pandemic.

“COVID was the digital disruptor. Our agents sell to small, medium, large businesses at their work site and now there was no work site,” says Gilbert, who signed on as CIO at Aflac in 2019. “So we had to kind of rethink and reimagine our whole model of engaging with policyholders or potential policyholders.”

Aflac’s Virtual Enrollment Experience fully utilized the cloud and SaaS solutions in its construction, Gilbert says.

“We needed the speed of the cloud to assemble a new experience for agents to work remotely. The Virtual Enrollment Experience is fulfilled via a microsite customized for each account and is hosted in the cloud (AWS). Each microsite is composed of several components, including product information and videos to inform, a decision support tool to help decide, a calendaring tool to schedule a virtual consultation with an agent, a virtual collaboration platform via Webex to consult on product offerings, and a connection to enroll and e-sign to complete the process,” he says.

Aflac also expanded its marketing outreach to direct customers to microsites where they can learn about Aflac’s supplemental cancer insurance, set up a virtual meeting with an agent, and use the homegrown system to sign on to policies. “We actually built a whole new enrollment platform that is much like an Amazon capability,” Gilbert says. 

John Hancock is another insurance company that overhauled its operations to be more digital-centric by integrating SaaS services such as Clareto to simplify the insurance purchasing process and reduce underwriting times, while using its homegrown JH eApp to streamline the overall life insurance process.

Building for tomorrow

With new platforms evolving, insurance CIOs are eyeing new possibilities for the future.

Liberty Mutual, which has been an industry leader in digital transformation, operates a hybrid cloud infrastructure built primarily on Amazon Web Services but with specific uses of Microsoft Azure and, lesser so, Google Cloud Platform.

Roughly 60% of Liberty Mutual’s data runs on the cloud and taps into an array of business applications and analytics dashboards that yield real-time insights and predictions, recently-retired CIO James McGlennon told CIO.com last year.

The insurance company under his direction spent 17 years developing a robust platform that today enables consumers to access an automated claims system that uses chatbots, cameras, and e-mail to initiate a claim and rent a car while a machine learning model analyzes the photograph of the damaged vehicle to detect whether its airbag has been deployed, for instance, and to determine immediately whether a vehicle is totaled or the damage is limited to a fender bender.

That’s today. The platform will enable data scientists to build the next generation of applications for its consumers tomorrow.

“We’re really trying to understand the metaverse and what it might mean for us,” said McGlennon. “We’re focused on augmented reality and virtual reality. We’re doing a lot on AI and machine learning and robotics. We’ve already built up blockchain and we’ll continue with all those.”

These new customer digital experiences extend well beyond requiring customers to fill out policy applications digitally or use chatbots for answering basic insurance questions. When designing modern policy applications for digital customers, data scientists at insurers will continue to use the cloud, advanced data tools, business intelligence, and machine learning models that will change the entire business practices — not just the method of communication, insurance CIOs point out.

Digital Transformation, Insurance Industry

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With digital operating models altering business processes and the IT landscape, enterprise architecture (EA) — a rigid stalwart of IT — has shown signs of evolving as well. One key indicator of this evolution is the increasing interest in enterprise architecture management (EAM) tools, which transformational enterprise architects and CIOs are turning to in order to jointly digitize the business.

According to research firm Gartner, the EA tool sector is seeing annual revenues grow by up to 30% from a limited footprint, with support for such tools increasing as EA broadens beyond direct control of IT departments and into more democratized technology environments. It’s a stark contrast from a decade ago when it was thought the sector would generate just $10 million in revenue because the tools were too complicated.

CIOs and their enterprise architects are buying in to EA tools now because the tools enable organizations to examine the need for, and impact of, change, as well as capture the relationships and mutual reliance within ecosystems of partners, operating models, capabilities, processes, applications, and technologies — all key currents in the era of digital transformation.

“The organization typically has tons of initiatives taking place, so to operationalize them can be difficult, especially as people are so busy,” says Anjali Subburaj, DCX architect with digital retailer The Very Group.

Plus, the pace of change increases the need for architects to use tools that enable efficient response times to business needs.

“At Citi, we needed to be able to scale in order to cope with payments from the likes of Airbnb and Uber,” says Eric Newcomer, former CTO at the financial services provider and current CTO at technology provider WS02. “The transition from monolith to microservices needs a high level of good governance.” Digital transformation needs to be rapid, too, but can’t lose sight of regulations, cyber security, and business reputation.

With the climate of change as it stands, CIOs are exploring EAM tools because the traditional EA approach can’t accommodate the rapid pace that digital transformation requires. “There’s an ongoing change in the business, and that means a change in IT, so there’s never a constant picture,” says André Christ, CEO and founder of emerging EAM technology provider LeanIX. So IT leaders across disparate sectors like financial services, media, consumer goods, manufacturing, and academia are embracing new tools to help see, analyze, and manage fluid landscapes of business technology as they digitize their organizations.

“Being able to look at the mix of applications as a whole, and trying to understand how that creates value or risk, enables you to make the case for change, or even maintain the status quo,” says enterprise architect Jonathan Gregory, currently at the UK’s Houses of Parliament. “EAM starts from the business outcomes and manifests into a series of investment opportunities that have a clear line of sight for delivering them. That’s where the opportunity is for enterprise architects, among others.”

Not just for IT

As CIOs have become business leaders and regular members of the executive board, technology has become central to solving business challenges or developing new business opportunities. Therefore EA is broadening its focus, too. Recently, enterprise architect was considered a very technical role, but as technology has moved to the cloud via SaaS and ownership has moved beyond the traditional IT department to business lines, the role has, like that of the CIO, needed to include architecting business capabilities, delivery of change at pace, and the move away from projects and toward products.

