IP Spoofing is used to gain unauthorized access to a network by impersonating a source with authorized access. IP spoofing is a cyber attacking technique. The hacker pretends to be someone else and conceals their identity to gain access to a network and hijack the browser. IP spoofing is also called IP address forgery or host file hijack. Learn how hackers can access your private information through IP Spoofing, and what steps you can take to prevent it.
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I bought a Tesla a little less than 2 months ago. My wife, who I think would admit to being a competitive person, responded by updating her preferred brand of Japanese sedan to their latest-and-greatest high-tech model this past weekend. While her car cost only a fraction of a Tesla, it was surprisingly close in features. And, while it is not electric, her car even has some features that my much more expensive car lacks.
Like the Tesla, her new car has adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, low-speed follow, collision avoidance, and other advanced self-driving features. Both cars are quiet, comfortable, have great sound systems, leather-like seats, touchscreen interfaces, and lots of trunk space. Doing the Tesla one better, her car also adds a heads-up display and quite a few more cup holders than mine.
There are, however, some tip-offs that the design philosophies of the two cars are quite different.
Her car has many purpose-specific buttons: one to turn on the music, another to adjust the volume, a set for heating controls, and so on. There are also some specific-purpose mechanical gauges and displays. The Tesla has no mechanical displays and very few purpose-specific buttons; there’s basically a large touchscreen. Most controls—even to unlock the doors—are “soft,” just like on a tablet.
While her car does offer occasional over-the-air updates, the Tesla updates seem to be a regular event, and the changes can be significant—not just tweaks and map changes. For example, there was recently a major UI redesign that completely altered the “look and feel” of most of the major controls of the car—even such fundamental controls as air conditioning. Like with a major smartphone update, I liked some of the changes and not others. It was quite a bit different than the layout I’d just started getting used to.
This morning, I got another big surprise: Last night while I slept, Tesla added a “navigate on autopilot” feature to my car that adds significant additional self-driving capabilities. This new feature allows the car to not only “stay within the lanes” on the freeway, but also to enter and exit the freeway, change lanes, and change directions—all based on the final destination I give it. It still requires driver confirmation (at the moment) before it actually makes these direction changes, but the car is now able to take me where I want to go without my hands-on management, just my overall supervision. Also, not incidentally, this same update fixed the most significant things that I (and I suppose many other people) did not like about the recent UX update.
It’s like I got a new car—again.
As I was driving to work this morning—or, as I should probably say, being driven to work this morning—I thought about how this situation perfectly illustrates the power of a platform software architecture.
From a software standpoint, the Tesla was clearly conceived of as a platform that supports transportation. New software applications on that platform can be changed and deployed rapidly. My wife’s car, on the other hand, was thought of as a single-purpose system—specifically, a car—and not as a platform. In my wife’s new car, the button that turns the audio on and off will still turn the audio on and off years from now. Likewise, the mechanical speedometer will still be the speedometer. That’s all they do — and all they are ever going to do.
In contrast to a single-purpose system that focuses on delivery of specific one-off, “hard coded” features, a software platform prioritizes the ability to change and adapt. In other words, a platform’s primary purpose is to enable improvements. This emphasis on flexibility over perfection reflects a philosophy of “Kaizen,” or “continuous improvement.” In this approach, you aim to make something better than it was before, as opposed to trying to make it perfect. Ultimately, of course, we get closer and closer to perfection in this way.
The modern “Agile” paradigm for software development also has, at heart, the realization that “things will change.” This is inspired by a more negative spin than Kaizen, namely: even if it’s great today, it’ll be an antique soon. In both Kaizen and Agile, the strong recognition is that building for change is essential—both to support improvements and to avoid obsolescence. A platform approach is first and foremost a means to do this. A platform is what allows you to “embrace change” and make it work for you. A single-purpose system, by contrast, tends to be a “what you see is all you get” proposition.
While a platform approach does prepare you for change, it comes at a cost. A platform approach is almost always more expensive to develop than a single-purpose application. Platforms also generally cause you to deploy a less feature-rich system than you’d like—at least initially. Of course, as time goes on, your ability to rapidly deploy new features enables you to blow past a purpose-built system and deliver feature-richness and the ability to keep growing. On day one, though, you will likely have fewer features deployed in a platform approach than you would with a same-cost single-purpose system.
In many business situations, the ability to rapidly and cheaply add or change features delivers more business value than a difficult to change, feature-rich product. Companies with feature-rich but fragile code bases are common, and they are under threat by more nimble competitors who can move quickly. In human evolution, it was our adaptability as a species that led to our success. Likewise, the nimbler software platform and company is often the winner. While it is not always the case, the software that aggressively moves forward will often beat the one standing still.
My wife’s car was less expensive, in part, because it is single-purpose. Her car will have the same capabilities in a few years as it does today. And even if she and I were at near feature parity when she bought her new car last weekend, my Tesla has already pulled ahead in the feature comparison. She’s owned her car for less than a week.
Because I chose to buy into a platform, I can’t even imagine what its capabilities will be several years from now. I only know that it will be better tomorrow than it was today—and it will keep on going.
I guess I’m a bit competitive myself.
When I launched an enterprise social network (GLO) for GlobalLogic few years back, several of my friends and colleagues questioned me, asking the rationale of this initiative. There was a fear that such platforms would not only adversely affect the performance of employees by giving them a platform for microblogging, photo sharing, and activity streams, but it would also be daunting to HR policies and corporate governance by making the overall environment too open.
