Digital Innovation & Transformation Interview with Jos Lieben about the cloud: OneDrive On Demand, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Pilots.

1. Interview with Jos Lieben
- A change to the cloud -
Translating Digital Transformation

2. Freerk Terpstra
Business consultant at Rapid Circle
Lots of developments at Microsoft
Office 365, Dynamics and Azure are rapidly providing us
with new products and functionality
How will this effect organizations, end users and ICT
departments?
Today I talk with Jos Lieben. Jos, can you introduce
yourself?

3. Jos Lieben
Work for OGD
Cloud architect
Primarily work with Microsoft products and blog
He blogs about situations where business requirements by
a company are not fully met with platforms such as Azure
or Office 365.

4. Map Onedrive locations to a drive letters
Work anywhere, anytime, any place
Citrix
With Onedrive for Business people still need to have access to
their personal files. My script is a solution for that.
Onedrivemapper
“A very famous example would of course be
Onedrivemapper”

5. Microsoft is coming with an update of their
OneDrive sync client. Do you think that will
solve their problem?
I was very hopeful that I would make my script obsolete. It was also a lot of
work to maintain it and it doesn’t pay of course. It is a free script. But as of
now, the solution they are going to implement, which is OneDrive files on
demand, is only for Windows 10. My script is mainly used on Citrix and remote
desktop farms.

6. For this time, no, it’s only for Windows 10. But I’ve started a user voice threat on this, suggesting that Microsoft
should expand this functionality to all other OS’es as well. It’s on the front page now, but it needs a lot more votes.
So, if you want to vote, do so!
For end user with ‘bring your own device’, it’s a solution,
for Citrix environment it is not; in the beginning.

7. Excited about Satya Nadella’s speech on artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is going to cost jobs
But is also going to create jobs
It is going to make our life a lot better
It will make my life easier and your life easier
Especially combined with virtual reality or augmented reality!
INNOVATIONS
What other innovations with Microsoft are you the
most excited about?

8. Do you have a view of how that would look
like? What artificial intelligence can do for
us?
Well, especially if you combine it with virtual reality or augmented reality,
imagine for example Google glasses, or a newer and more advanced version
of that. It would see what you see, it would see what you are doing. And
artificial intelligence could for example, warn you for danger, or select the best
path or help you choose the right products. Or maybe warn you that you
shouldn’t buy that candy bar, it could be almost anything, it could assist a
doctor in an operation surgery from across the globe. It could help somebody
who is disabled. Make a trip through the Grand Canyon.

9. And do you have experience already, at
customers, with working with artificial
intelligence, or virtual reality?
None. I only play computer games on virtual reality, that is really awesome.
It’s is still a very early stage thing.
I think the technology needs to be improved, it needs to be miniaturized. Right
now, the virtual reality equipment, are way too big and the quality isn’t good
enough yet, it is too slow. It is just way too expensive, but I think the Microsoft
solution is three thousand dollar, for just the glasses.

10. So we need to create a business case for
that?
Maybe not, it depends a little on the business of course. I can’t easily think of
any examples right now, that would justify a three thousand dollar glasses,
which will probably break within a year. But I’m sure there are many, there
should be many.

11. I’m also curious about the push that Microsoft is going to make this year
and next year on Dynamics 365. That’s another cloud service. That is
not so much a technical solution, it is much more a business solution.
And as IT partners, we usually help our customers implement an
infrastructure. A backbone for, for example, mail, internet, filesharing,
exposing, business applications to users in a user friendly way. But
Dynamics, it goes far deeper in to a customer’s actual processes in
their sales, their marketing. And if you as an IT company help your
customer implement Dynamics, you’ll become a much more invested
partner. You have to get to know them much better.
Any other innovations that
you’re really excited about?

12. Oh yes, absolutely. And this year it is going to be fifty euro per user
package and you are going to have the whole deal, everything that is
included in Dynamics and CRM. All in the cloud service, the cloud is
offering.
Do you think there are
coming big updates, for
CRM Dynamics?

13. I think, if you are working with the cloud, you have to be very resistant
to change, because it changes all the time. And that means, your
solutions in that cloud, especially if you customize something, through
scripting for example, or any other form of automation, or using APIs,
you have to really maintain those, because if you don’t follow blogs and
other news feeds by which vendor you are working with, your solution
can brake whenever there is an update. So you really have to stay on
top of things and I think that is also a shift in what we as IT consultants
have to do.
As we are an IT consulting company, we are that intermediate stage, so
basically we do that for our customers.
What is your most valuable
lesson you’ve learned with
working with the cloud?

14. They don’t always listen. And for them it is new as well. I think it is our
job to make them listen. Or to convince them, basically. And we are the
subject matter experts, so in a way, we think that we know what is best
for them. And our customers are sometimes afraid of the cloud, or it is
new for them and it is our job to convince them of all the benefits they
will have if they transition.
Do they always listen? Or
do they need to learn the
new dynamic of cloud?

15. Basically testing, a lot of reading and trying and toying with all the new
features that come out all the time. I have a lab, and anytime there is
something new that Microsoft blows about or in the first release
program I try it out and I try out every component of it, just because I’m
kind of crazy about technology in general. So that’s basically my play
time.
When Microsoft comes up with
new products where you don’t
know the exact impact for an
organization. How do you cope
with that?