“Enterprise architects need to be empowered to deal with the integration challenges,” says Darren Coomer, founder of the Strategy and Architecture Group and group CIO and COO of Zurich-based financial services provider Swiss Re. “An enterprise architecture tool is often sold as a prerequisite by consulting firms that often earn software commissions. So get some advice on the value it actually brings beyond what you pay your professional services providers to deliver.” 

EAM tools analyze the business, its capabilities, customers, processes, and products, and then operate in the language the business uses. In other words, it creates ownership. “It democratizes the architecture so you can ask questions about the applications used,” says enterprise architect Mike Winfield of London-based Tokio Marine Kiln, a specialist insurance company. “You could do some of this on a spreadsheet, but mapping the relationships between business, application, data, and technical architectures soon becomes unmanageable.”

As organizations and CIOs move away from waterfall projects and toward agile and DevOps, EAM technologies enable greater insight and management of the product. “With a product approach, you’re continually building something, so how do you understand if you’re delivering business value?” says LeanXI’s Christ.

The latest generation of EAM technologies and EA protagonists is highly focused on business value, which, like a product, is a continuum, not a one-off. “You’ve made an investment, and you have to keep investing in it,” says enterprise architect Gregory. “For the finance department, that can be a different way of working. So you need to bring the CFO along with you, which is why the EA is now a partner to the business who looks at how capabilities are utilized and how investment can make the greatest return.”

So EAM tools are, therefore, part of how EAs and business technology leaders manage investments made not only by the CIO and IT but by business lines. “Business-managed IT isn’t a bad thing as it leads to process efficiency, and employee and customer satisfaction,” says Christ. “The risks, though, are cost, integration, and what’s expected of IT. SaaS allows the enterprise architect to correlate its usage information intelligently, which leads to conversations about how they and IT can help.”

Credible data: The foundation of a successful EA strategy

Although leading enterprise architects see the need for a tool that better reflects the way they work, they also have concerns. “Provenance and credibility are key, so you risk making the wrong decisions as an enterprise architect if there’s no accuracy in the data,” Gregory says of how EAM tools are reliant on data quality. Winfield agrees, adding: “The difficult bit is getting accurate data into the EAM.”

Gartner, in its Magic Quadrant for EA Tools, reports that the EAM sector could face some consolidation, too: “Due to the importance and growth in use of models in modern business, we expect to see some major vendors in adjacent market territories make strategic moves by either buying or launching their own EA tools.”

Still, some CIOs question the value of adding EAM tools to their technology portfolio alongside IT service management (ITSM) tools, for example. The Very Group’s Subburaj foresees this being a challenge. “Some business leaders will struggle to see the direct business impact,” he says.

And Coomer voices similar concerns: “Some large organizations have spent several millions on implementing EA tools and maintaining internal teams dedicated to keeping them up to date. But in reality, this isn’t always necessary, and the CIO and organization inherit another legacy platform that becomes difficult to exit. The real value of an EA tool is often through visualization and being able to tell a different story, using the same core data for many different stakeholders — from the details a business analyst may need to run change initiatives, to the board looking for some security and validation that it’s on the right transformational journey.”

Redrawing the role

As EAM tools have entered the market as a result of the EA role evolving, CIOs aren’t as wary of their purpose in digital transformation.

“Architects can be their own worst enemies — too academic and too many methodologies,” says WS02’s Newcomer, a former EA himself. Gregory also understands the CTO’s frustration as well: “Over the last few years, there’s been a dividing line in the role of the enterprise architect, who in the past was seen as a technical guru that had come through the technology ranks.”

But the same was true of the CIO in the noughts. However, the role has transformed into being business-centric, and the architect is evolving to be a key partner with the CIO. The importance of EA communication is something Subburaj says is growing. The necessity and complexity of technology in modern organizations have inevitably led to the need to architect the interconnections between business processes, outcomes and the intertwining technology that plays an essential role. That complexity needed new EAM tools to visualize these relationships and provide a plan from which the CIO and stakeholders can better build the business.

CIO, Enterprise Architecture, IT Leadership

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Remote and hybrid work is here to stay. In an increasingly complex security environment, no challenge looms larger than how to protect remote devices that tie back into the corporate network.

In fact, modernizing networking technologies ranks among the top IT goals for 2022 according to an IDG survey conducted on behalf of Insight Enterprises. 

With more users working remotely, tools and processes designed for corporate networks are less effective for endpoint protection, leaving IT teams scrambling to keep their users protected. By some estimates, cybercrime could cost companies an estimated $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015.

When polled, CIO Experts Network of IT professionals and industry analysts stressed the need for employee buy-in, as well as a commitment to device management and endpoint security.

Most importantly, however, is building a strong security culture that encourages best practices across the organizations. The IDG survey found that 36% of respondents say that mitigating risk with stronger cybersecurity programs is a top objective for 2022. 

According to several influencers, that requires acceptance and buy-in from leadership:

“Corporations should look at homes as an extension of their organization’s boundaries. Which means that the same/similar tools, technologies, processes, and safeguards should be taken into consideration for people working from home.”

— Arsalan.A.Khan (@ArsalanAKhan), a tech advisor

“All devices, regardless of home use or business use, should incorporate cyber security and accessibility. It is critical to understand any potential security issues that might crop up on their home networks. Creating processes that incorporate these best practices will help you keep your employees’ technology and devices safe.”

