Tee up and transform
Why navigating a digital transformation is like playing golf. By Shashank Luthra
As I watched Shane Lowry win the British Open a few months ago, I tried to get my younger daughter interested in golf by highlighting its uniqueness. Unlike most other sports, I told her, you don’t just compete against your opponents, but also against the course you are playing on. While the rules of the game never vary, the conditions under which it is played change dramatically with every course.
The lengths and shapes of the fairways, where you ideally want your ball to land, vary. So do the sizes and types of hazards, where you don’t want the ball to land. This is unlike, say tennis, where you may play on a different surface — grass, hard or clay — but the dimensions of the court remain the same.
That might be why golf is the only individual sport where you are allowed to have someone beside you all the time: the caddie. A good caddie can be the difference between winning and losing.
Caddies not only understand the capabilities of the player they work with, but also have immense knowledge about different courses. They often play the role of an on-course coach, giving the player customised advice on which club to use, how to approach a shot and make them aware of risks.
DIGITAL FAIRWAYS AND HAZARDS Being an avid golfer and having worked with many companies on their digital transformation journeys, I see many similarities between the two pursuits.
There are two key outcomes businesses aim to achieve when they look to adopt any technology: it should either help them increase their revenue or reduce costs. These are the digital fairways on which businesses need to land, as they provide a great platform to push for the ultimate prize — profitable growth.
However, digital transformation comes with its own hazards, to continue the golfing analogy. One is cybersecurity.
More people and things getting connected to the internet and to each other has great benefits, but it also vastly increases the opportunity for malicious actors.
If a business suffers a cyber-attack, metaphorically landing in a hazard, it can seriously derail plans, cause reputational loss and leave it trailing the competition.
The ability to perform day after day, and especially under pressure, is critical to success. Top golfers achieve this by hours of practice and by automating large parts of their routine as they go from one competition to another, so they can place their entire focus on winning the tournament.
For businesses, the equivalent is ensuring their IT infrastructure can perform at scale and handle peaks and troughs in demand. This could involve the need to add a large number of users and devices rapidly, deliver content and services seamlessly across devices, or to cater to sudden spikes in internet traffic.
YOUR TECHNOLOGY CADDIE
Having a good technology partner, a reallife version of a golf caddie, is critical to the success of any digital transformation effort.
A good partner not only understands the capabilities of your IT infrastructure, but also has the unique vantage point to benchmark its performance against industry or global peers, and then work with you to improve that standing.
A good partner will also have a good grasp of the challenges your business and industry face, as well as potential growth opportunities. This enables them to give you customised advice and suggest the right solutions and technologies to achieve the desired outcomes.
Most importantly, this knowledge combined with proactive, actionable insights based on data analytics and machine learning means a good partner can identify problems before they occur and work with you to address them.
For example, we are able to analyse customer data against data from almost 3 million connected Cisco devices to assign unique fingerprints and identify highrisk assets, along with crash probabilities and mitigation actions that will lead to reduced downtime.
A good technology partner can also help you achieve top performance under pressure by helping you test continuously and automate key aspects of your IT infrastructure. This can help your business scale rapidly, while reducing security vulnerabilities and improving regulatory compliance.
For example, we recently worked with a large financial institution after it learned that nearly 2,000 of its devices were out of compliance just before a regulatory audit. They estimated the problem would take four months to fix, but Cisco was able to develop a fix and roll it out in two weeks.
However, despite all the preparation and precautions, there are times when things don’t go according to plan. Businesses face multiple risks every day, ranging from human error, a technical glitch or a deliberate cyberbreach. Picture a beautiful 300yard drive hitting the cart path and rolling into a hazard. It happens to the best players in the world.
A good partner, just like a good caddie, can help identify the root cause, the best recovery plan and the tools required to execute the plan to ensure you recover quickly with minimal impact on your business.
Despite the similarities, there is one big difference. In golf, the caddie can only be a guide. The player eventually has to take the shot. In the digital world, the right partner serves not only as a good guide but can also bring expertise, tools and solutions to bear to take the shot on your behalf and get you back on the fairway.
‘‘ A good technology partner can also help you achieve top performance under pressure by helping you test continuously and automate key aspects of your IT infrastructure.