Session Information:

Enterprise Architects: The Champions of IT

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic caught the world unawares. Not only did the pandemic tax our healthcare systems in ways we couldn’t imagine, it forced businesses to adjust to a largely remote workforce, cut costs, and make very difficult decisions to stay afloat.

This unprecedented time elevated the role of enterprise architects into the champions of IT as they quickly assessed their companies’ business capabilities, determined how to provide moreself-service abilities to employees, cut IT costs, and ensure business continuity throughout an organization.

Driven by the IT needs during the pandemic, Hylton Southey, Managing Director of LeanIX, Inc.will discuss what organizations need to consider as they transform their IT and leverage enterprise architecture for business continuity.

Key takeaways from this presentation:

• Learn how the global pandemic forced companies to rethink their IT transformation to accommodate a remote workforce
• Understand the issues enterprise architects need to address to ensure business continuity
• Gain insight into the steps EAs can take to keep IT running while balancing the needs of the business
• Learn how the Government of Yukon ensured business continuity using enterprise architecture

Session Transcript:

Hylton said the is the Managing Director of the Lean I X organization, go to market efforts in the Americas. Has nearly 20 years of experience leading high growth, technology, sales organizations, and operations teams. You spent 10 years at Mimecast leading e-mail and data security company, where he served in a variety of sales leadership roles, including Vice President of Business Development and VP of North American Sales. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa. Hilton has lived in Singapore, London, and Johannesburg, but now lives in Boston where Lean I X is headquarter. So, without further ado, please welcome the Hilton Saturday.

And he does not have his scammer on what, which, is, just letting, you know, you see his presentation, and, but you're not going to get to see him on the camera, and you'll get his audio. So, Hilton, please go ahead and share your presentation, and take it over from here. Please.

Thank you very much. And I hope everyone can hear me loud and clear. Candidly, I've had a technology problem this morning hence, you won't be cursed, by seeing my face. So maybe that's an advantage for everyone.

So thank you everyone for for making time, and thank you to ... for putting this together, and giving us the opportunity to speak with you, and then share some stories, and hopefully, for us to learn something from everyone today.

So I've got a fairly short presentation, I hope it is 16 slides, and I'll try to move through it in a way that makes it interesting.

We want to just talk about a few things today. First of all, introducing Lean I X and who the business is.

Touch on the complexity and the cliche that surrounds the digital transformation piece, and really talk a little bit about how that is set our business up for success and how we try to set our customers up for success in that environment.

It would not be.

It would not be real, if we didn't talk about the impact of covert 19 on both ourselves as a business and our customers. And there's some parallels there. Which made it quite interesting. As we've weathered the Storm of the last six months or so.

we'll talk a little bit about why I'll talk a little bit about the four pillars that our customers are using to address what we describing as the new remote workforce.

And I'll share an interesting story of an actual customer that was able to leverage our EA platform, to help them address some of the challenges and needs that arose from men during the pandemic. And I'll leave some time at the end just to make sure that there's an opportunity to ask questions. But I do believe that if we, if we did run out of time, we were able to answer those questions in a different way. But we will try to to be efficient with that.

So first of all, who is Levi X So as mentioned, by Jose. I'm hylton savvy. I run the US business.

I have my roots in e-mail security. I spent over 10 years, at what was then a startup, e-mail, security business, so I've only been in the space now for 16 months.

So I'm still really learning what enterprise architecture means about our product.

And perhaps most importantly, about how our product actually is set up to support our customers support enterprise architecture, and effectively support the discipline and the community that has grown out of the function.

So maybe we'll start with just a quick story about where we are and where we came from.

So we're a relatively small business, and we're very excited to say we're, we're growing really quickly.

In fact, I think we're around 250 people globally. We have 24 nationalities, three offices including an Office in Bonn Germany, which is where our organization was founded, as well as an office in India. Of course, as Jose mentioned, I'm based up here in Boston, Massachusetts, and that our office is just outside Watertown, and then sadly is mostly empty today as a result of the impact of covert.