I myself was not sure whether it was the correct investment direction, or whether I should first only focus in making the company's back end ERP systems more reliable and integrated. This alone is a challenge and number one priority of enterprises like GlobalLogic, which is growing every year, continuously adding new geographies, absorbing new business models, optimizing services portfolio, and re-structuring the organization.
Five years later, the picture is clearer:
- With over 300 online communities on GLO, 70% of our global workforce uses the platform for sharing their updates, writing blogs & papers, connecting with colleagues, posting pictures, submitting ideas, asking questions, and performing several other activities on everyday basis. The platform has turned into an organic knowledge repository of the company, having so much useful information
- GLO has become the primary platform for company executives to collaborate with the global workforce and participate in bidirectional discussions — therefore helping better manage the above-mentioned moving pieces. For example, our CXOs now use their dedicated communities on GLO for posting key updates and communications because all employees are automatically subscribed to these communities.
- The quality of our HRMS enterprise data has improved by 90%, with people being able to look at information that was earlier locked in back end ERP systems
- Some of the core business processes are front ended via the GLO platform. Because they have a social fabric around, they are more effective and efficient. Examples include employee self-service, competencies management, new employee joining process, employee referral board, goal management, performance management, and several engineering project management tools.
- GLO is a primary tool for the Resourcing function across all geographies because it allows users to identify "who knows what." This feature lowers the cost of vacancies closure via internal fulfillment by more than 20%
So the question is, "Was the fear that existed three years back in everyone’s mind unfounded?" Absolutely not. Lots of social networking platforms die because people find no enterprise value in them. To make these platforms successful, you must have (1) the right organizational culture and (2) the right integration with core enterprise back end systems.
The first question you should ask before spending a single dollar on a social networking platform is, "Is your executive leadership bold enough to ride the wave of an open, social collaboration environment?" If the answer to this question is yes, then the next question to answer is, "Who will be the actors on this system? Is it just humans, or humans along with backend enterprise systems?" If answer to this question is just humans, then pause for a moment, because it probably will not lead to where you want to be. That’s where I assert that enterprise social networking is not social networking.
Enterprise social networking means a meaningful integration of people, processes, and back end systems. If your people only generate activity streams in such a system, it is not an enterprise social network. Enterprise social networking is all about contextualizing the data sourced from the back end enterprise systems and presenting it in a format that attracts employees' attention and then interests.
The below figure represents this thought and takes it farther by making a recommendation to build the capabilities of the enterprise social platform so that the "social app" can be developed and deployed in a crowdsourced model. It presents a unique win-win situation for the enterprises and their people, whereby people are using the contextual information emitted by the enterprise social platform and using that information to further enhance the platform by building and deploying social apps. This has a huge potential to lead the innovation in enterprises.
By using the right mix of organization culture and technology integrations, enterprises can derive huge value by keeping their people motivated and turn them into a truly global innovative workforce, which is a top challenge of every multinational company.
In this article, I would like to describe how GlobalLogic is changing the approach to contracting with new technical specialists. We want this process to be effective - not only for our customers, but also for engineers.
Before explaining the changes, I am going to outline the most common way of involving new technical specialists in IT service companies. I will also explain the downsides of the usual approach for both companies and engineers.
Traditional Approach
Recruiters look for specialists within the company or on the market. Matching candidates are invited to HR interviews and then to a technical interview. If these go well, the candidate is usually interviewed by a project manager and then must pass one or more interviews with a potential client (depending on the specific project and agreements with the client). If the candidate is rejected at any stage and is then offered an opportunity to pursue another position, the entire process, except HR interviews, has to be held anew. Meanwhile, the candidate has no guarantee that he/she will be hired to a project.
Disadvantages for Engineers
Firstly, they need to pass many interviews. Although companies are trying to reduce the number of interviews for alternative projects (if the candidate was not qualified for the initial project), it is not always possible.
Secondly, apart from passing interviews, a candidate has to perform tasks on his/her current project. This is often inconvenient and drains energy and strength from candidates while also impeding preparation for the interview.
Additionally, feedback after each stage of the interview is often not given at once. The candidate has to wait days or even weeks without any guaranteet he/she will be picked for a project.
Due to the this, candidates often go to multiple interviews in order to increase their chances to quickly change a company or a project. Consequently, they accept the offer that comes fastest, even if the project is less interesting or promising. On the other hand, interesting projects usually have many stages of interviews.
Of course, the tendencies mentioned above do not necessarily take place. There are many cases in which candidates find interesting projects without facing many difficulties, but this often depends on luck.
Disadvantages for a Company
The first disadvantage for companies is, in fact, the same as for candidates — a large number of interviews that take a long time. A company not only organizes many meetings with the candidate, including communication with the customer, but also waits 2-4 weeks after a successful interview for the candidate to start working.
The second disadvantage the risk of losing a candidate because an offer from another company comes faster. This often happens when the customer takes a long time to choose an engineer for a project, even if the client loses several good candidates in the process.
The third disadvantage is that, even after several interviews, it is difficult to choose the best candidate. That's why project managers and customer representatives tend to take time and try alternative candidates. A perfect candidate that complies with all the requirements is rarely met;however, if a specialist is already working in the company and feedback is available, the decision about him/her is much easier to make.
Predictive Approach
As a company, we decided to change the approach when searching for candidates. Instead of using a principle "The project is primary, the company is secondary", we decided to go with the opposite approach: "Join the company, then join the project." If, based on the results of the first technical interview, we believe that a candidate is suitable for one or several of our projects, we immediately offer cooperation and sign a contract. That is, we are ready to pay him/her and take all the risks before a project manager and a specific customer interview the candidate.