— Debra Ruh (@debraruh), Ruh Global IMPACT and Executive Chair of Billion Strong

“When someone says, ‘do as I say, not as I do,’ it means they are a hypocrite. Security hypocrisy is when firms don’t enforce the same level of security controls for remote workers as they do on-premises. Firms serious about security must ensure that remote users follow the same robust security controls their onsite brethren do.”

— Ben Rothke (@benrothke), Senior Information Security Manager at Tapad

When leadership takes protecting remote devices connecting to the corporate network seriously, there are three simple steps to take to build a robust security framework for their network. 

“There are three device attack protection vectors to consider: the user, their applications, and the network,” says Adam Stein(@apstein2), Principal at APS Marketing. “For the user, keep up to date with ongoing security threats that could possibly impact their work at home. The user’s applications also need regular updating for ideal end-point protection.” 

Building Employee Trust and Buy-In

Security is only as strong as its weakest link. For Gene Delibero (@GeneDeLibero), CSO at GeekHive.com, ensuring strong security requires a strong security culture that educates and empowers workers.

“First, and perhaps most important, is creating a culture of accountability around security; it’s not just the company’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem,” says Delibero (@GeneDeLibero). “Organizations can’t expect remote employees to execute security measures effectively when they haven’t been trained on the company’s security policies.”

Steve Prentice (@cloudtweaksteve), a technology integration specialist, argues that truly dedicated organizations should build an entirely new architecture to make sure remote workers, and their devices, are up to the task. “This should become a new branch of internal IT security — specifically investigating, securing, and even penetrating the home offices of employees the same way as is done in an office. Employers should treat their employees’ home workspace and mobile technologies as branch offices — still a less expensive option than paying for building floor space, cubicles, etc.”

Isaac Sacolik (@nyike), President of StarCIO and author of “Digital Trailblazer,” adds that building a security culture should go hand in hand with building a positive work environment. “It all starts with the mindset and practices aimed at improving productivity and supporting work-life balance through flexible remote and hybrid work technology options. As employees gain trust with IT, they’re more open to learning and improving security, including locking down home networks, protecting data, and following IT’s recommendation on protecting devices.”

Securing Individual Devices 

After earning buy-in from employees, organizations still need to secure their devices. 

“Organizations should invest in a combination of asset management, endpoint detection, data loss prevention, cloud-based managed detection and response, and patch or vulnerability management,” says Kayne Mcgladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Field CISO at Hyperproof and Senior IEEE Member. “Of those, asset management is the starting point, as an organization should have visibility into the devices accessing corporate data and be able to select and apply appropriate controls to those devices. Those controls then may include endpoint protection or data loss protection, for example, if exfiltration of sensitive corporate data may result in compliance violations.” 

Employing this strategy empowers an organization’s IT team to protect the corporate network from a wide range of threats, according to Will Kelly (@willkelly), a writer and analyst. “My best advice for protecting at home devices starts with a solid and robust mobile device management (MDM) solution and supporting processes. An MDM automates operating system updates, security patches, virus scanning, application updates, and device security configuration, such as setting a lock screen.”

Jack Gold (@jckgld), President and Principal Analyst at J.Gold Associates, LLC., takes that one step farther. “It’s important to segregate work at home devices from other users in the family. You probably don’t want your kids playing games or web surfing on the PC you use for doing work. That could be enforced by giving workers a corporate furnished — and managed — PC exclusively for their use.”

Ensuring Endpoint Security

Kieran Gilmurray (@KieranGilmurray), CEO at Digital Automation and Robotics Limited, feels that securing the corporate network relies on implementing quality endpoint security practices. 

“Threat actors have taken advantage of the pandemic by targeting unsuspecting remote workers. Every ‘at home’ network connected device is a potential entry point for criminal activity,” says Gilmurray. “So now, employees are provided with a secure VPN between their home network and their corporate offices. The only way to protect remote devices is to apply best practice corporate ‘endpoint’ security practices to every device attached to a home network.”

To compensate, organizations can take a strategic approach that prioritizes high risk accounts and devices. Peter Nichol (@PeterBNichol), Chief Technology Officer at OROCA Innovations instructs to “Start with what the employer can control. Be sure to prioritize energy around high-risk endpoints. Specifically, privileged accounts or accounts with elevated access should be managed within privileged access management (PAM). Companies who act on endpoint security today will save themselves big headaches tomorrow.”

Robust endpoint security helps reinforce human weaknesses in the corporate network, says Frank Cutitta (@fcutitta), CEO & Founder HealthTech Decisions Lab. “The human vulnerability overpowers any technological protection one can install. We’re always just one errant click away from ransom or breach. While it sounds incredibly obvious, setting your computer to lock after a short period of time can also minimize external access along with changing passwords frequently. Face or fingerprint recognition software adds added security.”

While endpoint security is an important part of a robust security apparatus, it won’t protect an organization’s corporate network on its own. “Some advanced precautions might seem like overkill for a home office, but not if we view the home office as a mere extension of the corporate network,” says Scott Schober (@ScottBVS), President/CEO at Berkeley Varitronics Systems, Inc. “Endpoint visibility and detection at each home office allows IT to view the actual number of endpoints that need protection.” 

The ultimate answer may come via strong partnerships: The same IDG/Insight survey found that 87% of respondents will rely on third-party providers for support with challenges around infrastructure, operations, and culture. 