Just to give you a little bit of a sense of more of how technology is being adopted, more reflection of interest in what we do, and how we see things.

Last year, we ran an event on-site event in Orlando next to the Gartner EA summit that they run every year except this year. And we attracted 62 attendees to that event.

And when covert hit, we had to make a quick decision, like like many businesses, many of you listening, which make some smart choices, about how we reacted. You have the option to do the wait and see. You have the option to execute on your plan, and you have the option to change.

We took a fairly quick decision to do something that we'd never done, which was host a virtual event somewhat and very much like this one.

And as a result of pivoting to a virtual event, we attracted 960 people who actually attended the show after getting approximately 1500 people to register.

The flexibility and the agility that we showed. one could argue, wasn't entirely our choice, but it's certainly an example of where rapid adaptation, in tough times benefited us in both the short term, and we believe in the long run. In fact, we will be hosting our second virtual event. This year there'll be hosted in Bonn Germany, it will be a virtual event.

And we're expecting to have around 2000 attendees, as many as 400 of them will be able to be accommodated on-site in the trade center, and the balance of those attendees will be able to attend virtually.

It's something of a cliche, but it's really true. We see ourselves as a match between German precision engineering and high class US customer support.

As you'll find out a little bit more about us, if you don't know already. We typically deal with large customers. Medium sized customers are growing fast. And they all have a number of things in common. And one of them is very specifically the complexity related to the IT landscape and how it's evolving, whether it's digital transformation, they're calling it business transformation. A whole lot of good buzzwords tied to complexity and hard work.

So, let me just jump right in and give you an idea of how we're seeing things.

So what you're looking at here, is a screenshot of our tool, specifically gives you an overview of the application landscape of a customer as displayed in our console.

On the left-hand side, you have a point in time, which was the beginning of the journey, if you like. But the organization had around 500 business processes, all supported by approximately one thousand applications, and then all of that is held together with a whole range of technologies.

Over time, obviously, as organizations grow, and then make a conscious choice to embark on this digital transformation journey, you will see that obviously, the number of processors grow exponentially.

And with that, the number of applications and services and technologies all spike accordingly.

Just to be clear, and that may not be entirely visible on the screen, you're probably looking at what looks like a very confused game of Tetris because this is a complex environment.

The real power of our tool here is that you can filter down and narrow the scope considerably so you can get information you want.

But what's more important is we're trying to show here how complex environment can become.

So, the red dots show technology.

So, application, should I say, that have been end of Lifed, which gives you an opportunity to look over your shoulder and see what's gone, Really, with the view to making sure that those technologies, those applications, have been adequately, impactful and replaced.

The ones in yellow are the ones that are currently on their way aren't being phased out.

The ones in blue are the ones that are actively being used and connected.

So those are kind of the lifeblood of the meat of the, of the business, the technology side of the business, and the ones in the shades of gray.

I'm the various planning phases, that's pre seed, deployment, all are currently in the early stages of deploy.

So, you know, as I say, the colors may be interesting.

But what's more important here is that the proliferation of technologies that come with digital transformation have really given us as a business, a massive opportunity, but also has given IT, and specifically, enterprise architect architects a huge amount of work to do.

Know, people talk loosely about iteration and scaling, and then kind of building custom application to make sure that your projects are successful.

But the big hamstring, the big challenge for a lot of our customers, is making sense of this complex environment, so that you can actually invest, and make sure that your growth is careful, and backs your business strategy.

Another key element of our business is, is really the people, the people in the organizations that drive enterprise architecture.

And not surprisingly with the additional growth and complexity coming with this current wave of change, comes a real demand for skilled professionals who are able to, in a systematic way, follow a methodology that makes sense to them, but perhaps, more importantly, a methodology that makes sense to the entire business, so that IT and the business can communicate using a common taxonomy and make sense of things.

