At the beginning of 2021, Ardoq’s Henrik Holth, Lead Account Executive, had an idea: build a platform where IT professionals and leaders could have thoughtful conversations with digital transformation leaders.
To date, over 5,000 people have signed-up for these conversations with leaders in digital transformation.
To make the episodes more accessible, we’ve summarized some of our best episodes and organized them by topic, so everyone can find the relevant episodes for them. Here’s the full list:
Digital Transformation Leaders
- Purpose-Driven Leadership and Building a World-Class Technology Team
- How To Create a Sustainable Transformation Program
Challenges Facing Enterprise Architecture
- Is Enterprise Architecture Dead?
- Design Thinking: Closing the Gap for Enterprise Architecture
Digital Enterprise Architecture Journeys
- Carlsberg's Digital Journey With Enterprise Architecture
- Ordnance Survey’s Data-Driven Transformation Journey
- Driving Change in One of Europe's Largest Healthcare Systems
Guides for Digital Transformation
- Developing an Enterprise Transformation Roadmap
- Starting an EA Practice: Lessons Learned and Quick Wins
Digital Transformation Leaders
Digital leaders aim to continually create business value, develop work processes and ensure an organization’s services, products, and technologies are kept up to date. These three leaders share their experiences and stories.
Purpose-Driven Leadership and Building a World-Class Technology Team
Chief Digital and Information Officer of London Business School, Danny Attias, dives into what it takes to create world-class technology functions. As a university, London Business School handles multiple key business stakeholders with wildly different motivations, from students to government. Danny’s valuable insights cover hot topics like why security is no longer an isolated part of organizations.
Key takeaways:
- Get C-level buy-in on security issues
- Avoid an ‘attack and defense’ loop in leadership
- Learn the language of investing in change technology
In 2020, Danny was recognized for his digital transformation efforts and topped CIO UK's CIO 100 list. Speaking from both his business and technical perspective, he explores the importance of empowering teams, delivering continuous value, and quickly handling change.
To discover the full story, including how Danny seized the chance for digital transformation in his previous work with the UK Stem Cell Register, you can watch Purpose-Driven Leadership and Building a World-Class Technology Team.
How To Create a Sustainable Transformation Program
Featuring David Helps, Enterprise Architect at Worldpay from FIS, David is a proven technology leader working at the CXO level. He ensures the business objectives and IT capabilities converge, enabling the business to achieve its goals. In this episode, David shares his EA experiences in the FinTech industry.
As an EA, I think you've got to remain relevant and be seen adding value for an EA team … collectively. Doing this will help you retain credibility.
- David Helps
Key takeaways:
- Understand the importance of transformation projects and identify typical challenges
- Find the best way to inspire stakeholders to change using different types of change management
Find out more about David’s 8-step process to give organizations additional capabilities to lead change in today’s world in the video How Do You Create a Sustainable Transformation Program.
Challenges Facing Enterprise Architecture
As the digital landscape changes, so does Enterprise Architecture. Digital leaders must keep abreast of these changes and adapt with the organization. Gideon Slifkin and Niek de Visscher dig into recurring challenges they’ve seen leaders face, using design thinking to address problems.
Is Enterprise Architecture Dead?
Gideon Slifkin, LinkedIn influencer and Global Enterprise Architect at Deloitte, looks at the vital signs of Enterprise Architecture, defines three noteworthy challenges in the field, and gives tips on how to prevent those challenges. Spoiler alert: Gideon doesn’t believe Enterprise Architecture (EA) is dead.
Key takeaways:
- Use clear descriptions: Many EA teams struggle to explain what they do for stakeholders. Without a defined role, other departments cannot understand EA value.
- Avoid too much terminology: EA involves highly technical terminology. Stakeholders need it translated into terms they understand to appreciate the value.
- Gain stakeholder trust: Teams need to gain stakeholder trust and buy-in for long-term success.
Read about the three noteworthy challenges or watch Is Enterprise Architecture Dead? episode.
Design Thinking: Closing the Gap for Enterprise Architecture
Featuring Niek de Visscher, CEO/CTO at DI Blue and CEO at Digital Innovation Benelux. Niek’s company, DI Blue, uses automation to make businesses run smoothly, fast, and as efficiently as possible while delivering a great people experience.
Regardless of the specific challenges you have to tackle or the sector you’re working in, Enterprise Architecture is about people. Systems don't talk to each other. Businesses don't talk to each other. Processes don't talk to each other. People talk to each other.
- Niek de Visscher
Key takeaways:
- Learn how design thinking can support and improve the architecture capability of an organization
- Appreciate the Enterprise Architect's challenges
- Understand the 3 phases of design thinking
Niek de Visscher shares his experiences and thoughts in the video Design Thinking - Closing the Gap for Enterprise Architecture.
Digital Enterprise Architecture Journeys
It’s always inspiring to see how other organizations navigate digital transformation. Leaders in Carlsberg, Ordnance Survey, and Ireland's Health Service Executive share their stories of digital change.