“‘Endpoint anything,’ including protection that is based with on-premises technology, is limited in what it can do and what it can reach in today’s world. On-premises requires a lot of extra configuration and cost to support devices that are mostly remote when compared to a cloud-based solution in which touching or accessing a device from any location is just native with minimal infrastructure,” says Joseph Flynn, Director of Modern Workplace at Insight. “Endpoint security is harder to drive XDR types of services in an on-premises solution, as AI is usually in play. This tends to drive much of the automation and protection to streamline and increase capabilities. Having those capabilities on-premises in most tools is not possible unless they connect to some cloud platform”

Insight Enterprises, Inc. is a Fortune 500 solutions integrator helping organizations accelerate their digital journey to modernize their business and maximize the value of technology. Insight’s technical expertise spans cloud- and edge-based transformation solutions, with global scale and optimization built on 34 years of deep partnerships with the world’s leading and emerging technology providers.

Chrome Enterprise Upgrade (CEU) from Insight provides a simple and secure way to manage your devices. Try for free today. 

Data and Information Security

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The all-encompassing digital workplace platform 

Work as we know it has changed in the past few years coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Communications and collaboration technology were critical to that shift. As a result, we have witnessed the evolution of communications and collaboration suites to UCaaS platforms that are now evolving into fuller all-encompassing digital workplace platforms with deeper integration with CCaaS and strategic lines of business applications. As a result, the lines are blurring, and the days of silo applications that do one thing, like conferencing, are giving way to fuller platforms aimed at being more strategic solutions for helping companies run their entire business.  

We see from one end of the market (mainly small and midsize businesses) that providers like Zoho fully position their platform as the operating system for business. In their favor, they have the platform and myriad applications to make a strong claim. Collaboration and office productivity providers, such as Microsoft and Google, have evolved into digital workplace platform providers with the core applications companies need to run their businesses. Recently, as part of its fuller Zoom One platform strategy, Zoom announced the addition of email and calendar along with its expanded team chat functionality to rival Microsoft and Google. And that goes along with its complete contact center offering. With its acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has made it the collaborative hub of the platform that powers critical customer workflows in sales and marketing use cases, amongst others.  

This chat-enabled collaboration hub feature is becoming a common key identifier in these new-era digital workplace platforms. Take RingCentral, for example; they have a unified UCaaS and CCaaS offering with an in-context collaboration feature set that spans voice, video, and integrated team chat as the connecting hub. Similarly, Cisco Webex boasts UCaaS and CCaaS with a chat-enabled collaboration hub and an expansive portfolio of workplace devices. 

Technology vendors are always looking at adjacencies but what is happening now is the strong undercurrent of providing fuller platforms that support cross-business functions. Vendors have long realized they need to be the glue that connects rather than individual product providers. While this makes me reminisce back to the messaging middleware days, this is where we are now with digital workplace technology platforms.  

Low-code/no-code offerings are also emerging as critical features of digital workplace solutions to enable organizations to build applications to support essential business processes and workflows flexibly.   

Workplace transformation requires solutions-focused tech platforms 

In response to the ongoing digital transformation and disruption every business is going through, these platforms have to provide relevant business solutions that specifically support lines of business domains. Each solution set must, at its core, offer satisfactory experiences to both internal employees and external customers and partners. Business processes and workflows incorporate a continuum of conversational experiences between people, apps, and data in multidirectional iterations. 

The effect is a collaborative ecosystem and community of constituents that require seamless connectivity. Therefore, organizations must focus on the collaboration and community aspect of business processes and workflows. Every business process involves a series of collaborative events between various internal and external actors. 

They may include physical meetings, conference calls, videoconferences, and chat and email interactions. These are the points at which people come together to create, inform, negotiate, or persuade each other in ways that advance the process. Other nodes in the process include work done independently by each actor, such as planning, analysis, document creation, etc. 

The output of these intervening sessions is generally input to the next step, and part of the integration process is to make this data and content available to the right actors at the right time. This step involves shared middleware services such as access control and authentication, scheduling, and content management. Enterprise planners and decision-makers must evaluate digital workplace platforms and solutions by how they can support collaborative business workflows. The flexibility of the platform is critical. 

Final thoughts 

While new all-encompassing digital workplace platform offerings are emerging, each provider’s partner and developer ecosystem will be critical. Therefore, it must be an evaluation criterion in decision-making. First, evaluate providers’ offerings on the ability to integrate into existing infrastructure to minimize friction. Ensuring people are at the center of this, clearly define the goals and objectives of the workplace, and identify the specific needs and requirements of the organization. This step will help ensure that the chosen platform can support the desired workflows and collaboration processes and comes down into the flow of how people work in the organization. 

Collaboration Software, Remote Work

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For any IT leader new to an organization, gaining employee trust is paramount — especially when, like PepsiCo’s Athina Kanioura, you’ve been brought in to transform the way work gets done.

Kanioura, who was hired away from Accenture two years ago to serve as the food and beverage multinational’s first chief strategy and transformation officer, says earning employee trust was one of her greatest challenges in those early months. Tapped to guide the company’s digital journey, as she had for firms such as P&G and Adidas, Kanioura has roughly 1,000 data engineers, software engineers, and data scientists working on a “human-centered model” to transform PepsiCo into a next-generation company.

“People become embedded into the ways of working successfully,” she says. “Me coming in from the outside and proposing so much change —  the associates and midlevel management are the ones that must be empowered and that is the most difficult aspect of any kind of transformation.”

Now halfway into its five-year digital transformation, PepsiCo has checked off many important boxes — including employee buy-in, Kanioura says, “because one way or another every associate in every plant, data center, data warehouse, and store are using a derivative of this transformation.”

The $247 billion conglomerate, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, is developing a modernized data and cloud infrastructure replete with automated processes and workflows. To date the company has moved 5,000 applications to Microsoft Azure as it applies predictive analytics, AI, robotics, and process automation in many of its business operations.