There is no trick. It is the same contract he we provide to specialists whom we take directly to the project. We bear the same mutual obligations, and we continue to apply the traditional approach when needed. It is more important for useto secure a good specialist, even if we will subsequently need to spend time finding a suitable project. . There is no difference in the compensation package. The probationary period begins when the new expert joins the company and does not depend on the time when engagement in a project starts.
Over the years in business, we have developed a number of expertise areas, including Java, .NET, C/C++, Embedded, DevOps, Mobile, UX/UI design, QA, and JS. We choose specialists both in terms of 100% compliance with a certain project and in terms of compliance with the technological areas we develop.
If we like a candidate as a technical specialist, we will always be able to find and offer him/her a suitable project and a good customer. We have the opportunity and resources to sign a contract with the candidate and fulfill our financial obligations before going through all interviews. At the same time, we continue looking for a project while the candidate is in the interview process.
Experience shows that, on average, it takes 26 days from the date of a company signing a customer contract to match a candidate to that project. Although this is faster than waiting for a specialist to exit the market, we often find a suitable project within about a week. Using the predictive approach, we have attracted around 200 engineers to the company since last April. More than 100 of them are in Kyiv, and 70% have already chosen projects they want to join.
Many candidates ask, “Is there a maximum period of staying in the company without an allocation to a project?” I want to emphasize once again that we treat engineers found predictively in the same way as other engineers. In each case, the decision is made individually. However, since changing companies can be stressful and candidates expect stability in a new position, we guarantee that a specialist may stay in the company for a minimum of 6 months. This is not the maximum period and, as I said before, the decision in each case is taken individually.
Advantages for a Candidate
Advantages in the proactive approach are opposite to the previously discussed disadvantages of the classical approach:
- A candidate receives an offer immediately after a successful technical interview. On average, this takes no more than 3-4 days.
- When a specialist joins the company, he/she can choose a project and prepare for the next interviews in a calm atmosphere, when there are no tasks within a current project and no pressure from the fact that he/she needs to change companies urgently.
- During the adaptation period, a specialist can learn more about the company and learn internal processes before he/she is assigned project tasks.
- While the project is under consideration, there are opportunities to focus on self-development, improve knowledge and participate in the company's internal research projects (so-called Proofs-of-Concept [PoC]). We do not want our newcomers to sit around; on the contrary, we always welcome knowledge development and participation in activities that are beneficial to the company and the engineers themselves. Moreover, we have a very strong training base available to all specialists.
- Finally, engineers have an opportunity to choose a project from the proposed options and refuse uninteresting ones. While we expect that the specialists we take predictably will not look for a unicorn project (the ideal and mythical one where everything is always is good and never bad), we also understand an opportunity to refuse unsuitable offers should exist. Both HR and management would perceive it normally.
Advantages for a Company
- We find the right specialists faster. If we are sure that the candidate is suitable for us, we do not need to wait for the customer’s confirmation.
- This situation is beneficial for projects. Project managers and clients are often more willing to take candidates who have already spent at least a few weeks in the company, as a manager can better see if an engineer fits a project than if they'd only interviewed.
- After a successful interview with a client, a specialist almost immediately starts working on the project. There is no need to wait for 2-4 weeks for a candidate tobe transferred from another company.
- In addition to solving tactical staffing tasks for specific projects, we also solve a systemic strategic task. Due to this approach, searching for and attraction of specialists becomes more effective, because we avoid pressing deadlines and reduce concern from customers.
Usually, we quickly find a project for a specialist. Candidates are satisfied, which means they are loyal to the company and tend to cooperate with us longer.Even if the candidate was not picked for one, two or even more projects (in very rare cases), we keep him/her in the company, and more importantly, help him/her to gain new experience and skills.
Business Benefits
There is an increasing trust in us from clients who receive a specialist for the project immediately after the interview. This allows us to fulfill our obligations on time, even if the client needs a lot of specialists as soon as possible.
Ultimately, this allows us to grow our business faster. If customers are able to get more people to join the project quickly, they begin to consider the company in particular and Ukraine in general as a more attractive place for development of their products. I am certain an increasing number of service companies will use this approach to attract engineers. This is also good for engineers, because the more businesses come to the market, the more choices and offers they will get.
Possible Disadvantages
In this article, I have emphasized the advantages of the new approach,but I would like to add that - depending on the situation or wishes of a specialist - this approach may be less suitable than other methods. This can take place in the following cases:
- The specialist wants to start a new project immediately after joining a new company without a single downtime day. Even with the traditional approach, this does not always happen, but the chances are higher than with the predictive one.
- Only the project is important to a specialist and not the company (outstaffing approach when choosing a company for work). In this case, the candidate needs to understand what project he/she wants to work on and search until this project is found.
Let us first start by defining security in an Internet of Things (IoT) context, as it can be understood in very different ways, and the term is often used to describe only a single aspect of the question. We can categorize the different meanings of the word into three different groups: lifecycle security, communication security, device security.
Lifecycle security covers the ability to securely and remotely manage a device at the different stages of its life, from configuration, monitoring, and upgrade until its decommissioning or revocation. This is essential to guarantee that devices are actually used in an expected way, especially when managing large deployments.
Major Macroeconomic Shift from Products to Platforms
The greatest economic disruption since the Industrial Revolution is currently taking place due to profound value chain and asset value changes in modern business practices. Physical and digital worlds are merging, creating new forms of interaction between businesses and people.
The traditional organization lifecycle flow — from design and creation to selling and consuming specific products — is evolving in our digital world. While particular stages may be removed or merged, this overall transformation introduces a new instrument called a platform.
