(upbeat music)
>> Hi and welcome to another Cube conversation.
This one from BMC Helix Immersion Days in
Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California.
I'm Peter Burris.
Every organization that attempts significant
change, and there are a lot of organizations
attempting digital transformation, which is
about as significant a set of change as you can
make, has to worry about what platform, what
foundation has to be in place to make that change
easier, and that's what we're going to be talking
about in this conversation.
We've got John Fraser, who's the
Managing Director of Service Management in Online
Business Systems.
John, welcome to the Cube.
>> Thanks Peter.
>> So, tell us a little bit about online business
systems.
Let's start there.
>> So, online business systems is a Canadian
digital transformation in cyber security
consultancy.
We've been around now for 33 years.
We're headquartered in beautiful
Winnipeg, Manitoba, but I have operations all
across North America and we're about 330 people
today and growing rapidly.
>> Winnipeg happens to be one of my favorite
cities in the world, so good for you.
>> Perfect.
All right. So, let's talk about, I mentioned up
front this notion of a stable platform, a stable
foundation.
Tell us a little bit about what your
understanding of, as you work with your clients,
what constitutes that stable foundation for
change?
>> Well, one of the biggest challenges we see with
companies, is they try to make change in the
wrong way.
Too much, too fast with no control, no governance
and they just don't have the proper controls
in place.
One of the biggest challenges with change in an
organization in digital transformation today is
they don't know where they're starting from.
So, one of the fundamentals is really
understanding where they're beginning and what
they're trying to change.
It's staggering to see organizations, and
I've got lots of stories to tell around
companies that have gone through major program
transformations to really trying to embrace
digital technologies only to fail again and again
and again, because they don't understand how
things are connected together or where they're
starting from.
>> So, the foundation has to start with knowing
what's in the foundation? Have I got that right?
>> That's right.
You can't change what you don't know.
>> So, it's online business systems helps clients
move through some of these digital
transformations.
I got to believe that the service management
element is a crucial feature of any successful
transformation.
>> Absolutely, we begin with embracing technology
to help companies understand where they're
starting from.
We leverage a lot of tools and techniques in
terms of understanding where they're starting as
an organization, the people, and then using tools
like BMC's Helix discovery to understand all of
the components that make up the systems within
their organization that they're trying to
transform and how they're all connected together.
>> Now, as we go through this process, one of the
things that a lot of my clients are discovering
is that the cyber security challenges get that
much more extreme.
One of the things that's become increasingly
obvious is as companies talk more about digital
business, talk more about how they're
transforming and generating new classes of
revenue or customer experience, they become more
obvious target to the bad guys.
What is the relationship between digital
transformation, service management, and cyber
security?
>> Yeah, and interesting you say that.
We believe as an organization that they're
intertwined.
You can't do digital transformation without a
strong cyber security program.
You can't do either one of them without
automation.
The pace of change and more importantly the
volume of threats and challenges facing the
organizations is beyond human capability.
You can't do it manual anymore.
It doesn't matter how many people you throw
at it, it's just impossible.
So, you've got to automate, you've got to leverage
technology, artificial intelligence to really
face these challenges.
>> So, given your standing and working on the
service management side, what are some of the
steps that your customers are taking to ensure
that they are going to succeed with digital
transformation in a way that doesn't open them up
to security issues?
>> So, one of the key areas is understanding,
like I said before, where they're starting from.
How all of the components that make up their
business service fit together and then,
understanding from a security aspect how to
prioritize fixing those threats.
One of the biggest challenges in securing your
organization, today is understanding what to
work on.
The average large organization gets thousands and
thousands of new vulnerabilities a day and the
back log just becomes insurmountable.
So, without being able to understand how to
prioritize that work against valuable business
services, they're never going to win.
>> So, you mentioned something about service
capabilities or service components, the
historical norm for IT has been, until a few
years ago, to focus on mainly the hardware or
infrastructure assets as the things to be managed
and that has been not working as well in a world
where we're delivering digital services to
customers and partners for revenue or other
purposes.
So, what constitutes a service capability or a
service component in your mind as kind of the new
notion of asset within IT?
>> It's assets, anywhere.
It could be the traditional hardware sitting in
your server room.
It could be servers and/or microservices sitting
in a cloud location, it could be a software as a
service component.
They all make up business services together.
>> Or combinations of all of them.
>> It often is combinations of all of them
together and that's one of the biggest challenges
is understanding how they all fit together and
how the information flows.
So, for instance, if an organization is trying to
prioritize how to secure a business service.
Let's use automated tellers as an example.
They may have traditional on premise servers,
they may have cloud offerings and they may have
third-party software as a service just protecting
their servers on premise is not going to protect
that business service, so you really need to
understand how all of the pieces fit together.
>> So, are you actually working with business
leaders and IT leaders to do a better job with
defining what constitutes a digital business
capability and use that as an organizing
principal for how they think about how all their
resources come together?
>> Yes, it's critical that you have business and
IT working together and you have the right level
of business working with IT.
Without sponsorship at the executive level,
digital transformation will fail.
>> Even in Canada?
>> Even in Canada.
>> Well, this has been a great conversation.
John Fraser who's a Managing Director and Service
Management in Online Business Systems.
Thanks very much for being on the Cube.
>> Thanks Peter.
>> And once again, this has been a Cube
conversation from BMC Helix Immersion Days
in Santa Clara Marriott and I'm Peter Burris.
Thanks until next time.
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