PepsiCo’s migration to the cloud has paid off in in many ways, Kanioura says — in speed, flexibility, and agility, reducing on-demand forecasting from weeks to days or hours, and in feeding its supply chain more accurately and frequently.

“We want to ensure that the monetary value realization is captured across the board, and so far, we are very happy with the financial KPIs, which translate to business implementations which gave us a positive ROI,” Kanioura says. “But there is more room to go. We expect within the next three years, the majority of our applications will be moved to the cloud.”

The company is also refining its data analytics operations, and it is deploying advanced manufacturing using IoT devices, as well as AI-enhanced robotics. PepsiCo also plans to evolve its network modeling to become more “prescriptive,” anticipating events and making planning adjustments rather than reacting to market conditions, she says.

Upskilling for the digital future

The digital overhaul of nearly all PepsiCo’s business processes and operations has no doubt contributed to the company’s expected 12% growth for the current fiscal year over FY2021’s reported $79.5 billion in revenue. But with automation comes questions about the long-term viability of a range of current roles.

Kanioura insists the transformation’s goal is not distributing pink slips. In fact, she says, PepsiCo, which employs about 300,000 workers across the globe, is transforming all its human capital for the digital era.

“We are upskilling every employee of PepsiCo, whether you know someone who sits in company headquarters or you’re sitting in a plant or out selling our products,” Kanioura says.

One core program developed to achieve this goal, PepsiCo Digital Academy, provides employees with a common foundational understanding of the value of data and analytics and how they can use that information in their own roles, Kanioura says.

Digital Academy was launched last year, and to date roughly 27,000 employees have participated in digital training, with almost 140,000 views on digital training content, according to the company.

One HR employee took some courses in data analytics and found a new job within the company helping to advance digital transformation.

“I was always passionate about advanced analytics and took courses where I augmented my digital skills and acquired new ones,” says Ashley McCown, senior data analyst in PepsiCo’s People Analytics division. “These new skills enabled me to take on a new role where I am able to leverage advanced analytics to solve HR problems.”

IDC analyst Craig Powers says increased automation inevitably leads to some job losses. But enterprises are sincerely trying to upskill their employees to retain institutional knowledge necessary to realize the growth a digital transformation is designed to generate, he says.

“Is it possible to upskill all employees in a large organization to be digital experts? Not likely,” Powers says. “However, for the sake of success and efficiency in digital transformations, companies should be looking to educate and upskill as many internal people as they can, because their knowledge of the organization’s business processes is hard to replace.”

Enterprises like PepsiCo are also battling for new digital recruits even as they develop digital talent from within.

To that end, PepsiCo has launched two Digital Hubs — one in Dallas and one in Barcelona — to create more than 500 new data and digital jobs over the next three years. The hubs are designed to accelerate how PepsiCo “develops, centralizes, and deploys critical digital capabilities” across its global operations, according to the company.

Blending analytics and AI

Since taking over, Kanioura has applied the expertise she developed as chief analytics and AI officer at Accenture to advance PepsiCo’s data infrastructure, a strategy that includes building out a data lake and AI capabilities with partners such as Microsoft and Databricks.

Analytics and AI are integral to Kanioura’s vision for PepsiCo’s future, one that centers on enhancing three key pillars: consumer experience, commercial excellence, and operational excellence. “Every data set, every data KPI, or every data field is as important as the app,” she says. “Yes, the data is key. But the big unlock is MLops. The importance of using AI for data ops is critical. What we are trying to do is operationalize all our analytics and algorithmic libraries.”

PepsiCo will use a combination of customized Microsoft Azure and Databricks AI frameworks and machine learning models to redefine its operations even as it develops its own homegrown framework, “which is very specific to the needs of PepsiCo,” says Kanioura. “AI in this company is something that we absolutely debated down and it’s evident in many of our transformations across the globe.”

Gartner analyst Sid Nag says PepsiCo has adopted many of the technologies that are driving the next phase of enterprise digital transformation.

“The next frontier in IT services will be driven by the nexus of cloud, edge, 5G, AI, IoT, and data and analytics,” Nag says, adding that digital business initiatives built on these technologies can help enterprises interact more closely with their customers, thereby improving customer experience and engagement. “Digital touchpoints supported by cloud environments are the mechanism to connect the digital and physical worlds and are essential for the digital economy to execute on and accelerate digital business initiatives.”

Kanioura says PepsiCo’s success over the past two-plus years has laid the groundwork for an evolved, insight-driven enterprise. But for her, the most impactful achievement has been fostering employee trust across all layers of the organization.

“I expected more resistance,” she says. “I didn’t get too much resistance and that’s the toughest thing — to grow with what we were proposing. If you’re going to bet parts of your business and part of your critical business to a transformation like this, you need to be convinced that it will not cannibalize or disturb your growth trajectory.”

Analytics, Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation

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Since the outset of the pandemic, organizations have been increasingly launching initiatives aimed at automating business processes, turning to technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) in efforts to reduce costs, speed up tasks, and improve accuracy of core business operations.

Some leading organizations, however, are not stopping there. Seeking to push their automation agendas forward, they are embracing a move toward broader “intelligent automation” (IA), a strategy that weaves capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into standard RPA to enhance its functionality.

In addition to RPA, AI, and ML, intelligent automation strategies can also incorporate a mix of technologies such as natural language processing, chatbots, and others that complement each other, says Lakshmanan Chidambaram, president of Americas strategic verticals at global IT consulting firm Tech Mahindra.

“These technologies together allow us to automate business processes to a larger extent, when compared to simple RPA automations,” Chidambaram says.