In this new platform business model, the main assets take the form of interactions between producers and consumers. Elaborate algorithms and data management solutions enable an evolved user experience, and an optimized costs structure enables rapid growth for businesses.
What is a Platform?
Platforms are open intermediary interfaces through which suppliers and customers meet; they are multi-facial structures forged by their users and suppliers. Both sides are engaged due to a number of benefits created by the platform ecosystem.
Users are attracted to platforms for many of the following reasons:
- Platforms memberships are mostly free-of-charge for consumers.
- Modern aggregators are easy to use and offer a very wide range of products and services.
- Buyers can communicate with each other, creating peer-to-peer communities.
- Prices are lower because of internal competition and reduced operating costs.
- Platforms offer seamless logistics and customer care.
Suppliers are driven by the following factors to choose platforms:
- Platforms attract many users, so they offer a large market.
- This market can be easily accessed, and costs of using a platform are comparatively low.
- Using a platform brand and UX enables suppliers to improve their digital image.
- Because sellers can build relationships with buyers, platform integrations may replace or significantly enrich their own digital presence.
Platforms also empower entire markets through the following factors:
- Network Effect: Two user sides create content and value for each other and for the platform.
- Scalability: Freed from infrastructure problems, businesses can make a rapid jump in scale, as well as fast internationalization.
- Asymmetric Growth: Platform ecosystems create complementary markets and may develop sideline opportunities.
- Horizontal Communication and Collective Intelligence: Effortless interactions and analysis of collected data help businesses follow consumers’ expectations.
Players of Platform Ecosystem Adoption
Platform business development started with digital-born technology and retail companies (e.g., Amazon, Alphabet, eBay), and now they are dominating the digital economy. Non-technology industry leaders who have realized the power of digital ecosystems are actively developing their platform strategies. Depending on the type of company, there are different strategies in a platform economy:
Asset Light Businesses
Asset light businesses (i.e., don’t own physical assets) like Uber or Airbnb have created their entire business models around platforms. Such companies are pure platform players, and as industry disruptors they totally rely on the power of optimizing ecosystems. Although they primarily drive new platform models, some develop in the direction of middle/heavy asset businesses by investing in tangible assets. For instance, Uber is investing in a driverless fleet of cabs. The majority of modern startups belong to this asset light category (according CB Insights, 70% of unicorns are platform companies).
Mixed Businesses
Amazon and Apple are vivid examples of companies that combine their own goods or services with a platform. They both leverage ecosystems effects while controlling their own product supply chain.
Asset Heavy Businesses
Traditional corporations — especially industry leaders like General Motors or General Electric — have started using the strengths of platforms to build sideline businesses that primarily target the consumers of their core products. For example, in December 2017, GM introduced the first automotive commerce platform for on-demand goods and services reservation. Creating a new consortium model, asset heavy companies often start with bringing their partners/suppliers to a platform in order to drive standardization. Then they involve their customers and distribution channels to get to new verticals. Besides building their own platforms, another option for non-technology enterprises is integration with existing ecosystems.
Advantages and Risks of Platform Integration
To be successful in today’s competitive landscape, enterprises across multiple industries must integrate their mission-critical components with digital ecosystems. They usually take the first step to lower costs and spread risks. In this way, their main business functions are tightly connected to a network of digital partners.
On the one hand, in the near future all companies — regardless of their nature — will have to integrate with third-party platforms to match the standards of customer service, technology maintenance, and other processes of their digital competitors (especially related to client interaction). But on the other hand, relying on online platforms not only means giving up control of product and brand presentation, but it also hands over the gathering and management of increasingly important customer data to the platforms.
However, as digital platforms develop in size and market power, the risks of neglecting such opportunities will become higher than the drawback of not having complete control ovwe the value chain and data. Customers will turn to online platforms as the main point of search, driven by the platforms’ enhanced user experiences, customer care, and broad range of products.
This tendency is not limited to major consumer-facing industries like high-tech, retail, and media. Platforms are also disrupting connected healthcare, heavy industry, education, hospitality, insurance, payments. They are event impacting improbable sectors like politics through online selling platforms, communication systems, social networks, and AI intermediaries.
Therefore, defining a platform ecosystem strategy should be among the core components of corporate planning. From the implementation side (i.e., maximizing positive effects and minimizing risks), we recommend aligning your network strategy with the right choice of platform-enabling technologies, like modular software architecture, IoT, cloud technologies, big data solutions, and AI solutions (depending on whether the company wants to develop a new platform or integrate with existing platforms).
GlobalLogic unites under one roof the technologies needed for platform development, from embedded to cloud, and from to data analytics to UX. An advisory-based approach helps our clients choose the optimal platformization strategy and implement it in the most effective way.
Secret #12: Plan for Success
When you begin a transformation project, you will of course believe in its success. But let’s face it: that’s at an intellectual level. On an emotional level, truly disruptive change that transforms your company or your entire industry, and that enables entirely new ways of doing business -- nine times out of ten, that level of success just feels unreal. A long shot, a hail-Mary pass, a last-ditch effort—choose your metaphor. It’s not that you lack confidence—but rather that this degree of success is just hard to imagine.
However, as you do the hard work and execute your technical transformation strategy, at some point it will hit you viscerally: “I’ll be darned, this whole thing just might work.” This might be after a demo, some wins with an MVP, with early-access customers or focus groups or receiving some other concrete or somewhat unexpected support.
When that “gut check” point comes, it’s time to start actively planning for success—that is, to start thinking concretely about the actions you and your company should take when you have in fact transformed to a new type of company. You’ve already thought about it abstractly, of course, but now it’s time to get down to nuts-and-bolts. In particular, you need to decide when to go “all-in” and start cannibalizing existing work streams to feed the new initiative. In general, it’s good to hedge your bets as long as significant uncertainties remain. However, the point will come, soon, when you need to commit fully and as a company so that your transformation initiative will succeed.
