Identity. Security. Decentralized. The Future of IT in the Age of Change

So thank you, Warwick and welcome everyone. Also from my side to the EIC, number 15 in 2022, I'd like to talk today about out identity security, decentralized, and a little bit broader than trust that the future of it in the age of change. And I think we all know we are in times that are somewhat disruptive, that are depicted by change. And what is extremely essential here is leadership. So when it's about change, it's also about leadership. And I believe that this leadership is changing as well, the way we need to do leadership.

So traditionally we look at things like shareholder value and other things, and digitization was just one of the topics we also have over the past years, started to create new metrics for measuring the success in the digital age. So what is the return on investments? Time to market very important at the end time to value as a really distinctive factor in digital business, but over the last two, two and a half years with the pandemic and with all the other disruptions, I think we, we need to focus on, on other key themes.

And I picked some up that McKenzie brought up, which I believe are very valuable and we need to center our strategy on sustainability. We need to drive forward the transformation, even while a lot of our, it will remain hybrid for long. We need to get better with talent. I think when you specifically from the us here, the theme of the great resignation then, and everyone in our industry is also aware. We always have a lack of talent. We need to get faster. We need to operate with purpose. So we need to have a strong leadership.

And this is based on being good in our digital business, but there are so many factors impacting that I don't want to read them up, but it's very clear. There's a lot of things happening around us. We need to be aware of which affect our business. And I think many business have learned in the past two years that there's a need for speed and readiness in the digital business. And so change requires leadership.

And again, my Kinsey products, some interesting six distinguishing mindsets for CEOs. I believe these are not only distinguishing for CEOs. They're distinguishing for every leader, for the CEO, for the CIO, which needs to modernize and to reinvent the it organization for the chief digital officer, with all the need for creating new digital applications. And finally also for the CSO. So what we need is we need to think about how can we move forward? What can we do better? And this is from my perspective, a very essential thing to keep in mind. This is what will make us succeed or fail.

And we are in this digital age and we are in that digital age for a while and it's moving forward. It's moving forward by decentralization. So to speak. We had some centralization around large blocks on the web and we are decentralizing. Again. We are having this circles of digital transformation, the various levels like we have external drivers impacting our business. We have the, the change we need to do within our organization.

Again, it's about change. It's about leadership, but we also have the key enabling technologies. And we need to understand that our business becomes more at risk by that change by going digital. So what is happening at the end of the day is when we move our business to digital business, then we are vulnerable to things that can go wrong there, starting with the customer experience, the digital experience and ending with cyber attacks. And so we need to find a way where we can deliver where we can innovate, where we can move forward, where we bring the time to value the business needs.

While on the other hand, ensuring that our business is not disrupted. This all sounds like challenges.

And yes, there are challenges around starting with cyber risks. So trust this morning, I read numbers from the, the German BSI or the governmental agency for security it. And they said, the number of incidents they learned about has gone up again, 12% over the last 12 months. And this is not about to stop. So we have challenges and for our business models, as I've said, we need to be faster. When it comes to time to value, we need to deliver our services, this availability, resilience. We need to tackle the challenge of good customer journey, digital experience.

But we also have this challenge of cyber security, more ware states sponsored attacks. Cyber is F us even cyber warfare these days. So these things are becoming more challenging. These things are becoming more complex and it's about challenges, but what we must not underestimate and let's look at it from the positive side, if there's a challenge, there's opportunity. And we in the technology business, we all think about innovation. We all are concerned about innovation. And I think one important point is we are also where innovation is where opportunities are.

And we have these changes, the global change starting with the climate change, starting with the Ukraine war, the economic ecosystem change with inflation being back business change, supply chain disruptions, great resignation. The it change with the cyber risk.

Yes, this is, these are challenges, but we also have this global change, the digital age as an opportunity, the smart ecosystems, which create new opportunities for doing a lot of things differently. And a lot of things better, a lot of business opportunities, the new types of dealing with customers and consumers. And clearly there are some things in between which mean there can be a challenge if you don't speed fast with your business model change, or there can be an opportunity.

If you're the one leading and look at it from an opportunity perspective, we need to take these opportunities and there are opportunities at all levels. And so it is changing.

We have, at the end, we have fundamental change in it. We have a lot of new capabilities and these are things we can make value out of decentralized technologies, becoming more dynamic, augmented technologies take AI. And a lot of other things take the metaverse hyper connected, collaborative, composable, more flexible in how we bring things together. And this is there is paradigm change in it, and we can use that paradigm change to differentiate.

