(phone ringing)
- Welcome to The Shiproom.
You're on the air.
(upbeat music)
In 1864, Gerard Heineken convinced his wealthy mother
to buy him a brewery.
Almost 160 years later, a new generation of smart women
are still doing amazing things for the company.
Please welcome Athina Syrrou,
who leads the collaboration and devices team
at Heineken International.
Hey, thanks for being here.
- Hi, Brad. - Thanks for flying
all the distance and coming to Seattle.
- Thanks for inviting me.
- Every company and CIO is getting feedback
from their workforce about how do you use modern tools
to do your job?
So when you get this feedback,
how do you evaluate which tools
you deliver to your workforce?
- First of all,
there are innovations and new tools
and new features that are popping up all the time.
- It's hard to keep up with.
- It's hard to keep up with, and actually, people,
they don't need, they don't wait for the IT department now
to tell them that this is new or there is a new tool.
Actually, they know before IT.
- Yeah, and they bring it in often.
- Exactly.
So that's why we have also embraced the cloud strategy,
which really helps us remain current.
So it helps in terms of the whole life cycle management,
so by moving to the cloud,
all the latest and greatest features
are available through the cloud update.
The second part of this is what I mentioned before
about keep listening.
Keep listening, and evaluating the business needs
and their requirements, and then be open
to reassess the portfolio of tooling and technology
that we offer to our users.
So we are always open to say that this is what we offer now,
but then we find new business needs, new requirements,
and then we can modify, we can adjust,
we can take things out, we can bring new technologies in.
- Now you grew up in Greece.
- Mm-hmm. - And you work in Amsterdam?
- Correct.
- You're obviously very comfortable speaking English.
- Yup.
- I want you to help me understand
a few common Greek sayings.
- Let's give it a try.
- All right.
(speaking Greek)
- The actual translation is, makes your life a roller skate.
- Okay, makes your life roller skates.
- Which actually means that it makes your life really tough.
- There you go, throw it, yeah, just like that.
- Whoops. - Wow, you got it.
- (speaking Greek) - All right, I got it.
- So, I have lost my eggs and my baskets.
Yeah, it means that I have no clue what's going on.
- Have you ever mumbled that before to yourself?
- Yeah, it's a very common Greek saying.
(speaking Greek)
This is a very difficult word even for me that I'm Greek.
It means it's raining chair legs.
- It's, chair legs?
- Chair legs.
It's what you guys say it's raining cats and dogs, right?
So, it's really heavy rain.
(speaking Greek)
It means act like a duck.
- Act like a duck.
- Yeah, it means that keeping it quiet
so that you don't get the blame for anything,
so keeping it really low-profile.
That's a good one. - All right, awesome.
(alarm clock ringing)
You recently started rolling out Teams,
and we were looking at the ramp
of how fast that was happening.
What got you interested in Teams?
And what are you learning as you've been testing it
and rolling it out across Heineken?
- We're looking for digital collaboration capabilities
that people can use and they can exchange ideas,
they can brainstorm, they can exchange files,
they can call, they can chat,
and this is what we've found MS Team's a good fit for,
so it also matches very well with the rest of our portfolio,
so it's a very good alternative for having in one place
all the digital collaboration capabilities.
- And what's been the response
of the people using inside of Heineken?
- It also requires very robust change management
- Training and helping understand?
- Just the tool itself, it's just one more tool.
So, people can use it, and they can make great things,
or they can use it and change nothing,
and actually add one more tool
on top of what they were already using.
So, what we see as the real benefit
is when the tool is combined with proper change management,
and people are modifying their ways of working.
So they stop the old culture, traditional culture
of just sending emails, which is much less direct,
much less interactive, much less efficient,
and they modify their ways of working,
and this is supported by a good tool.
- You know, you and I were just looking
at your ramp of Microsoft 365 across Heineken,
and in less than two years,
you've deployed almost everything.
- It's actually, business is asking us to do that.
- Tell us a little bit more about how you helped create
business pull, rather than IT push.
- In a traditional IT, an IT organization
is providing IT solutions and that pushes
it to the business. - Yeah, you have to do this.
- And then you have to do it,
and then you have
unhappy customers.
Instead of doing that, we have a cycle
where we are exploring all time the business needs,
and we are delivering solutions
that are fit for purpose for that reason.
We tend to give more options to people.
So we are not just saying that--
- You don't restrict, you empower.