Some signs of looming success include:
- Growing alignment and excitement in your company, from line level to board level
- Top people—even if they were previously skeptics or rivals—now want to come on-board, or even to claim credit for the work already done
- Decrease in opposition. People are pro-actively removing obstacles for you, even before you ask them, rather than everything being a constant uphill battle.
Perversely, political struggles may actually increase as your success is seen as more likely. When the previously uninvolved or peripherally involved fully understand that a transformation will actually happen, many will start jockeying for position in the new order. Your task as a transformation leader is to keep things focused so the value of the transformation is not diluted. There’s the old saying that “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” But at the same time, you need to mitigate the risk that your transformation initiative will be hijacked into familiar alignments and “more of the same” thinking, and therefore lose a lot of its value.
Unless you have a truly Machiavellian turn of mind, it’s unlikely that at the outset of the transformation project you will be able to predict the political issues that will arise near the end. I’ve found that the alignments that occur are often surprising and unexpected; in particular, many (though not all) of the initial detractors may become strong and principled supporters. And, of course, the opposite can occur as well. My best advice is to stay alert for both opportunities and threats that arise from the success of your initiative, both personally and for the initiative itself. I also have come to believe that the best sign that people really “own” something is when they come to believe it was their own idea. But, of course, as the change agents, you and I both know better.
Secret #11: There is more time than you think to finish — but less time than you think to start
By definition, a crisis is a problem you can't solve with the time or resources you have. Or so you believe. Regarding your company’s technical situation, you may feel you are out of time; there is no hope. But there’s a saying about crisis that I like to keep in mind: “Don’t confuse the end of an illusion with the beginning of a crisis.”
Many times, when we begin a transformation project, we do so in response to a perceived crisis:
- A competitor may announce a transformational or disruptive product
- A 3rd party company or technology may impinge or seem likely to impinge on your industry;
- A startup develops something customers have previously been asking you for, and begins taking your market share away
- Customer behavior has begun to shift radically and you can’t keep up with the changes.
These are indeed urgent and important situations, but in most cases the root of the problem was already there: it was unmasked by the external situation, not caused by it. In other words, you are witnessing the end of an illusion, not the beginning of a crisis.
My point in saying this, by the way, is not to persuade you that everything is OK, and certainly not to encourage you to stay where you are. If you’re in a transformation situation, you probably do have a real problem and you really do need to act. However, panic or a sense of impending doom is not going to help. The situation you are in was probably years or even decades in the making. If you are a sizable business, it will take you at best months to even begin to alleviate it, and probably one to two years or even longer to truly resolve. Some companies with deep technical debt can take three, four, five years or more to really “fix” their underlying issues, even though incremental releases may allow them to be partially mitigated faster.
I’ve been surprised several times in my career when I thought my company was way behind the competition, only to find that we were in fact first, or one of the first, to deliver. That’s because in many cases you are comparing your own internal reality to someone else’s hype. If your competitors are good at hype, but you are good or become good at delivering products, you can still win, even when it may look like you’re too late. Also, even if you are not first to market, it takes the public a while to accept a new product or business model. You’ll generally be seen as an early entrant even if you are second, third or even later, even if shipping takes months or quarters longer than you’d like.
If your company has strong market or domain presence, a loyal or otherwise “locked-in” customer base, or significant name recognition, you can beat earlier competitors who do not—and compete effectively with many others who do. I remember when I was at Rational and we were working on the Rose 1.0 software design tool—a new product category at that time. Several months before we were ready to ship, a number of tools with similar software architecture drawing capability started to come on the market. They didn’t have all of our capabilities by a long shot (no code generation, for example), but they did do architecture drawings. I talked to one of the product management team and he told me “Don’t worry about it. The best thing that could happen to us is to have a large number of weak competitors. They’ll just create market awareness for us, and we’ll win.” He was right—and we did.
A spectacular example is, of course, Apple. The world had pretty much written off Apple as a viable business by the late 1990’s, saying that it had lost its technology edge and was consigned to a long decline into total market irrelevance. This situation took a while to fix; in fact it took Steve Jobs and his team four years of hard work to turn Apple around technically (counting from the time Job’s re-joined as CEO in 1997 until the time the iPod and OS X shipped, both in 2001). In other words, even after the world had written Apple off as a viable company, they still had four years in which to mount a successful turnaround. And what a spectacular turnaround it was. Granted, even in decline Apple had a lot going for it in terms of brand and customer loyalty, and none of us are Steve Jobs. But the lesson we can take from this is that if our company also has non-technical assets such as consumer loyalty, domain expertise, brand recognition, revenue streams / tangible assets, or other types of assets, there is hope. We may in fact have time to implement our technical transformation, even if we are in a deep hole today.
While shipping later than you want to can sometimes be overcome, starting work too late often cannot. The dirty little truth about software development is that it generally takes longer to develop the product you want than you think it would. Even with great planning, great management, and great processes like Lean and Agile—practices which we follow and strongly endorse—there will always be some bottleneck that takes longer to resolve than you expect. This might be in an area totally unrelated to the software itself—project funding, requirements analysis, regulatory review, external or internal third-party dependencies, etc. Its predictable that something unexpected will happen, and that this will make things take longer than you think.
