technology

Today’s business environment embodies the phrase “survival of the fittest.” As in, if your organisation isn’t as productive and efficient as it can be, you’ll be left behind.

Introducing new technology in today’s digital world can help you remain competitive.

That’s not all though, the effectiveness of your solution depends on how you choose to implement it. If your employees don’t use the new tool, you won’t realise any of its benefits.

Fret not, with careful preparation, effective support, and defined end-goals, you can make your technology roll-out a success.

In 2011 we founded a company that was born out of our customers' challenges. It was the early years of true enterprise cloud software, and we were a Systems Integrator. We implemented other vendors SaaS technologies, and we were pretty good at it. We delivered to scope and proudly pushed customer projects live, on time and on budget. Regardless, we had one consistent theme that would affect all customers, 'challenges with adoption.' But that's impossible.

The same title often hides a large diversity of roles, positioned differently across their respective organisations. It often reflects the maturity of each firm towards the appreciation of the threats it faces, the need for business protection, and its appetite for controls.

For large groups, in particular where business units or geographies manage their own bottom line and have a significant degree of autonomy in real terms, it can result in a large population of security practitioners across the group with very diverse approaches, objectives and priorities.

Remember the early 90s, when the mobile phones were not there. The only way to communicate to an out of office employee was landline phone or personal message via a colleague. Today there is no distinction between professional and personal lives as we are always connected.

Many years ago, as a young brewery sales manager, I was talking to the new transport manager who'd recently taken over from someone who’d “been there years.” Now that he was settled in he was starting to have a look at things and one of the things he wondered about was the seemingly erratic delivery route planning; On a Monday the dray lorries would go out to customers on the very extremities of the delivery area and the next day they were all within a stone’s throw of the brewery. Wednesday they were moderately far away, the following day round the doors again and on a Friday right out at

Eko: Could you tell us about your background?

Andrew Main: I grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, serving customers and picking up on their behaviours, quickly learning that there was no food on the table without great service. I was fascinated by hospitality, and by high school, I had decided that I’d build a career in this sector.

For a while now, I have been helping companies to transition into an automated world where our human intellect is driven up the ladder by freeing us of the mundane tasks. It’s been a journey that some companies have thrived in and some have taken longer to adapt. To understand similarities, pitfalls, and the best deliveries, we need to look at how traditional ITIL Service Transition requires an evolution in this world of AI & Autonomic revolution.

As technology has advanced, we’ve used it to isolate ourselves more and more.  

Consider this, we used to go to the movies or a theatre for entertainment. It was a shared experience with a large group of people.  Then we started to watch TV in our living rooms with our families, a smaller group. Now people watch videos on YouTube with headphones, a very individual experience.  Then, of course, we attempt to rebuild connection via comments.

The subject I’ve learned most about in the last couple of years has centred on dealing with suppliers. I cut my IT-teeth in the Nasty 90s world of screw-em-down-then-kick-em-out contracts, but that won’t work for me these days. First, my programme doesn’t need that; and second, the big wide world doesn’t work like that anymore. So, to stop anyone else wasting time on old-school pointlessness, here are my best three recent lessons:

For the last few weeks, I’ve been vigorously wrestling with the changing nature of IT and the role of the CIO. I seriously believe IT is in some sort of mid-life crisis. Or possibly, it’s just about to grow up and get some long trousers.