In fact, if you if you do wonder around LinkedIn, for example, you'll see that there's a huge demand for skilled professionals that can actually help with this kind of work.

So, for us, as a business, to do this, there's two things to take from that.

one, is that, digital complexity and general complexity gives us lifeblood, the need for skilled professionals to manage enterprise architecture, enterprise architecture tools, is giving our business. Or particularly, in the early part of this year was giving our business a massive tailwind?

And then, things changed dramatically. So, in fact, we closed our Boston office on Friday, the 13th of March.

And I remember, prior to that in February, getting a text message from a peer, working at another tech company in Boston, telling me that they were stopping international travel. And no shame on me. Or maybe you have your own view, I thought that was a rather hysterical way to react.

However, I think history has proved. that was both a prudent and the smart approach. And as we evolve into this new world of a work from home environment, it's it's proved to be entirely the right choice.

Anyway, we rolling along nicely as a business.

We had this tailwind of interest driven by professionals who were learning and we had complexity, which is a problem we solve, and suddenly it covert shows up, and everything changes.

So many companies prior to cobra very comfortable, and remain very comfortable in this work from home environment, the shock came to the organizations that either had made a conscious choice like ourselves, that we wanted to be an office based organization, um, and had only prepared for work from home scenarios in a disaster recovery mode, which we had done.

Of course, we have great faith in our RDR plans and our continuity plans, but so many organizations really struggled to know where to start.

Um, one of the challenges it's always going to be ensuring that the collaboration element that vanishes from an on premise, Insight's environment is somehow restored.

And then, figuring out the connections between people, technology, and groups becomes even more critical.

So, suddenly, the need for answers that span business and IT are needed And, there's a MOX increase in interest of the value of what an enterprise architect can deliver can deliver.

She makes sure that the link between business and IT are, in fact held together to make plans for this new, normal web people are compelled and have little choice, but to work from home and collaborate.

Add to this, that's when everyone sees uncertainty, it's just a matter, of course, that spending is paused.

We are the key schade high growth tech company with ambitious growth goals.

We are also a fairly conservative business when it comes to spending and investment, and unfortunately, fast, maybe the bulk of our rapid scaling and hiring, I was pushed into second half of this. Yes. So we had optionality and the choices, many of our peers, and many organizations didn't have that option.

Because when uncertainty happens, spending is paused.

And what becomes, increasingly care, is that overall spending drops. It's harder to get budget. Show. Many of you are acquainted with that battle on a day-to-day basis right now.

And in order to get budget, you have to be very specific on creating a strong understanding on exactly what the ROI is going to be on the investment center. So at this point in time, when organizations are being careful about spending.

If you can't show top line revenue, growth via some kind of business, dramatic business change, and, or you can't show a bottom last line, cost-cutting opportunity, it's really, really hard to convince IT, kind of, it's finance that IT needs to spend more money. And again, this is a reflection of the conversations we're having with a broad range of companies, from banking, to finance, to manufacturing and including healthcare.

So it's not a it's not a story specific to a vertical and yes there are definitely some areas where significant organizations have benefited from the pandemic and not just created massive opportunities and tailwinds for them.

So then, the quick the question becomes, What does your reality look like?

We send our team home.

And because we plan for this, because we're a Lean agile organization, or case, we'd like to see it like that, everybody can work from home. We're a small company with a wealth of, Well, put together tools. We have the collaboration pieces in play. We have Slack. We have Zoom, everything that you'd expect.

And a lot of organizations.

Or comfortable leaning on a good collection of tools.

What we saw is that the employee experience of gaining access to those tools changed dramatically.

Um, employees needed to be in a position where they can easily and rapidly access technologies to support the day-to-day operations, and IT becomes increasingly driven.

To serve as a customer resource center so that the individuals in the organization get the technology they need.