After fighting it for years, I’ve come to believe unexpected events are simply part of the nature of complex systems—that is, systems and programs with many “moving parts.” Your best strategy is to plan to adapt and respond, in addition to mitigation of known or reasonably foreseeable risks. You can and should work to remove every obstacle you can anticipate, and take advantage of all the efficiencies that modern software development has to offer. We are lucky to be in a time where many things that once were hard and time consuming—for example, setting up the physical hardware infrastructure—have now become much simpler (due to cloud and containerization technologies in this particular case). Many previously difficult and expensive vendor selection alternatives are now addressed by multiple free and widely used open source packages, or cheap open source-derived and cloud-hosted alternatives. But even with all these advantages, people still get sick or quit; natural disasters occur; management, customers and investors still create unexpected opportunities or hurdles to jump over; and, generally, stuff happens that you cannot control.
These are not excuses and all these contingencies can and should be planned for and aggressively worked around—however I can tell you with almost certainty that when you are in a transformation scenario, if you are thinking more than single-digit weeks / a couple of months out, shipping on time will be more of a struggle than you currently think it will. If you have a very near-term goal, you can indeed generally hit it provided your goal seems ridiculously easy at the outset of the work. But it will still be harder than you expect. If you are thinking many months or several quarters out, you will almost certainly be late or not as feature rich as your current plan calls for, due to the cumulative effect of now-unexpected events.
Things are different once you become a well-oiled machine. But even there, experienced companies and teams still plan for uncertainties and generally hedge their externally (customer) committed dates and targets, even in this modern era of Lean / Agile software development. They do this, generally, by prioritizing their objectives (rank ordering and setting “Must, Should, Could, Won’t” cutoffs on the backlog for the release), focusing on the most important items, and staying “Agile” to accommodate the surprises. Their professionalism comes from recognizing the reality of the unexpected, and being able to accommodate it without stress.
Once we have an idea about where we want to end up, choosing precisely where to start becomes another important decision. In large companies, I often recommend that clients choose a project that everyone has wanted to do for a long time but which has never been successfully implemented. Ideally this project should create significant upside for the company if successful—for example, opening up a currently untapped stream of revenue. On the other hand, it should have limited downside risk, in the sense that if the project fails, it won’t tank the company—or negatively impact revenues in a material way. The reason for these conservative criteria is not that you expect the project to fail, but rather that they allow people to feel that it’s safe to take a risk, change their behavior, and to do their best work. These criteria set people up to be heroes if successful, but is not so career- or revenue-critical that people need to fear making mistakes or trying new approaches. In other words: high upside, limited downside is situation where people can do their best, disruptive work.
For some companies, there is no “hedging” or “Plan B”: the company needs to transform or die. While small companies may literally go out of business unless they move fast enough, for a significantly sized company things are rarely that quick. Generally, the worst case for a large company is a long, lingering erosion of market share accompanied by top executive departures, layoffs, and ending in an ignominious acquisition of the remaining assets by a competitor or disrupter wanting to buy market share. That’s bad enough.
In “transform or die” cases, wholesale re-invention is indeed required. Generally, however, your best plan is limit the impact of new initiatives on your current revenue generation activities as much as you can, until you have demonstrated success. Move in parallel to the degree that you can—then go “all in”. Apple, again, is a good role model here: in turnaround mode, they continued shipping and doing active engineering work on their then soon-to-be-obsolete operating system (MacOS) while, in parallel, developing their new operating system (“OS X”) as well as disruptive new products like the iPod. They didn’t start cannibalizing their MacOS revenue stream until its successor, OS X, was well established.
Overall, your best mitigation for uncertainty is to start now, and to prioritize your work so you do the most important and risky things first. That way at any given point in time, you at least have the most important items completed. And if you do encounter a risk, you have maximum time to mitigate it. But this only works if you start. Thinking and planning is great and necessary, but it doesn’t turn into working software until you actually start work on the software!
Secret #10: Know When to Back Off
Backing off is sometimes necessary to accomplish your transformation agenda. To be an effective change agent you have to be an aggressive risk-taker and sometimes a passionate advocate. You have to constantly push the line forward, challenging people to think in new ways and to act differently. For those around you, that can be exhausting—and it can be exhausting for you, too. Here are some signs I’ve learned to look for:
1. The people who have been following you stop following.
Not in a mutinous way, let’s hope, but things have started getting done more slowly and with less enthusiasm than before. This can be frustrating and upsetting, but don’t take it personally, and don’t take it out on your staff—yet. This is most likely an indicator that they’ve had as much change as they can absorb, at least for now.
I’ve found the best strategy in this situation is to back off and, if necessary, let people do things the wrong way—at least for a while (weeks, not months), and at least in small ways. As a leader, you still need to prevent the big truly catastrophic failures—but small failures and mistakes can be valuable learning experiences for your people, even when you know your approach would have prevented them. Mistakes will energize people to accept more change, because they will then begin to understand why you’ve been driving these changes in the first place.
It’ll be clear to you when your people are ready to move forward again—because if you’ve got the right team, they will start asking for it. And if you have the wrong team, you’ll know that too. If you have the wrong people, your best course is to make changes as soon as you know they are needed. But first, give your team a chance to recover. Even good people get burned out from time-to-time.
2. Your opponents within the company gain the upper hand or the ear of senior management.
Sometimes the right answer is to push back. Other times the best course is the aikido move of temporarily stepping aside and even accelerating your opponent along the direction they are moving. Not everyone who opposes your agenda is evil or acting solely out of self-interest. In a complex business, there is room for—and a need for—differing perspectives.