As RPA adoption matures, it appears likely that IA will also gain traction within enterprises seeking to improve automation outcomes. An August 2022 report from Gartner projects global RPA software spending to reach $2.9 billion this year, up 20% from 2021. The worldwide RPA software market is expected to continue experiencing double-digit growth in 2023, according to the research firm.

Vendors are rapidly evolving their RPA offerings into broader automation platfors with embedded capabilities for hyperautomation — Gartner’s term for IA. As a starting point toward hyperautomation, organizations will increase their spending on RPA software because they still have many repetitive, manual work tasks. Automating these could free up employees’ time to focus on more strategic work, the firm says.

Here is a look at how leading organizations are bringing intelligence to their automation strategies — and advice for CIOs seeking to do the same.

Embracing intelligent automation

Technology services provider Insight Enterprises is one such company embracing IA, leveraging a variety of automation technologies to support its business processes.

“Our RPA team focuses on internal optimization of highly manual back-office processes and a few client-facing reporting activities,” says Sumana Nallapati, CIO. “The team’s two primary towers currently focus on operations and finance, with a goal to provide a thoughtful approach to tackling manual processes, reducing costs, increasing productivity, and smoothing out error-prone processes.”

The firm is using Automation Anywhere’s RPA platform, which combines the basic RPA functionality with the ML and analysis capabilities of automatic process discovery and process analytics, as well as cognitive technologies such as computer vision, natural language processing, and fuzzy logic.

The initial drivers for deploying RPA at Insight were to optimize operations and enhance critical back-office functions. “We sought to standardize the organization’s critical processes while working to scale and increase productivity across our entire business,” Nallapati says.

Insight understood early on, however, that automation was vital for growth in many business areas, Nallapati says, so it focused on two primary use cases when launching its RPA initiative in 2018: deal registration and sales order entry.

Since RPA was new to the company, Insight began slowly in those two areas to work through the challenges of implementing an RPA strategy and infrastructure, Nallapati says. “Once the teams could show success in standing up an environment and automating more minor activities, we looked to scale the focus of automation,” she says. “Now, we’re working to transform how we maximize intelligent automation’s tactical, strategic, and competitive advantage.”

Insight is expanding its use of automation and IA globally. “As part of our integrated technology roadmap, we have a focused stream on transforming our organization into an ‘automation first’ culture,” Nallapati says. “The goal for this stream is to go from being focused solely on less valuable, individual automation to creating a center for enablement of strategically focused intelligent automation.”

For an organization to maximize the benefits of IA, the effort should be tied to a larger strategic initiative and be strongly linked to process transformation, Nallapati says.

“In the short term, our team is focused on a formal approach that identifies areas of our business that are heavy in manual, resource-intensive processes,” Nallapati says. “Ultimately, our vision is to run a self-service, scalable automation model that allows for teammate-driven development and maintenance of bots/automation.”

Growing the IA strategy

Cloud software provider Freshworks is also deploying IA, as part of a multi-year digital transformation effort, with a focus so far mainly in the human resources department.

For example, the company is using the AI capabilities of its own IT service management software (ITSM) combined with the RPA capabilities of Automation Anywhere’s platform to enhance the onboarding process and give new employees access to the tools they need on their first day of work.

With IA, the company has streamlined areas such as invoice handling, employee onboarding and offboarding, and customer order processing, says Prasad Ramakrishnan, Freshworks CIO.

“This automation has allowed our IT team members to get time back by skipping mundane repetitive tasks, and focus on what they were hired to do,” Ramakrishnan says. “Using AI and RPA technology, all of our employees can find the information they need in a streamlined and efficient manner.”

The need to increase automation of business processes “increased drastically” when all of Freshworks’ employees began working remotely in 2020, Ramakrishnan says.

“When it came to onboarding, different stakeholders needed to come together to achieve a successful day-one experience for our new hires,” he says. “With all stakeholders moving to a remote-first working model, [IA] enabled us to create role sets and streamline approval processes, thus reducing the long cycle times. Once the team started, there was no limit to our imagination on things we could identify and optimize using IA.”

Freshworks has set up task forces across the business to continuously identify new opportunities to implement IA. “We see an increased need to intelligently automate the various tasks that employees perform,” Ramakrisnan says.

Kickstarting a smooth IA journey

Adopting and expanding intelligent automation can be challenging because it involves a number of components and impacts multiple processes. Experts suggest several practices to ensure a smooth move.

One is to understand that automation is a journey, not a destination. “It’s never ‘good enough’; there are always more opportunities to uncover and tackle,” Nallapati says.

A good way to find and exploit those opportunities is to create an “automation first” culture, Nallapati says. “Much of the automation journey is rooted in change management,” she says. “Working with leaders to understand what automation can do, walking teams through the change, and teaching stakeholders how to work with and manage a ‘digital worker’ is critical to the program’s success.”

Automation isn’t a one-and-done endeavor, Nallapati says. “Much like the traditional employee, digital workers need coaching, occasional support, and the best tools and processes to make their work easier and more productive,” she says.

Another good practice is to set bold goals then work iteratively in small, decisive steps toward the big goal, Nallapati says. “Do not try to boil the ocean with automation; you must stay methodical and focused on the outcome you are trying to achieve,” she says. “Show value quickly. Break down a larger goal into smaller pieces that allow you to realize value more rapidly and tie it to a specific, measurable outcome and return on the investment.”

IT-business alignment and collaboration are key

Companies also need to optimize business processes to increase the effectiveness of automation, Nallapati says. “Working together in a partnership, the business unit and the automation teams can leverage their expertise to refine the best approach and way forward to optimize the efficiency of the bot/automation,” she says.

