CDW Exec-Connect | Top Tech Trends for 2023 (Part 2)
In the second article of the two-part series finale, five CDW leaders lay out the CIO's guide to long-term strategic growth and digital innovation.
Introduction: Tara Barbieri, VP & GM, Orchestration
Welcome to 2023! In December, our roundtable of CDW Vice Presidents talked about the IT skills gap, the benefits of automation to defer labor costs, leveraging business logic and workflow processing, prioritizing data security, and consolidating legacy systems. The gang’s all here, and ready to explore more IT Trends to accelerate digital transformation in the coming year.
Revisit Part 1: CDW Exec-Connect Roundtable Discussion
This year is bound to be a game-changer from an innovation perspective. Already, tech news spilling over from 2022 is proliferating our newsfeeds with discussions about chatbots that produce human-like responses and surreal AI portraits generated with lightning speed. The Consumer Electronics Show and the NRF Retail’s Big Show made headlines about breakthrough tech that is touching many different industries. Implementing breakthrough tech will require new insight into how to manage data, storage, and security, all while training the workforce on how to leverage new technologies for better business outcomes. So, let’s jump in.
This interview has been edited for length and continuity.
"Change Management has to start day one." - Mike Kennedy, VP, Tech Enablement Strategy
SIMPLICITY
What tech implementations will be essential for the Future of Work in 2023 and beyond?
Mike Kennedy, VP, Tech Enablement Strategy
2023 is likely to look a lot like 2022 with everyone looking to retire legacy systems and CISOs wanting to automate and put as much monitoring on the edge as possible.
Lee Washington, VP, Enterprise Infrastructure
I agree. Technology standards are going to be key to the Future of Work. In the new world, it’s all about ‘Who is where?’ Who is in the building and who is working remotely? I’d say invest in any technologies that are going to facilitate the new boundaryless, hybrid-work environment that we’re in, specifically around simplifying collaboration technology that brings coworkers together to innovate from disparate locations.
Cecelia Myers, VP, Digital
Focusing on user experience makes it easier to enable your workforce, and it makes the tooling and the support that they have fall into the background. That involves thinking more deeply about how to empower your co-worker base to better serve your customers.
Stephanie Hagopian, VP, Integrated Security
When you implement a new solution, you can configure it perfectly from a technical perspective, but if you haven't executed the appropriate change management controls or appropriately communicated those changes to the right stakeholders and user communities prior to its release, then it really doesn't matter.
But what does that user-back experience look like internally?
Lee
Invest in ensuring interoperability of equipment for workers and assume everyone will be mobile, traveling from home to multiple office locations in a day. Simplifying the experience with consistent plug-and-play for hoteling and conference rooms, etc. If multiple meeting attendees are in the office encourage everyone to gather in a common location for collaboration.
Cecelia
Organizations are beginning to understand that even as they invest in tools, they must put a user experience and a journey layer over it for it to be effective. You can buy the best tools in the industry on the market. And if you don't connect them well, think about the tasks that people do daily, and think about the things that are pain points for them, it's all just kind of a great idea with a user manual that nobody really looks at.
Stephanie
We see that all the time. People tend to think of their security investments in the silo of how its impacting risk or overall compliance and governance for the organization, but we always remind them not to neglect the human factor. What about an end user’s journey interacting with this technology? If an end user experience isn’t positive, they will find ways to bypass it, which represents a huge security risk and jeopardizes any value you may realize from that investment in the first place.
Mike
The absolute safest system is one that nobody can use, but that defeats the purpose. Organizations can’t invest hundreds of thousands of dollars for their “innovative” solution to be ignored by its workforce. The best solution takes the employee experience into account and balances the need for security with the needs of their customers and workforce.
"Invest in any technologies that are going to facilitate the new boundaryless, hybrid-work environment that we’re in." - Lee Washington, VP, Enterprise Infrastructure
SECURITY
We’ve mentioned security quite a lot already, and that's a great opening to talk more about security. What do you think will be the challenge of building a secure cloud, whether on prem, in a public cloud or in the hybrid environments?
Lee
The biggest risk is when security is an afterthought and it’s not built in or designed from the beginning. You have to look at security from an infrastructure, data and application perspective. Unfortunately, companies fall short to look at all three.
Tara
So, do you think that CISOs will be spending a lot more time and money trying to identify patches and vulnerabilities that are caused by shadow IT now that people are working remotely?
Stephanie
It's not just a concern going into 2023. Shadow IT has been a top concern of our customers for several years. The proliferation of data being managed by application workloads, backbone infrastructure and sources not under the direct control of that IT organization continues to grow.
Tara
In that case, should organizations be locking things down?
Mike
If you lock it all down, you have total control, but then you don't have capabilities. So, the idea is, how do you find that balance where you push it to the edge so the remote coworkers can do what they want and can take advantage of the technology without putting the company at undue risk.
Stephanie
A lot of times the internal IT security department doesn't even know what the lines of business are doing. There's a whole lot of acquisition and merger activity going on in the market, and I suspect there will be more of that across industries in 2023. That makes it more of a challenge for customers, because they don’t know about the infrastructures they’ve inherited.
Mike
Organizations that can quickly identify issues and can remediate fast provide options to the business versus always trying to lock things down. The old model of building better walls just is not going to work in today's kind of environment.