And in the meantime, while people are grappling with these challenges, the business itself is trying to continue to find competitive edges that can keep developing, The business cannot simply slow down.

The idea here is that if you do nothing during a time of crisis, you set us up for failure when the storm is passed.

So, innovation and iteration during times of crisis are the things that really make a difference for organizations.

So we started to see a common pattern amongst our customers, who put together a framework, if you like, for making sure that enterprise architecture could effectively wrapped together and ensure the success of the remote work workforce.

For many organizations, I said, This wasn't a big deal, companies like Salesforce and Twitter could quite comfortably adjust to this, no new normal. In fact, I think Twitter has already moved on to being 100% remote.

one of the key takeaways for me and us as a business for my customers, is that there was a disconnect from the humans who are trying to get access to technology, and there was a frustration level that, in order to, to get access, you strive to reach anyone. And there's old antivirus systems, so those systems needed to work really, really well.

So at this time, you know, looking around, getting the feedback from our customers, we launched our self-service portal within charge customers for it and we rolled it into the new package. So it just comes as as a default.

And and candidly, there's a lot of technologies out there that focus only on that part. But we were in a position away because we had people on the platform already. It was a really comfortable transition. You just add that piece of technology.

And in order, simply does is, it allows, a, enables employees via self-service to get access to approved and available software, that they need to do their jobs, reducing the number of ... support requests to not blocking up and coming up ITQs, taking over to some degree efficiency that's required to make sure help desks with four applications running smoothly.

And also align people in the business to figure out who subject matter experts are and how to get access to them, so that requests for information and requests for support, were quickly addressed.

It also facilitates democratize, democratization of inflammation, so that employees are able to do their own research, find the answers to what's needed, and then easily access what they need to actually get their job done.

Another key area where organizations have started to focus, or having, of increase their focus, is now that they've been given this challenge of understanding how to better serve this new community that's working from home.

They've been given a fresh lens and fresh energy into initiatives to review the complexity of their environments, So, because of the drive to reduce expenses, because of the new normal way people are working from home, organizations have a renewed energy. We see in rigor in trying to reduce costs. in order. To do that, you have to have a single pane of glass. You have to have a way to see everything in high everything ties together.

And the key to working this is to make sure that the business and IT leaders are able to combine their efforts, Not only business applications and processes, but also to fine tune, co IT infrastructure, and operations, and again, the question becomes, how do we do this. How do our customers do this?

If, every time you start a project, you have to do a research project so that you can have a starting point, and I'm not going to dive too deeply in textile, resist the urge to give you a product pitch, but I think you're getting the sense that this is something that ... effectively does.

And at large companies with a massive complexities where you have duplication and inefficiencies duplication of applications across different organizations, geography's functions, organizations are able to identify opportunities to not only reduce the costs but also improve the quality of the service delivered to that work from home workforce.

The reality is that the leadership group and the IT department cannot do this job on their own.

It needs to be a broad range of stakeholders, committing to sharing and making sense of the information to make informed decisions. So that if something has changed.

Everybody is part of the process, and everybody is committed to that, and this is certainly the feedback we get from our prospects and our customers these days.

The obvious opportunity that that arises from this is the principle that efficient use of the cloud adoption can increase.

So, as everyone knows, the cloud governments, governance creates controls to manage access, to manage budget, to ensure compliance across whatever hybrid arrangement of cloud applications you're using.

Um, it does sound like all of these things are just pushed off into the cloud. It's the same thing. Either people become aware quite quickly that the economies of scale, efficiencies, and the budgetary impacts are a magnitude that cannot be ignored.

I mean, it's, it's the cliche.

Again, of, it's not, it's not if, but it's when organizations of every size are busy on this journey, and in a work from home environment, good governance process makes it much easier to manage these, reach these resources. It's about staying organized and it's about maintaining control, but not in an authoritarian blocking way.