Technology leaders should make sure to get business leaders and users involved in the IA process, Ramakrishnan says. “Educate them about the possibilities and collaborate with them in joint problem-solving sessions,” he says.

One recent example at Freshworks was a joint effort between the automation team and the billing department. “With a large number of customers and a large number of invoices to process every day, any small savings through automation goes a long way in increasing productivity, accuracy, and improving employee and end customer satisfaction,” Ramakrishnan says.

Similar to the type of hackathons that are common in IT organizations today, Ramakrishnan says, “we partnered with the business to have a business-side hackathon/ideathon. We educated the key users from the billing team on the possibilities of automation, and then they were encouraged to come back with ideas on automation.”

IT and billing then jointly reviewed the suggestions for feasibility, prioritized them, and came up with an implementation plan, Ramakrishnan says.

It’s also smart to avoid jumping into IA, and automation in general, without a good reason.

“Never build a solution looking for a problem,” Ramakrishnan says. “Be sure to identify the problem first, and confirm if there’s a way to solve it already before creating more havoc for employees with a new application to deploy, implement, and learn,” he says.

Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation

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If you’ve been struggling to adapt to our new era of work, you’re not alone. The strategic and practical challenges of our new era of work – from inflation and supply chain headaches to finding and retaining talent, and more – have required much of information technology leaders.

Here’s your chance to get up to speed.

At CIO’s Future of Work Summit North America, taking place virtually September 28, leading technology thinkers and practitioners will offer insights and strategies for leading through disruptive times.

Kicking off the event will be the futurist and innovation expert Kian Gohar, who wrote the bestselling book Competing in the New World of Work. He will share research-based strategies on retaining talent, giving purpose to work, and rethinking assumptions about how and where work should take place. He will also answer questions in a live discussion.

“We know that the future of work is going to require having teams that are able to work really well together regardless of what disruption or what opportunity brings,” Gohar says.

The summit will examine what innovation looks like at various high-performing companies. Jeanine Charlton, chief technology and digital officer at Merchants Fleet, will discuss IT’s role in co-creating key digital business initiatives. Kathy Kay, executive vice president and CIO of Principal Financial Group, will talk about how she established herself as a leader during a remote era and has executed a strategy to modernize and simplify technology throughout the organization.

Innovation incubators are another strategy for purposeful ideation. Katie Webb, director of U.S. Innovation at Aflac, will share how she built the insurance giant’s internal incubator and how to organize, structure and approach teams and projects, create momentum and build trust.

Carrie Rasmussen, CIO at Ceridian, will talk about the CIO’s role in the next generation of work. And Brad Stone, CIO at Booz Allen Hamilton, will explain the firm’s five organizational principles that serve to inspire and retain talent but also accelerate growth.

Giving an inside look at the latest global research, Amy Loomis, IDC’s research vice president for the future of work, will explore key technology deployments as well as empathic leadership and governance strategies.

One model of leadership that is servant leadership. Discussing how they implement servant leadership – with results – will be Lisa Davis, senior vice president and CIO at Blue Shield of California; Nicole Raimundo Coughlin, CIO of the Town of Cary, North Carolina; and Dr. David Reis, CIO of the University of Miami Health System.

Looking to get ahead in your own career? Myrna Soto, a longtime IT leader and corporate director or board member of CMS Energy, Spirit Airlines, Popular Inc., and Trinet, will share tips and other best practices for how to prepare for board meetings and build relationships with board members. She will also offer advice for how to join corporate boards yourself.

Throughout the summit, sponsors including Freshworks will share innovative solutions for the hybrid workplace.

Check out the full summit agenda here. The event is free to attend for qualified attendees. Anything you miss will be available on demand for a period after the event. Don’t miss out – register today.

Human Resources, Innovation, IT Leadership, IT Strategy, IT Training 

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With 65 million vaccine doses to administer at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Luigi Guadagno, vice president of pharmacy renewal and healthcare platform technology at Walgreens, needed to know where to send them. To find out, he queried Walgreens’ data lakehouse, implemented with Databricks technology on Microsoft Azure.

“We leveraged the lakehouse to understand the moment,” he says. For Guadagno, the need to match vaccine availability with patient demand came at the right moment, technologically speaking. The giant pharmaceutical chain had put its lakehouse in place to address just such challenges in its quest, to, as Guadagno puts it, “To get the right product in the right place for the right patient.”

Previously, Walgreens was attempting to perform that task with its data lake but faced two significant obstacles: cost and time. Those challenges are well-known to many organizations as they have sought to obtain analytical knowledge from their vast amounts of data. The result is an emerging paradigm shift in how enterprises surface insights, one that sees them leaning on a new category of technology architected to help organizations maximize the value of their data.

Enter the data lakehouse

Traditionally, organizations have maintained two systems as part of their data strategies: a system of record on which to run their business and a system of insight such as a data warehouse from which to gather business intelligence (BI). With the advent of big data, a second system of insight, the data lake, appeared to serve up artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) insights. Many organizations, however, are finding this paradigm of relying on two separate systems of insight untenable.

The data warehouse requires a time-consuming extract, transform, and load (ETL) process to move data from the system of record to the data warehouse, whereupon the data would be normalized, queried, and answers obtained. Meanwhile, unstructured data would be dumped into a data lake where it would be subjected to analysis by skilled data scientists using tools such as Python, Apache Spark, and TensorFlow.

Under Guadagno, the Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens consolidated its systems of insight into a single data lakehouse. And he’s not alone. An increasing number of companies are finding that lakehouses — which fall into a product category generally known as query accelerators — are meeting a critical need.