As a champion, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that your way is the right way, or even the only way. You may be right. However, when strong feelings come up it is wise to back up, take a pause, and understand why these opposing viewpoints have gained traction. Be open to the possibility that there is some real issue or perception that needs to be managed, and that you have not yet addressed it effectively enough. For myself, when I get the feeling that I’m 100% right and the other person is 100% wrong, I’ve learned that that’s exactly the time I need to back off and recover my perspective.
3. You yourself are exhausted, with no emotional resources left.
People manifest exhaustion in different ways—for me, I become short-tempered and irritable and lose my sense of humor. When this happens, take a break from driving disruption. You will not make good decisions anyway—and your team has the opportunity to step up and surprise you. Work on other productive but less-disruptive and intense activities until you get your mojo back.
When you re-engage, it’s often a good idea to do it gradually. Start by nibbling around the edges, in areas that are essential to your transformation, but which may be less controversial or provocative than your central push. These may include the “easy stuff” we talked about it. This still takes brainpower and is essential to your overall success, but it’s more localized. Or it may be some other areas. The key is to avoid the “hot button” issues while you are re-engaging. Instead focus on the less controversial parts of your initiative first, and then later get back into “full speed ahead” transformation mode.
The other side of this is when not to back off. There are some situations where backing off is potentially fatal to your transformation initiative. These include:
1. Dealing with bad actors
It’s not easy to sort out the bad actors from the people who simply disagree with your approach. Genuine, open and principled disagreement is one thing and, in my view, should be accommodated to the full extent possible. But active sabotage is something else. A bad actor is a person who offers no constructive agenda of their own and instead either actively puts roadblocks in your way, or else organizes opposition to your program in an effort to undermine it and make it fail. Some people exhibit this behavior out of fear for their jobs, out of frustration that they aren’t getting their way, or because of personal idiosyncrasies. If working with them to understand and meet their legitimate needs does not change their behavior, I would potentially class them as a bad actor.
Before taking action, make sure that their issues are not legitimate. You need to be honest with yourself. People are not necessarily bad actors just because you find them annoying. Even vocal critics of your program or portions of it are not necessarily bad actors. People are bad actors who have an unreasonable and continuing agenda of destroying or derailing your program, for reasons of their own which in your honest and sober judgement are opposed to the interests of your company. These people are rare—I think I’ve only encountered three in my whole career. But they do exist.
When you have identified a genuinely bad actor—someone who is actively and unreasonably trying to undermine your program—the only effective strategy I have found is to get rid of them. If such a person works under you, I recommend that you fire them rather than move them to another project within your company. I made the mistake fairly early in my career of tolerating a bad actor who was in my group. He was such a great engineer that I felt an obligation to find a place for him in a different team that was not working on my change program. This was a mistake, because he continued to undermine my change program from his new role. In retrospect, the best thing I could have done for my company and my initiative was to get rid of this person.
When a bad actor is outside of your group, I would have a frank conversation with him or her directly and then, if necessary, take the situation up their management hierarchy. Where you don’t have direct control, sometimes the best you can do is to keep them far away from your program; other times you can’t even do that. Where you have a bad actor in your program who you can’t get rid of, at least try to put them in a role where they can do as little harm as possible. Then keep a careful eye on them, gather evidence, and continue to escalate. This wastes a lot of time, but sometimes it’s the best you can do.
2. Existential threats to transformation
Obviously, as the champion, you need to deal with anything that threatens the existence of your change initiative, and not back away. This might be funding issues, competing initiatives, lack of support from various teams, etc. A principled and strong stance in necessary for success—and will hopefully be met with support if your initiative is as important as you think it is.
As an effective champion, it’s all too easy to slip into a mindset where you start to see yourself in a “savior” or “hero” role. Keep in mind, though, that your continued ownership of the transformation initiative, and your creation of its detailed shape, may not actually be essential to the success of the transformation itself. Ownership and direction changes sometimes happen because of the inherent misalignment in transformation initiatives generally. When you’re doing your job as a champion and a leader, regardless of which direction you take, some people will agree with you while others will not. The forces within your company may continue to align behind you, but they can also shift and align a different way. One person staying at the head of a complex transformation initiative in a large company over a long period of time is unusual. It may happen, or it may not.
My advice is to focus first on the transformation itself, rather than your specific ownership of it or your control over its detailed direction. If the process of transformation itself is at risk, you as champion should fight with all your resources to keep it moving forward. But if the focus or the ownership of the transformation shifts, while the transformation itself is still moving forward, that’s a different story. It may be time to let go.
Changes in ownership or direction might pose risks to your role, or be undesirable in other ways; but keep in mind that the initiative is not you. Also, and this can be very hard to take, the specific details of how the transformation is implemented probably don’t make as much difference to its ultimate success as you think they do—in part because of the learning effects we have discussed. The transformation, if you’ve launched it well, can and should be able to carry on without you.
As a champion, you naturally have a lot of skin in the game. You probably identify strongly with the project’s goals and success, and have invested heavily in the detailed means of getting there. The time may come, though, when you can’t have it both ways: you may have to decide whether it’s more important for the transformation itself to be successful, or for you personally to be in charge of it.
This is a judgement call you will have to make. Get the input of people you trust, in and outside your company, and get as much insight as you can into your own motivations and the realities of the initiative and your company. Some initiatives might indeed fail without you personally at the helm. But unless you control everything, from board level down, odds are high that there will be many points of view on that subject. My advice is to pick the viewpoint that is the most honest, and assess what your real options are, including what you can practically accomplish given the full reality of the current situation.
If you do decide to step aside for the good of the initiative, odds are near 100% that you will have other opportunities to lead other transformation initiatives, taking everything you have learned with you. The world does not lack from a need for technology transformation nor for leaders of it; your company may not lack for these needs in other areas either.