- Exactly, so for collaboration,
this is the only solution you can use,
however, what we do is that we hear the business needs,
then we define our shortlist, our portfolio of solutions
that match these business needs,
and then our people can actually use the solution
that matches better their ways of working,
their personality, what actually they like most.
And we see that this works much better
than just saying that this is the solution,
go ahead and use it, because this is what IT provides.
So we need to provide people their flexibility,
and just come to work, bring the device,
bring the device of their choice, their preference,
because they need to love their workplace.
(phone beeping)
- That's our Teams phone.
- Okay.
Oh, okay.
Let's see what it brings.
- Hey, welcome, you are on the line here with Athina,
who is this?
- Well hello.
It's Professor Tiberius Waynesworth,
with the Society for the Preservation and Advancement
of Brewed Spirits, Energy Drinks and Boxed Juice.
(classical music)
- Hey, welcome back to the show, Professor.
Hey, do you have something you want to ask Athina here?
- Indeed.
Heineken owns 165 breweries, which make 250 different beers,
and as part of my increasingly important research,
I'd like to explore the Heineken archives
with my patented game,
Brew or False.
Tell me please, Athina, which of the following beers
are actual Heineken-owned products, and which are not?
(Athina speaks foreign language)
- Queen Dolphin IPA.
- Nope.
- Fake.
Desperado's Tequila Raisin.
- Yep.
- Real.
Golden Pheasant Grapefruit.
- Nope.
- Real.
Boa Constrictor Cream Ale.
- True.
- Fake.
Gluten Free Cranberry Bread Lager.
- Oh, ah, false.
- Fake.
Bison Super Strong XXXtra Strong Lager.
- False? - Sounds pretty real.
- Yeah?
- Go real.
- Okay, brew.
- Real.
Dandelion Fig Hard Cider.
That sounds like a wild night out.
- Ah, I will give it a brew.
- This one is fake.
Turbo King Dark Ale.
- I will go brew.
- Very good.
- Nice.
- Now, for my final inquiry,
I heard your organization has recently started using Intune.
Please, tell me about it.
- We are moving more and more into cloud,
and what we experience is that in cloud,
the integration of Intune together with Azure,
gives most seamless experience combined with security.
This is key here, because security's one of
our top priorities, and this combination,
it actually embeds security
in the seamless user experience,
which is the great advantage of this.
What now we are looking, is to further expand on this.
So we have started with our mobile devices,
but as I mentioned before, our future, our vision,
is to really move into future that is device agnostic,
place agnostic, and it doesn't matter
from where and what you're using to connect.
- So while we were talking here,
actually the The Shiproom has a machine learning bot
that's been listening in and analyzing the conversation,
and now we have come up with,
or the bot has come up with the 12 most important
questions for us to end the show with.
We call it the Database Dozen.
While we're answering the questions,
just to give ourselves a little bit of challenge,
we're gonna be decorating these authentic Dutch clogs.
(bright, happy music)
- Which zoo animal would you be
the least excited to ride?
(clock ticking)
- Elephant.
- What color of the rainbow could you do without?
- Red.
- If you could eat only shape of pasta
for the rest of your life, what would it be?
- Penne.
- In the pantheon of yogurts,
how does Greek yogurt stack up?
- Ah, it's the best.
- In terms of nice dinners,
which beer pairs best with cereal?
- Heineken Zero. - Do you ever say
it's all Greek to me?
- Ha ha...no.
I let other people say that.
Well, we're all done, let's see what you got here.
So let's, oh look at that, you went authentic.
Thanks for hanging out in The Shiproom with me today.
- Thanks very much.
Thanks for inviting. - Before you go though,
if people wanna learn more about you,
or they wanna learn more about Heineken,
where would direct them to go?
- Heineken.com and LinkedIn.
- Well thank you again for being here.
- Thanks very much
for inviting me. - It is such a pleasure,
I can't wait to stay in contact more
and learn more from you.
- Same here.
Thanks very much. - I'm Brad Anderson.
This is The Shiproom, see you the next time.
(upbeat music)
Do you feel like you're cheating on beer
when you drink wine?
- A little bit.
- How concerned are you that spiders
might learn how to read?
- Er, zero.
- Hey everyone, now that you've watched
this episode of The Shiproom, I really recommend
you go to Microsoft365.com/Shift,
and learn how to get started deploying Windows 10
and Office 365.