Apex talks to Dane Bamburry, Director of Enterprise & Solutions Architecture at Cox Enterprises. Dane is a technology leader with over 23 years of experience within the IT industry. Together let’s dive into organizational priorities and technological trends today and tomorrow in the post COVID era.
Q: What are the current data trends and how will it impact your organization?
A: Current data trends in the ongoing COVID-workplace are focused on employee centric data. This includes analyzing the productivity of remote vs. on-premise work efforts, employee engagement via collaboration tools/technology and cybersecurity data. From a productivity perspective, organizations are investigating how intelligent automation can augment the productivity of an organization while ensuring employees are still contributing. Remote work has introduced new metrics around increased workforce productivity as well as measuring employee burnout due to always being connected. Employee data trends will also focus on if/when organizations return to the office and the shift in productivity. Collaboration and communication data trends have significantly increased over the past 18 months. Metrics such as total number of video calls vs. audio calls and the impact it has on an organization’s workforce are becoming standard trends that will need to be tracked even after returning to the office. Data trends around cybersecurity have significantly increased given the rise in cyber-attacks, especially on the remote workforce. Organizations will need to remain focused especially as some organizations will implement true hybrid working models where a percentage of the workforce will remain at home while the rest return to the office.
Q: What are your top data priorities: business growth, data security/privacy, legal/regulatory concerns, expense reduction…?
A: Top data priorities include data security/privacy, application portfolio management and employee engagement from a collaboration/communication perspective. Data security is an obvious one as organizations have to be more diligent in the proactive cybersecurity strategy. From an application portfolio management perspective, we need to understand our application ecosystem given the significant shift to cloud technology solutions to better management costs and duplication of capabilities across the IT landscape. Communication and collaboration will be more associated with productivity in a post COVID workplace than we have ever seen at any point in time, so it is a top priority to make sure we understand it and utilize the analysis effectively.
Q: Did you have specific projects or initiatives that have been shelved due to COVID-19 and current realities?
A: Yes, we shelved some very specific initiatives due to COVID-19. This was a collective effort to re-prioritize what is most important to keeping the lights on (KTLO) and what supporting projects are needed to transition to a remote working environment. As we approach the future, we will have to balance re-introducing shelved initiatives with new ones that are supporting our go-forward strategy. It will require a more fine-tuned alignment of organizational and technology strategies than ever before.
Q: What advice would you give an early stage CIO or CDO joining an enterprise organization?
A: Build a technology strategy with the business in the room contributing all the way. The COVID-19 disruption has taught technology leaders a very important lesson in that when you are significantly out of sync with the business, major disruptions such as a pandemic will quickly expose your flaws and unpreparedness.
Q: Have you found new vendors for your organizations that are now needed in this time of COVID-19 and remote working?
A: Yes, but in some cases, it is not about finding new vendors, it is about leveraging the full suite of capabilities of existing vendors where you did not see the need pre-pandemic. This has driven home the message of defining business capabilities not only for the current state but also for the future state. The future state may be short or long term, but they still need to be defined. In the past, organizations would be very concerned about disaster recovery as a future state business capability, but the focus was more on the technology and not so much on the workforce. Going forward, business capabilities will have to be defined in areas, which will further create a need for new vendors. A simple example of this is mail delivery, most organizations did not have a plan to get physical mail to a remote workforce during the pandemic, so they quickly came up with a makeshift solution to address this.
Dane Bamburry – Director, Enterprise & Solutions Architecture at Cox Enterprises
Dane Bamburry is a technology leader with over 23 years of experience within the IT industry. In his current role, Dane currently serves as the Director of Enterprise & Solutions Architecture at Cox Enterprises Inc. His experience includes digital strategy, technology transformation, software integration, enterprise architecture, portfolio & program management, and identity & access management. He has served as the technical lead on various multi-million dollar transformational technology projects, including Financial, ERP, Communication & Collaboration solutions. He is a past recipient of the iCMG Enterprise & IT Architecture Excellence Award for Mergers & Acquisitions. He is also a contributing writer to DMI: Review, a quarterly publication by the Design Management Institute with the article titled “Drones: The Future of Product Delivery.” He also authored an article in the upcoming book “97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know: Practical and Approachable Advice from the Experts”
Bamburry is a strong advocate for mentoring and developing young minds. He is a member of the CIS Advisory Board for Georgia State University. He is a past board member of the non-profit organization YES! Atlanta, which is an organization focused on providing at-risk teenagers an opportunity to experience personal success. He has mentored students at both Georgia State University and Chamblee Charter High School. When not mentoring students, he is mentoring a wide range of professionals across multiple industries. He was featured in CIO.com’s article “Solving IT’s looming leadership crisis,” which discusses how mentorship can help develop the next generation of technology leaders. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Directors of ITSMF, which increases the representation of black professionals at senior levels in technology.
Bamburry graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems and a concentration in Industrial Design from the University of Notre Dame. He also holds an MBA with a focus in Organizational Leadership from Ashford University’s Forbes School of Business & Technology.
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