When it does come time to let go, holding on to a given initiative with a death grip is not good for you, or good for the transformation. If you do hold on too long, you take a very significant risk of yourself becoming one of the “bad actors” I warned about earlier. Continue to align yourself with the goals of the transformation, but know when to let go of the means.
Secret #9: Get Help
This probably sounds self-serving given that GlobalLogic is in the product development services business—and perhaps it is self-serving.
However, I’ve observed time and time again that it’s very difficult for companies to change without the continued presence of an external change implementation partner working side-by-side and whispering in their ear. It’s far too easy to lapse into earlier and more familiar patterns despite the best of intentions, especially under pressure.
A third party can reinforce the message of change. Also, to the extent that you empower them, they can help you be more effective as a change agent within your company by establishing touchpoints with all the functions in your company who need to be influenced—even those outside your direct sphere of control. They can even help hold you yourself accountable by holding up a mirror to your progress—if you let them.
With all types of coaching, I like to use the analogy of learning how to ski. I suppose that you can read and take classroom instruction about skiing. However, until you go down the hill a few times with a skilled instructor at your side, you will never be successful. Similarly, having an experienced partner by your side as a reality check and “force multiplier” is a key value-add.
As an “outside” partner we are often asked—by senior management—to bring a message to even more senior management or to board members within their own company. This is because a lot of the lessons of digital transformation are counterintuitive to people who have been part of the old system. Also, to put it very directly, if our clients perceive a risk that the messenger may get shot, many would prefer that we are the messenger, rather than themselves! We and companies like us understand and are OK with that; taking these risks on our client’s behalf is part of why you pay us in the first place. Also, the message may be better received if it’s coming from us rather than you; it’s often easier for people to hear messages coming from a 3rd party than from someone “inside the system”. Questions of loyalty, past interactions and company culture don’t apply with the same force. The more arms-length nature of the relationship can put the focus more squarely on the message than the messenger.
In particular, having someone outside your company back you up when you make the stand to “stop digging the hole deeper” can be very effective. The ability of a 3rd party to say what’s “normal” and what’s “unusual” is key for the credibility of many transformation initiatives. All of us who work for a particular company tend to develop tunnel-vision around that company. Working with someone outside your particular company structure who has “been there and done that” can help everyone gain perspective about what may seem novel to people in your company, but which in fact is perfectly normal in other company’s undergoing transformations.
We are also seeing the phenomenon of hiring experienced technology executives from outside the company. That is, bringing seasoned management from a successful product or technology company into a more traditional business as the designated owner / catalyst for transformation. If these people are empowered, this can be very successful. I’ve seen the most success where the new “outside” people have a very explicit mandate that is outside the mainstream of the business—at least at first.
One US brick-and-mortar retail giant we work with offers a great success story for the case where outside executives were brought in. This traditional old-school brick-and-mortar retail business brought in executives with a non-retail software development background. There first task was to implement the company’s mobile business strategy. While the retail company had a web-based e-commerce site, they had not had any success establishing a mobile presence. In fact, previous attempts had failed badly.
The new technology execs were spectacularly successful in devising and executing the mobile strategy, producing one of the most widely used e-commerce apps that had so far been deployed in the US. They also, quite shrewdly, took the opportunity to address a number of problems of the brick-and-mortar business, including “showrooming” (looking at items in the store but purchasing from a lower-cost competitor on-line) and “Omni channel” (seamlessly relating the customer relationship and shopping experience on-line and in the physical world).
On the basis of this success, they were given increased responsibility, including technology ownership for previously off-limits retail domains, including the brick-and-mortar stores.
This strategy worked because the new technology execs had an opportunity to demonstrate success in a “safe” area; this is, an area that was clearly related to the company’s main business, but not at that time seen as “core” to that business. If they had failed, the core business brick-and-mortar retail business would have been largely unaffected. In the course of developing the mobile solution, they gained the confidence of the business’s more traditional stakeholders, including those in charge of brick-and-mortar operations. They also, I would argue, opened their eyes to the fact that what happens on-line is in fact core to their business, and also showed what technical transformation could mean to their company.
From the outset, the retailer’s largest need for transformation was in fact in their core brick-and-mortar business, not in their mobile strategy. However sometimes the quickest path to the end goal is not the direct one. If this retail transformation initiative had started the other way around—in other words, if it had focused on the arguably more important brick-and-mortar retail transformation first—I doubt it would have succeeded. Despite the technical skills of the new executives (and their innovation partner, GlobalLogic), the stakes simply would have been too high for the retail company. The legacy stakeholders would have actively opposed the changes claiming the newcomers “lacked expertise” and “didn’t understand how things really worked”. Bottom line, the biggest stakeholders in the status quo would have opposed any change that was too close to their core business, and never would have bought in. This is not out of any evil intent; it just would have been perceived as too risky.
For people grounded in the “old, traditional way” of doing things, it is very hard to imagine what digital transformation looks like in the context of the company they are so familiar with. It’s a “fish in water” phenomenon and not a failure of intelligence; just of imagination. Seeing a proven success-point within their own business helps open people’s eyes. An in-context success can get a critical mass of people either on-board, or at least willing to start considering the potential benefits of change. Also, after a demonstrated success, it is the detractors who now have the burden of proof when they oppose further transformation. This can shift the dynamics of change in the direction of transformation.
Not all companies have the luxury of starting with a project where the fate of the business is not at stake. However, if you can do it, focus on one of these “high upside, limited downside” projects to start. It will increase your chances of success by reducing the perceived “threat level” to the business. It also gives people a conceptual framework that allows them to begin to understand the benefits that further transformation will bring.