“Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs can help I&O leaders address their most important challenges: talent shortages, innovation bottlenecks and change resistance.”

“I&O leaders work in a monoculture which is fragile. That needs to change for I&O leaders to adapt to unpredictable and changing conditions.”

“To be successful in DEI, you need to adopt three principles. Be curious. Be collaborative. Be courageous.”

“Diversity is the outcome of inclusion and equity. To make your team more diverse, you need to make your team more inclusive. To attract and retain non-traditional talent, you must have equity and inclusion.”

Gartner research shows that culture change is the top challenge for 33% of I&O leaders.

“Since changing the culture of I&O is something that is keeping you up at night, you need to think and act differently. Facilitate psychological safety, and to understand psychological safety you need to understand agile DevOps.”

“Set goals to recognize your team members. Learn how each employee likes to be recognized and better understand your team.”

There are four Must Do’s that I&O leaders should consider when they transform their I&O strategies.”

#1: Embed IT in business as a personal mandate and become the provider of services by delivering business-oriented IT services.

#2: Equip I&O staff for an uncharted future by redefining their roles and expanding responsibilities. 

#3: Prepare to deliver adaptable operations by embracing a service-oriented approach to infrastructure delivery.

#4: Transform the approach for IT by mapping technology trends to business priorities and potential benefits. 

“As an I&O leader, you will be known not by the infrastructure you manage, but by the innovation you deliver.”

“By 2024, 40 to 60% of all IT spending will be in the public cloud.”

“Increasingly, I&O leaders will be asked about cloud governance as a central area of management in the public cloud. Good cloud cost governance begins with good cost governance right at the beginning of your cloud migration phase.”

“There are six common ways cloud migration costs go off the rails.”

• #1 Wrong team: Having untrained staff and inexperienced partners on the team.

• #2 Rushed application assessments: Missing requirements or having wrong migration sequencing.

• #3 Wrong emphasis: Having too much “lift and shift” or too little refactoring,  remodeling and transformation of workloads to make them more cloud natives.

• #4 Poor landing zone design: This includes cloud compute network and storage infrastructure and security integration and management tools. If not done well, it leads to higher operations costs.

• #5 Insufficient appreciation of dependency: If you rush through the application assessment, you are likely not to notice all the ways in which the workloads talk to one another or depend on one another. Not taking into account all those crossed dependencies is likely to cascade migration delays.

• #6 Hidden indirect costs: The cost of retraining, reskilling as well as residual costs should be in I&O leaders’ budgets.