And so there are these large paradigm changes, web three metaverse decentralized autonomous organizations, there's AI as an tech change that enables a lot of new things to happen. There's this decentralization thing. And all of these things have a disruptive aspect and they have a differentiating aspect and you can either look at disruption or you can can look at differentiation. Disruption is more on the challenges side. Differentiation is more on the opportunity side. Look at it as an opportunity to differentiate your business, to get better in this.

This brings us to a term which is a one you might like or not composable. It's about the ability to put things together, more flexibly. And there's a lot of talk these days about a composable enterprise, which quickly ends up with talking about APIs. I think it's the wrong starting point. We should really start with the enterprise because it's an enterprise that is more flexible. And this is it's a reality. When we look at today's enterprises, we have a totally different world of partnerships with external parties.

I trust that this morning a talk and there are numbers saying in a few years from now, 50% of the workforce in the us will be trust contractors. They will be not employed anymore.

And so we, we have that change where, where your organization looks different, where you work with others in different ways. So what we need is an business model that fits to that. We need an organization and an it that covers that. So then we can cope with challenges. We can leverage opportunities, always think in leveraging opportunities and we can differentiate instead of disrupt. And this is not only about it. It's about really enabling your entire organization.

It's taking a business focus and thinking about how can my business model, my business organization, everything look like and to evolve it continuously. And then we need the management that goes back to leadership. I mentioned we have organization and the people we need. And at the end, yes, we need an it that serves this need. This is flexible enough. So this enterprise is something where business models, digital services, organization, people, and it fit together and cry together. And it must change.

And I have at a very high level and I will follow up with various block posts and videos going more into detail, but we need an it that is following some, some, not for everyone new, but I think some difference thinking compared to the past. So orchestration is a very important thing because this is about composing decentral elements and using the opportunities of decentralization, autonomous components, modular elements. We also need to discover them. We need to get, understand what we have. What is there, what we can orchestrate it's about utilizing core technologies.

These are the technologies I had on the previous slide. Some I picked look at these, not every technology will be that relevant for your organization, but many will be it's about understanding how data, identity and security, and specifically also services fit together.

So it's, I would say this triangle of services, identity data underpinned by security, and we need from a more it perspective, we need to understand what are our essential control blades that make up new services. And then we have this advance pillar, which is essential across everything, the security pillar. And then we have data. We have the logic, we have the composition where we bring things together to orchestration and we have the digital experience and we need to be good in everything.

A good digital experience will rely on our ability to bring together the right services, compose them, having the right service to logic and dealing with data. Data is sample data is ubiquitous. So let's start doing it. There are a lot of concepts out there last year. I talked about some concepts on how to deliver at trial in agile manner, digital services, all these videos. And so on of the previous E I C are available online. It's also about plan, build, run, improve, but in a way that is modern plan build, run, improve in the past.

It's about doing it strategically on longer cycles, doing it very dynamic on the development level. So there are different pillars of doing so, and we need coming back to identity and security. We also need to think about an identity and cybersecurity that is composable. We are coming a call Analyst Analyst. We are talking for quite a while about identity and security fabrics about the mesh. So you can integrate fabrics in two ways, the mesh or the production, it's both only then it's the right perspective on this term.

An integrated perspective of isolated tools build on microservices, being flexible to orchestrate where our APIs a well thought art target operating model, definitely API first using leveraging decentralized technologies and made for activities so that we can service identity and security that we can serve the change that we don't hinder the change. This is what we can do. We have the technologies on hand in identity and cyber security. We learn a lot about this in the next three days or four days, including today. What it requires is teamwork. We need to get rid of the silo.

Thinking leadership requires leaders with their distinguishing mindsets that cooperate across everything from the business model down to the it, we need a flexible it, a layered it, and we should follow these fundamentals for identity and security, which are sync and fabrics sync, composable API, first decentralized and at trial. Thank you. So not much to do then on the agenda.

No, I think it's all here. So I have just one question though. What would you say is like the biggest single opportunity or strategy that most enterprises are currently failing to capitalize on to ensure that they remain both competitive and secure? It's it's these are these questions, you know, where, where you need a, a very long answer. And that I, I think it is the biggest challenge still is living too much on silos.

So it is, we need to rethink our it. And one of my favorite samples is, you know, there are a lot of organizations that still have whatever SAP department, if then it must be a line of business applications department, which works more closely with the others. We need to work together. It's this teamwork, it's this leadership thing. And I think it's the, their task for CIOs to res rethink their organization because it starts with them.

Okay, great. Thanks very much.