Stephanie
Automation and machine-intelligent reporting will help with that, but another driver is that VPN is not enough. Cybersecurity insurance providers don’t even underwrite insurance policies anymore unless organizations are doing more than just using a VPN. They are looking at Multifactor Authentication (MFA) layered on top of a password vault or some privileged access control model to safeguard data assets against malicious external or internal threats. We at CDW are promoting a Zero Trust Framework because we understand that a security mesh is needed to really de-risk the threats associated with Shadow IT.
Lee
Shadow IT has been a security risk and concern for years due to the loss of central management, monitoring and auditing of appropriate security controls. Also, many companies only think of securing infrastructure and apps. Your data is just as important as understanding how it’s secured, who has access and how to restore it from a Disaster Recovery standpoint is critical.
Stephanie
Absolutely. This means that even if a digital identity has successfully and legitimately authenticated into a system, we need to still repetitively challenge that identity’s validity as it passes through devices, application workloads and data stores. And this concept doesn’t just apply to human-based digital identities. We’re also dealing with APIs, Bots and RPAs (Robotic Process Automation), so we want to be extremely cautious about applying the correct context to an identity and correctly assess how privileged or sensitive the data is that the identity is trying to access.
Mike
I know we've talked about creating a federated model, especially when it comes to API creation and controls. So, for example, creating standards for APIs, governing bodies, and centers of excellence, as well as rights management. While not everyone needs access to financial forecasts, putting the data that makes sense into the hands of the teams empowers decentralized decision-making and faster responses to change.
Cecelia
Of course, you must ensure that those applications and solutions are secure, you have to vet them properly and do cost controls, but at the same time, if you're thinking user-back about the selections you make that makes the control easier.
"We're predicting and seeing increased scrutiny and interest around third-party vendor risk management" - Stephanie Hagopian, VP, Integrated Security
So, how do companies start to partition that data and segment it so that people can only access certain data based on their role? And how else can you rein in the spending on shadow IT? There is limited budget so some of this Shadow IT is not only risky, but wasteful.
Stephanie
From a CDW security perspective, we're predicting and seeing increased scrutiny and interest around third-party vendor risk management, as a key part of our advisory activity. We saw a lot of it in 2022 as well. It runs alongside building a good, centralized vendor management program.
Mike
Yes, vendor management at CDW is an area of continual attention. This allows us to manage not only where people are spending, but also making sure we're taking advantage of utilization of the capabilities we have already. Enterprise architecture, Vendor Management Office (VMO) working in tandem to assess and approve a purchase that has a new capability or evaluate what we already have in-house. Along with security, it’s the triad working together to make sure we manage the sprawl without limiting what we can do as a company.
Stephanie
Every single customer we work with asks us— as they should— about that, and we promote the fact that we're not just going to do this implementation, pull the plug and then run away. When we're working with technology services, that's part of a full-stack solutions approach. And in our minds, it is also about managing the human component and ensuring that we've embedded the appropriate amount of knowledge transfer, training, and change management controls to ensure that an implementation is fully adopted.
"The customer-facing experience and the coworker-facing experience is a continuum." - Cecelia Myers, VP, Digital.
USER EXPERIENCE
Cecelia, going back to what you mentioned earlier, How does digital transformation connect the employee to their customers?
Cecelia
I think organizations will begin to feel a lot of pressure to enable savvier experiences for both customers and employees. Experience is the great differentiator. Organizations have really bought into the importance of design thinking and having a user-based mindset even for internal users. They’ve seen the writing on the wall in terms of ROI for user training. They are starting to make sure that the experience for using the new tool is aligned with the culture of the organization and they are asking the right questions about comfort-level with features before choosing a tool. They are building time in the roadmap to answer user questions about how to use tools correctly to make sure that risk is minimized.
At CDW from our Account Managers to ITS and every kind of coworker in between, the company is making those kind of omnichannel investments to connect the coworker to our customer audience. And that’s because the customer-facing experience and the coworker-facing experience is a continuum.
Mike
A lot of these SaaS platforms have free training journeys that people can take advantage of. To Stephanie's earlier point, change management has to start day one. If it were only a change in technology that would be easy but organizations require more attention and planning. Changes have ripple effects and success is usually defined as being able to bring everyone on the change journey, so that by the time you launch, your people are just as ready as your systems for the change.
They understand the vision for why, and the impact it's supposed to have on the customer, then they can provide feedback. Then we can make enhancements. But change management is a journey that you go on throughout, and the key is to make sure you've got that feedback loop and you've got those ambassadors embedded in the organization who can give you feedback in real time, and make constant iterative arrangements, because you don't want this to be a one and done.
Cecelia
They need help in making those moves because, the “easy” stuff is still pretty big when you're setting it up for the first time and it gets a lot more challenging. I think that's where expertise from people who have been there and trod the path before can help you set up a strong foundation.
"There is limited budget so some of this Shadow IT is not only risky, but wasteful." - Tara Barbieri, VP, Integrated Tech Orchestration
Tara
Absolutely Cecelia. That is our niche. Our experts and the integrated services we deliver do just that. Our services and solutions extend across the full stack and consider the full life cycle of tech operations putting customers on a path toward true digital transformation that spans from implementation planning, cost modeling, training and managing tech solutions. This is why for the second year CDW was recognized by Frost & Sullivan with a Customer Value Leadership Award for Global Digital Transformation Services.
This announcement was recently made, but it isn’t news to us. We’re confident that in 2023, CDW will make a sizeable impact in guiding customers on this journey. Thanks to each of you for joining this conversation and for the work you do at this company to serve our customers.