You're able to give your users access to the resources they need, But at the same time, put a stop to things that are happening outside, the area of control, and effectively stopping shadow IT.

Ultimately, what this gives you a business, um, it's trust in leadership. Leadership has made good investments as communicated the value of the investments, and that your end users who are now, basically, sometimes, working in an environment that can be quite lonely.

Their frustrations are reduced and that's a key, that's a key area of human behavior that organization collaborations through a single pane of glass can address.

And a cloud governance solution, obviously, also addresses regulatory compliance for HIPAA, FedRAMP, etcetera, can help you enforce limits and control budget.

And candidly that, at a time, when everyone's looking at budgets, reduce labor so that you can redeploy IT resources to focus on projects that are driving topline revenue growth instead of just managing resources to stay on track.

So the example we see is from our prospectors.

Adopting a solution such as ours, allows you to stop using spreadsheets, things like Vizio PowerPoint, to manually process and track all of the accounts, the costs, the compliance regulations.

And this drives real collaboration and sharing with a documentation set that is actually a living document session set. And by collaboration continues to remain alive and relevant.

So, I recently came across an observation on the CIO websites about parenting. I kind of stole this from, from someone way smarter than me.

The statement was, when we make assumptions, We contribute, contribute to complexity rather than the simplicity of a problem. Which makes the problem more difficult to solve.

It's a trap certainly, that parents fall into, and companies fall into, At the, at the start of any project, whether it's digital, business transformation, whatever you want to call it, the objective remains consistent, which is ultimately breakthrough performance.

So, the successful customers that that we work with, have adopted a framework, and this isn't always exactly the same, but we certainly see commonalities, with a four step process to make sure that data dynamic picture, to plan and execute.

Um, and, of course, none of this is rocket science, but you have to start identifying your organization's critical business process with an overall understanding of impact and risk.

So, understanding the needs, um, and then have you identified the dependencies you need to perform in order to identify dependencies, to perform.

Your critical process may include applications, the vendors you use, skill sets, location of your offices, and other processes.

An obvious one that everyone thinks about is, what is the acceptable amount of time? You know, how long can a service be unavailable before it becomes a critical business risk? And then what is your recovery time.

How do you rebuild it, and how quickly can it be returned?

None of this is particularly new.

But it's gonna be all be captured in one place in an ideal world, where all the different stakeholders across this crisis environment can share and collaborate. And that's really the hard part.

Again, I don't want to slide back into the product pitch mode. Probably more interesting would be to relate. A short customer story of one of our customers who actually recently used our service to navigate some of the choppy waters during the covert pandemic.

So, as you can see, Ryan Igor is Enterprise Architecture for the UK government, and he was specifically charged with the task of overseeing their response for the covert 19 crisis.

So he was assigned to the Emergency Measures Office. And his role was to ensure business continuity across governmental departments and services, as well as connections with companies that serve them.

Key item was health providers and be able to connect back to the constituents to the community at large.

His challenge is compounded by the fact that, as many of you probably know, u-conn is one of the smallest, highly remote provinces in Canada. It's way north-west, Squat, about 50,000 people. And candidly has very limited resource to respond to this kind of situation, both from a human resource perspective, and from an actual infrastructure perspective.

That's physically shut down like many local governments and governments, services. and that to figure out, Probably most importantly, how they could protect small, scattered vulnerable populations across a very large distances.

As we all know, the the pandemic is caused lots of public and private organizations to realize.

They don't have a central repository, um, to use to change their operating procedure and support a remote workforce force during the crisis.

This issue hit Yukon really hard.

They sort of needed to quickly get their hands around a dataset of their services, to understand, what do we have? What are the continuity plans? How do we support this? And where are the critical pieces that support the population that support the society's needs, and the and Ryan inherited this, this project, and then stepped up to the mark?

And he was able to use the EAA, the enterprise, architecture data that lives in our tool, to do a full analysis of services by how important they were to servicing the populations at risk.

