Enterprises are increasingly investing in digital transformation, and it is imperative that these resources become value for business. But for that to happen, cultural change is needed within organizations, according to Tom Davenport (pictured, center), president’s distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, and fellow of the MIT Initiative for the Digital Economy.

“I have always found that the soft stuff about the culture, the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change,” Davenport said. “And more and more we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have to change people’s behaviors and attitudes. We haven’t made as much progress in that area as we might have.”

Because of this need for change, culture is one of the pillars of the BizOps Manifesto, a declaration of values and principles that serve to better align and continuously improve software development and operations to the needs of digital businesses. This alignment must happen through a combination of technology, culture and communication, according to the manifesto.

Davenport, Mik Kersten (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer at Tasktop Technologies Inc., and  Serge Lucio (pictured, right), general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom Inc., spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. They discussed the role of the BizOps Manifesto in today’s digital world, the importance of data-driven decisions and how companies can move toward a closer relationship between IT and business. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration is another key to success

A culture change begins with the realization that people within an organization are all different and with various backgrounds and that everyone needs to trust and collaborate to find solutions that improve business results, according to Lucio.

“When we think about the types of changes that we’re trying to truly effect around data-driven decision-making, it’s all about bringing the data in context, the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders, whether we’re talking about an operator or a developer or a business analyst,” he said.

In this way, it is easier to collaborate, Lucio explained.

Another step to change the culture is to establish a connection between what people are doing in their specific cycle and the business objectives. “If you start to be able to align business [Key Performance Indicator] … to the KPIs that developers might be looking at — whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever metrics that they are used to actually track — you start to be able to actually contextualize what we are effecting,” Lucio said.

IT is at the heart of business

Many factors make the current moment ideal for the launch of the BizOps Manifesto. Before, IT was a back-office-related activity, important to capture customer orders, for example, but now it is at the center of organizations, which need to be a data and digital business, according to Davenport.

“If you aren’t making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of going out of business or losing out to competitors totally,” Davenport said. “You’re compared against the best in the world, so we don’t really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our IT projects or building things that don’t really work for the business.”

BizOps Manifesto is a second step toward the evolution of IT areas after the Agile Manifesto, launched in early 2001 as an effort to establish the principles of agile software development.

“I’ve been closely following the Agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto, and I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level,” Kersten said. “[Now] we really need to improve at the business level.”

Organizations are failing to implement a successful digital transformation because they are measuring activities, how they are becoming more agile and how teams are working, not how quickly they deliver value to customers.

“So we need to now move past that and that’s exactly what the BizOps Manifesto provides,” Kersten said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE