This year’s Red Hat Forum on October 9th provided a great mixture of success stories, focused not only on scaling technology but also on culture shifts to foster innovation and growth. The agenda also included speakers representing partner companies, such as VodafoneZiggo, Microsoft, Belastingdienst. We were honored to be part of it.
My top 3 Takeaways from Red Hat Forum 2019
1) Shift the mindset on how we work from Hierarchy to Community
Disruption comes from creativity. Today’s technology, which gives us far more possibilities than we have ever had before, was created by passionate, enthusiastic and dedicated communities. Traditional hierarchies, communication overhead, and the push for non-value adding tasks hinder creativity and lower motivation. To prepare the working environment for the future, managers and executives need to focus on forming communities of inner-driven and self-organizing contributors, having an agile mindset.
The shift in paradigm from hierarchy to community and having a dynamic and flexible workforce, in which knowledge and expertise are freely shared, are key to continued innovation going forward.
A full-house at Utrecht’s Beatrix Theater.
2) Keep calm and automate everything!
After building highly efficient and effective communities, give them time and energy to innovate by automating repetitive or manual activities.
An additional effect of automation is a reduction in the number of human errors. Some of the proposals to start this journey are to automate capacity scaling, build agnostic infrastructure to maximize portability, automate service lifecycle management, embrace open source software and the power of communities from the inside and outside of the organization, and build capabilities like containers and self-service solutions.
Our very own CTO Gert Jan van Halem explaining the value of OpenShift on Azure (ARO). Read more about it in our ARO white paper.
3) Do products, not projects
Everyone seems to be familiar with the buzz-phrase “digital transformation”. Most companies, especially the ones having many legacy solutions, are heavily focused on trying to rethink existing processes with the help of groundbreaking tech. To keep up with the fierce competition, most seem to engage in long-term, financially burdening projects but lose focus on fit for customer’s purpose and delivering value. To succeed in fulfilling the users’ needs, first one has to listen to them. Otherwise, it might end up with a successful operation (the Project) but with a dead patient (the Product) – the initiative is deployed but the deliverable brings no value for users.
An example of community-created open source knowledge can be found at the Open Practice Library.
Key summary of success stories
Red Hat Forum speakers shared their success stories in implementing innovation throughout the power of communities. Here is a short summary:
Microsoft showed an interesting case from OASEN Water Company in which the digital feedback loop was used to engage customers, optimize operations, empower employees and transform the products, all connected through the Intelligent Cloud: Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Open Data (weather systems, satellite data).
VodafoneZiggo explained their journey of embracing uncertainty and possibilities by creating an end-to-end user experience from demand to service implementation, by making the boundaries between the network and IT disappear through onboarding network virtualized functions, building common infrastructure, API/microservices enablement and automatic network implementation.
OptaPlanner showed an innovative demo on solving vehicle routing problems created by various constraints by using the power of AI.
Devoteam experts spreading the Tech for People message.