He also, there was able to use the open APIs and create a custom dashboard.

That dashboard was used for feedback from department heads on data accuracy, and to support and maintain business continuity across the state.

So specifically, stakeholders are able to use the dashboard that they built to report on where they needed resources.

And, because of the way the collaboration tool works, they were able to make this information available to key decision makers in real time because of the central repository. and because of the collaboration piece. And, they were able to make this dashboard available in three days. And that's really based on having a central repository, accurate information, as well as a culture of willing contribution from all the stakeholders in the business.

So, you know, to say that the pandemic has passed in, Yukon, we would probably be an exaggeration. It's a pass for any of us. Probably, not for some time.

But Ryan's role has changed to a point now where, um, you can just maintain and ensure performance and steer the ship so you can fine tune and adapt where resources are delivered and how they're delivered.

And all of this data can be, can be watched via the architecture tool, where he has a full view of the entire inventory.

And simply put the agility of having a single pane of glass allowed u-conn to respond very quickly with confidence.

And probably the most important element to that is that the communications to the constituents were quick, though accurate.

And they were based entirely on the reality of something that was delivered virtually immediately, um, this is not a unique story.

Many companies operate in this fashion on a day-to-day basis and many companies will use our tool to perform application rationalization, technology risk management on a daily basis.

In this instance, Ryan was able to bring the technology to bear to maximize and make sure that the things that were needed were delivered in place and on time.

So, if you're interested in finding out the real story, you know from the horse's mouth, there's a webinar and I can send that on if anybody's interested in seeing that.

So, just to wrap up, It's certainly not a unique situation, operating in a crisis mode is not something that is entirely unique to covert 19.

It is, for me, a reminder, that even during times when we not in a crisis mode, it's certainly worth adopting that same mentality to make sure that we refine our business processes, that we operate in an efficient way.

And that we execute, in an Agile way, is that, If we need to change, we can. And, again, in order to reach that point, we'll need to have a clear view of where we are.

So, we do believe that the customer experience of the employee is critical to the overall success of the business.

By providing a cohesive plan and executing on that to deliver tools, allying self-sufficiency, as well as trying to reduce complexity, you're able to deliver that experience to end users that keeps them engaged, keeps them working, keeps them successful.

The flip side of unraveling, the complexity is you can reduce costs and re-invest.

And then you're able to use a single tool to wrap it all together as you make a pivot to the cloud and ensure that the efficiencies are maintained.

And what you're able to do at the end of the day is stay ahead of some of the crisis, some of the chaos that's actually being driven by Coburn and future proof yourself. Any future processes that may occur.

So, Jose, I'm going to stop there and happy to I think we're well on time and I'm happy to take any, any questions.

Fantastic. Fantastic Hylton. Thank you very much for your presentation. You can actually keep that slide up, because I think that you summarize some of your key topics in that slide.

So, that's a good background for us to have as as we have a discussion here.

So, there are a few questions that have come in. So, we have about seven minutes here, and I want to cover as many as possible. For those of you who want to submit additional questions, please do so, as we have the conversation. I still have a screen here that shows me the questions that are coming in. So, I'm going to pick one that came in at the very end here from ... Martinez, She says, First, Great presentation, and her question is, What type of information do you recommend presenting when discussing data accuracy concerns?

Jose, sorry, I'm really struggling to hit it. Could you repeat that question? Yes. So the question was from Ana Martinez and she asks, you discussed discussions around data accuracy concerns and she asks, what type of information do you recommend presenting when having discussions about data accuracy concerns?

That's a, that's a good question. So data accuracy is a pivotal part of a successful deployment of our service, and any tool at all.

So what we, what we talk about in lead I extended as we talk about something called factsheets. And fact sheets really are just that object that ties specific attributes to the platform describing applications, projects, etcetera, etcetera.

And the key part about the fact sheets is, you create a common taxonomy. So in the first place, everyone speaking, the same language.