16. Yes. Many customers are a little itchy about the cloud, they have
doubts. But they do see everyone else moving to the cloud. And they
can see, they can easily make that business case, they see that it’s
cheaper. And it offers them a lot more value for their money. And by
doing a pilot, you can put a good subject matter expert at the customer
site, have them really listen to what the customer does and needs and
in a very lean way, you can very easily show them what the cloud
means for them, what it can do for them. Because almost every cloud
service can be implemented partially in hybrid mode, for example.
Besides your normal, traditional IT.
I reckon that you use pilots
a lot, with customers?

17. They will of course see the difference because it is a new system, it is a
different system. The cloud is different from what they’re used to. But I
think it is our responsibility and a bit of our technical expertise to make
that transition smooth, that the user doesn’t have to choose between
the old and the new. We should guide them in that. And training is also
extremely important, that is often forgotten or ignored. It is at least as
important as the solution itself.
Do you integrate it that
thoroughly that they don’t see
the difference when they are in
a pilot?

18. Yes, the last two organizations I was working with. Cordate, which is a
NGO, and Oxfam Novib, which is also a NGO. They both also went with
the pilot approach and they expanded the pilot like an oil stain over the
organization.
It was the first time, that way. They could see how well it could fit their
business and improve. Every time they added a group, that group
would be trained and then immediately using their new environment.
That worked extremely well.
Do you have examples of
organizations that did that
quite well, delivering a pilot
and also a lot of training?

19. In the after care part, where you encounter all the difficulties. Because
your implementation, if you look at it from a technical view, the
implementation will be fine, but afterwards you will notice the users
aren’t fully adapting your new platform. For example, they’ll sneakily be
using USB-sticks, or Dropbox, instead of OneDrive. And somehow, you
have to figure out where that went wrong and what other alternatives
they’re using. And it will be far more expensive and a lot more work to
get them to fully adopt the new system and to be satisfied with it as
well, because in the end it is all about user experience and user
satisfaction.
Are there also organizations
that say “I don’t want that
much of training, or I don’t
want a pilot”?

20. I think security and automation. The security should be obvious with the
recent news on, what is it called, Wanna Cry and all these other types
of ransomware. Especially we as an IT company have to be our
customers guardian against these kinds of dangers. And the customer
has to realize that these dangers exist of course. And automation is
really important, because capable IT workers, are scarce. There are not
enough of them. Those that are there, want to do fun work. They want
to do exciting things, they want to do new things. They don’t want to do
the same task over and over and over again. So I really believe that if
you can’t automate something, then there is something wrong with your
process. You really have to focus on automating all of the common
tasks in your organization.
What do you think are the
most important development
and focus areas the coming
period in your area?

21. It has it’s challenges. But most of the time IT companies or customers
have systems like Topdesk or service management tools that have
registered what they do. What the most common incidents are, what
the most common changes are. And from there you can easily track
back, go to those, to people that do those changes or that request
them. What do they need and what the variables are. And you can
automate those.
Is it difficult to gather all of
those information? Processes
and automate them.

22. I’ve learned that business requirements never map perfectly on
standard solutions or standardized platforms, such as Office 365 or
Azure. Mainly 90/95% you can map, because those platforms are huge,
so extensive. But that final 10%, those final requirements, that the
standard platform can’t meet, that’s where it’s fun for us as consultants,
that’s where we get to script a solution like OneDrive mapper or any
other tool. That’s where we make the difference. So, in the end if you
have a good consultant and you have a customer who knows there
processes well, or helps you get to know them well. I think you can
almost always map 100% of business requirements on to cloud
platforms.
What are your learnings about
translating business
requirements and challenges
in to technical solutions?

23. The more you modify, the more you customize, the more you have to
maintain.
The rate of change is extremely high. But on the other hand I’ve not
noticed any issues regarding this before. Because even if you
customize things, they are customized based on documents at APIs.
Those are also maintained.
And you try to stay as close to
the bases as possible to the
end solution?

24. I think almost every implementation is one where you learn a lot, also
because of a kind of boredom with what I already know. I like to pick
those things that I don’t know about yet. But maybe one of the first
lessons I learned was at a big power company. They were transitioning
to a new OS update. And their IT staff was very resistant to that
change. They were very stubborn. And one of the first things I learned
there as a student was that if you resist change, you don’t have a place
in IT. Because they got fired two months later.
They were stubborn. They didn’t want change and literally said things
like ‘This is how we always do it’.
At last, do you have an
interesting story about
implementation, project or
workshop where you learned a
lot about ICT or
implementation?

25. “Like everything in the world, if you don’t want to change then it’s very difficult to survive. And especially in IT, it is
very important that you enjoy change and that you see it as a puzzle and a challenge.”
Change

26. Most of the time you can cope with it by showing them. First listening to
them and understanding why they are afraid of this change and then
showing them that it is really not that bad. In almost every situation,
every improvement is better. And they just don’t know it yet and if you
help them figure that out, they will be very happy. But they are afraid for
their current job.
Do you, at current customers,
also sometimes have these
kinds of IT employees, that are
stubborn and don’t want to go
along?

27. Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed
the conversation.

28. Next time I’m interviewing
Jasper Oosterveld about
innovation, his work and
collaboration with Office
365.