“Lakehouses redeem the failures of some data lakes. That’s how we got here. People couldn’t get value from the lake,” says Adam Ronthal, vice president and analyst at Gartner. In the case of the Databricks Delta Lake lakehouse, structured data from a data warehouse is typically added to a data lake. To that, the lakehouse adds layers of optimization to make the data more broadly consumable for gathering insights.

The Databricks Delta Lake lakehouse is but one entry in an increasingly crowded marketplace, that includes such vendors as Snowflake, Starburst, Dremio, GridGain, DataRobot, and perhaps a dozen others, according to Gartner’s Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators.

Moonfare, a private equity firm, is transitioning from a PostgreSQL-based data warehouse on AWS to a Dremio data lakehouse on AWS for business intelligence and predictive analytics. When the implementation goes live in the fall of 2022, business users will be able to perform self-service analytics on top of data in AWS S3. Queries will include which marketing campaigns are working best with which customers and which fund managers are performing best. The lakehouse will also help with fraud prevention.

“You can intuitively query the data from the data lake. Users coming from a data warehouse environment shouldn’t care where the data resides,” says Angelo Slawik, data engineer at Moonfare. “What’s super important is that it takes away ETL jobs,” he says, adding, “With Dremio, if the data is in S3, you can query what you want.”

Moonfare selected Dremio in a proof-of-concept runoff with AWS Athena, an interactive query service that enables SQL queries on S3 data. According to Slawik, Dremio proved more capable thanks to very fast performance and a highly functional user interface that allows users to track data lineage visually. Also important was Dremio’s role-based views and access control for security and governance, which help the Berlin, Germany-based company comply with GDPR regulations.

At Paris-based BNP Paribas, scattered data silos were being used for BI by different teams at the giant bank. Emmanuel Wiesenfeld, an independent contractor, re-architected the silos to create a centralized system so business users such as traders could run their own analytics queries across “a single source of truth.”

“Trading teams wanted to collaborate, but data was scattered. Tools for analyzing the data also were scattered, making them costly and difficult to maintain,” says Wiesenfeld. “We wanted to centralize data from lots of data sources to enable real-time situational awareness. Now users can write their own scripts and run them over the data,” he explains.  

Using Apache Ignite technology from GridGain, Wiesenfeld created an in-memory computing architecture. Key to the new approach is moving from ETL to ELT, where transformation is carried out while performing computations in order to streamline the entire process, according to Wiesenfeld, who says the result was to reduce latency from hours to seconds. Wiesenfeld has since launched a startup called Kawa to bring similar solutions to other customers, particularly hedge funds.

Starburst takes a mesh approach, leveraging open-source Trino technology in Starburst Enterprise to improve access to distributed data. Rather than moving data into a central warehouse, the mesh enables access while allowing data to stay where it is. Sophia Genetics is using Starburst Enterprise in its cloud-based bioinformatics SaaS analytics platform. One reason: Keeping sensitive healthcare data within specific countries is important for regulatory reasons. “Due to compliance constraints, we simply can not deploy any system that accesses all data from one central point,” said Alexander Seeholzer, director of data services at Switzerland-based Sophia Genetics in a Starburst case study.

The new query acceleration platforms aren’t standing still. Databricks and Snowflake have introduced data clouds and data lakehouses with features designed for the needs of companies in specific industries such as retail and healthcare. These moves echo the introduction of industry-specific clouds by hyperscalers Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services.  

The lakehouse as best practice

Gartner’s Ronthal sees the evolution of the data lake to the data lakehouse as an inexorable trend. “We are moving in the direction where the data lakehouse becomes a best practice, but everyone is moving at a different speed,” Ronthal says. “In most cases, the lake was not capable of delivering production needs.”

Despite the eagerness of data lakehouse vendors to subsume the data warehouse into their offerings, Gartner predicts the warehouse will endure. “Analytics query accelerators are unlikely to replace the data warehouse, but they can make the data lake significantly more valuable by enabling performance that meets requirements for both business and technical staff,” concludes its report on the query accelerator market.   

Noel Yuhanna, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, disagrees, asserting the lakehouse will indeed take the place of separate warehouses and lakes.

“We do see the future of warehouses and lakes coming into a lakehouse, where one system is good enough,” Yuhanna says. For organizations with distributed warehouses and lakes, the mesh architecture such as that of Starburst will fill a need, according to Yuhanna, because it enables organizations to implement federated governance across various data locations.

Whatever the approach, Yuhanna says companies are seeking to gain faster time to value from their data. “They don’t want ‘customer 360’ six months from now; they want it next week. We call this ‘fast’ data. As soon as the data is created, you’re running analytics and insights on it,” he says. 

From a system of insight to a system of action

For Guadagno, vaccine distribution was a high-profile, lifesaving initiative, but the Walgreens lakehouse does yeoman work in more mundane but essential retail tasks as well, such as sending out prescription reminders and product coupons. These processes combine an understanding of customer behavior with the availability of pharmaceutical and retail inventory. “It can get very sophisticated, with very personalized insights,” he says. “It allows us to become customer-centric.”

To others embarking on a similar journey Guadagno advises, “Put all your data in the lakehouse as fast as possible. Don’t embark on any lengthy data modeling or rationalization. It’s better to think about creating value. Put it all in there and give everybody access through governance and collaboration. Don’t waste money on integration and ETL.”

At Walgreens, the Databricks lakehouse is about more than simply making technology more efficient. It’s key to its overall business strategy. “We’re on a mission to create a very personalized experience. It starts at the point of retail — what you need and when you need it. That’s ultimately what the data is for,” Guadagno says. “There is no more system of record and system of insight. It’s a system of action.”

Analytics, Data Management