When peak, when somebody describes factsheets by word or in another source it's very clearly referenced sibal in the platform.

So when when embarking on the project, it's really important for all the stakeholders to be in involved upfront.

It's certainly a situation where when you upload all the information, you need to make sure that everybody involved in the process has had oversight of the information that has a common agreement of what whole terminology means and what every acid is described.

So you start out with a clean picture.

So you have an agreement amongst the broad group that these are the facts.

This is what we agree as an application. This is how this works. These are the things that connect, and these are the people that are responsible for these things.

From an ongoing data integrity piece, it's really important that stakeholders are connected to that and can actually make sure they're kept up to date.

Because with, in the absence of a central repository, you end up with a project every time.

You want to start a new initiative.

So, data integrity become something that is a huge body of work at the beginning of a project and then restarts after the project.

However, if you have a central repository, you don't have to restart to date data. Integrity is driven by collaboration and hopefully, commitment to the team and candidly, it's all about a cultural shift. It's all about getting people to commit to that is hops going to work. And driving adoption.

Very good, Very good. one other question that we have Hilton has to do with the enhancement of the employee remote work experience. Share with us what you have seen that has been useful to enhance that employee, remote work experience. What are some of the maybe a couple of things that you have seen in the marketplace that have stood out for you?

Yeah, that's, um, that's another interesting one, and there's this, there's a lot of pieces to that, and as technologists, we quickly get sucked into the conversation around what tools can we provide.

So, you know, it would be nice to have, have experience with, for example, Zoom or go to meeting, that is flawless.

So you, people invest in equipping their teams with high quality connection. So that meetings are run efficiently without technology issues. And the connection between people is is, is efficient and accurate. So, I mean, everybody knows that, investments in online meeting tools have been significant.

Other tools that and ensure collaborative collaborations like Slack so that people can constantly be in touch. Casual work conversations can happen in an efficient way, in an easy way. It's all about having accessibility in it and then people being able to be able to get to that stuff easily.

No, other collaboration tools like like Confluence have certainly been adopted increasingly from from where we're sitting.

But as I said, we technologists, we talk about tools. And we want to make sure people have great bandwidth the times that companies are investing in that for the employees. And then that does opened a lot of questions around what's the long term, vision of your business?

Are you by choice, a, an office based organization, or you no longer making the choice, and you've become a remote company in the long term.

But the other piece, I just want to add quickly jose's that.

Employee satisfaction, an employee of enjoyment is not just based on people's experience with tools. There is a key element, the human element, where people need to be recognized, for still being engaged as co-working. And I've seen all kinds of interesting things. You know, I've seen organizations provide, for example, an online online yoga classes, virtual yoga classes for their teams on a weekly basis.

We've had things like virtual, happy hours on a Friday afternoon. I've seen a lot of that.

We've also seen all kinds of online quizzes to make sure you don't lose the connection that comes with being out of the office. So it's a double edged sword.

Invest in, in key technologies that support high quality experience in terms of bandwidth, high quality video conferencing equipment. And make sure you balance access to all of that with a provisioning process that is simple, reducing frustration. And then spend some money on keeping people happy. And, look, there's no secret sauce. And I'm no expert, but that's what I, what I've seen be quite successful for, for our customers actually in the last stage of six months.

That's great, practical advice hylton. Thank you. Hilton, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing your journey, sharing your insights and expertise. We really appreciate that.

All right, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes our session. We will close this segment and then we will do that. Please fill out the survey that will pop up for it with any feedback and comments on the session. We'll be back up at the top of the hour and you do not want to miss this session with Joshua Gosset, who is the Chief Transformation Strategist for Red Hat. And Josh is going to talk to us about accelerating value creation by maximizing hybrid cloud outcomes, outcomes through platforms. So, we'll see you back at the top of the hour, and, and I look forward to it.

Take care.

Thank you, Mary.