Carlsberg's Digital Journey With Enterprise Architecture
Featuring Walter Hannemann, Digital Transformation Leader, Pragmatic Innovator, and Enterprise Architect at Carlsberg. Walter’s story includes working at the intersection between business and IT: running companies, working with startups within the shipping industry, and solving problems. As he puts it: “the bigger and the more hairy, the better.”
EA never ends. The moment you are done with one thing, a new thing starts.
- Walter Hannemann
Key takeaways:
- How Carlsberg began and continues on their EA journey, from the start of their cloud migration to working in the postmodern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) world.
- Top tips for getting stakeholder buy-in, including communicating value and gathering relevant data.
- Key learnings from Carlberg’s journey so far, including how best to use your governance model and communications.
Walter shares Carlsberg’s enterprise architecture journey, from a “project” to a “product” mindset of their global application landscape in the video Carlsberg's Digital Journey With Enterprise Architecture or read Carlsberg's Digital Journey With Enterprise Architecture.
Ordnance Survey’s Data-Driven Transformation Journey
Featuring Jo Shannon, the Director of Technology and Design at Ordnance Survey. Ordnance Survey has been making maps since 1784. Now it creates, maintains, and distributes detailed location information for Great Britain. They record and keep 500 million geospatial features in the Ordnance Survey master map up-to-date.
For me, the greatest responsibility is creating an environment for people to be at their best. When I say be at their ‘best’, that's the classic scenario of not getting it right all the time, learning from mistakes, and then, ultimately, succeeding.
- Jo Shannon
Key takeaways:
Jo sat down with Henrik to discuss her journey in IT, her experiences in leadership, and her current employer Ordnance Survey (OS) topics include:
- Moving OS from paper maps to data-driven maps
- Examining how company values can encourage team success
- Dealing with the effects of pandemic-related challenges
Learn more about how Jo and her journey with digital transformation in Ordnance Survey’s Data-Driven Transformation Journey.
Driving Change in One of Europe's Largest Healthcare Systems
In this episode, we chat with Digital Advisor to the CIO office at Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE), Gar Mac Críosta. Gar and his team at HSE manage the full suite of health and social services to deliver better health and social services for the people of Ireland.
Drawing on industries from healthcare to banking and everything in between, Gar dives into what it takes to run stakeholder management successfully.
Key takeaways:
A cyberattack left HSE in the dark mid-pandemic. Gar outlines how the team dealt with the fallout from facing every organization's worst nightmare. He discussed how his team began rebuilding their infrastructure and mapped what they:
- Needed to know
- Actually knew
- Wish they knew
Want to learn how artifacts of shared understanding can help improve the quality of the conversations around change? Watch Driving Change in One of Europe’s Largest Healthcare Systems.
Guides for Digital Transformation
Every journey to success starts somewhere. These two leaders share tips on how to move through various stages of your digital journey, from starting to building a roadmap.
Starting an EA Practice — Lessons Learned and Quick Wins
Audrey Honeycutt worked as an Enterprise Architect at Nebraska Medicine, the top-rated hospital in Nebraska, for nine consecutive years. With over 4,000 people employed and covering three areas of business, all with their own individual needs, it’s no surprise that Audrey needed to get a bird’s-eye view to see how every team plays.
Audrey takes us through the journey of starting an Enterprise Architecture practice and shares the lessons she has learned from her successful implementation of EA at Nebraska Medicine.
Key takeaways:
- Tips for setting up an EA practice at your organization
- To use frameworks or not to use frameworks?
- Using persistence to build a solid foundation
Find out more about how Audrey tackles the complexity of juggling technical problems, adding value, and the importance of getting executive sponsorship for your EA initiatives. Watch the full conversation, Starting an EA Practice — Lessons Learned and Quick Wins.
Developing an Enterprise Transformation Roadmap
Featuring Mark Thomas, Consultant and Experienced Principal Enterprise Architect.
To achieve value during the transformation period, you will need to build up the work on your roadmap. Taking a holistic view will help you fully understand how the whole transformation hangs together and how each stage moves forward. - Mark Thomas.
Key takeaways:
Years of working with architecture have helped Mark develop an Enterprise Transformation Roadmap. He highlights six steps to a successful transformation:
- Understand why strategy is the most important first step
- Identify and bring together your stakeholders
- Set your scope and approach
- Use mapping and monitoring throughout the project
- Save resources by understanding how to scope the approach
- Make transformation possible with governance
Watch Developing an Enterprise Transformation Roadmap on YouTube, or read the blog The 5 Stages of Building an Enterprise Transformation Roadmap.
Leaders in Digital Transformation
Change often requires leaders in digital transformation to find new ways of driving change while simultaneously rethinking processes and systems that may have once worked well. Ardoq’s Behind the Future series provides insight into the major critical success factors required for successful transformation.
We look forward to hearing more from leaders in digital transformation and IT, learning how they lead change within their organizations, and using their advice so we all can better navigate our transformation journeys.
Be the first to hear about the next Behind the Future episode when you sign up for our newsletter.
- Blog Posts Is Enterprise Architecture Dead?
