What Do “Business Outcomes” Mean To IT?

by Eyvonne Sharp

IT professionals that want to be taken seriously by their business counterparts are often told to communicate what IT does in terms of “business outcomes.” To an IT pro, the outcomes seem obvious–implementing a technology stack more efficiently saves the company money; faster code deployments with fewer rollbacks deliver applications and new features more quickly; reduced downtime in network operations keeps customers happy and employees productive.

These are worthy endeavors that have a material impact on business performance. The problem is IT pros often discuss these accomplishments in technology-centric language; they’re technical outcomes, instead of business ones.

What’s The Difference Between Business Outcomes And Technical Outcomes?

Outcomes are simply the results of the actions we take. So then, when we discuss business outcomes, we’re talking about the positive results the overall business will achieve if they take a particular action. For a business outcome to be significant, it needs to have a material impact on the organization’s ability to fulfill its purpose (eg. increase the capacity of a production facility) or have a material impact in the company’s bottom line (eg. increasing profit by unlocking new revenue streams). As a general rule, you know you’re focusing on a true business outcome when the results are significant enough to be interesting to the company’s board of directors.

If your company is not focused on delivering technology, it’s likely that line of business leaders are not deeply concerned about improving IT operations. It’s not that IT operations don’t matter, it’s that business leaders assume IT departments will operate well and don’t involve themselves in the details. They’re not likely to invest “their” budget to help IT teams perform better. If, however, you can improve productivity per employee, increase product output, and demonstrate your ability to make the business better, leaders will take notice. You’ll have to find a way to discuss how your efforts will meaningfully affect them.

How Do We Begin To Focus More On Business Outcomes?

First, don’t assume business people are stupid and that business language is beneath a technologist. This is a toxic and self-destructive attitude. Yes, sometimes business jargon seems risible, but at the end of the day the business is there to produce material and measurable outcomes. And IT is part of that process.

Second, build strong cross-functional relationships. Get to know people throughout your organization and understand their challenges. IT teams can be myopic when it comes to their own issues, but there are whole other universes of problems in different areas of our companies. Get curious and understand what they are.

Remember, key decisions are made by people, not algorithms. Those people do not make decisions in a vacuum. Their decisions are made by an amalgam of personal and professional motivations, their sense of personal and organizational risk, and their level of trust in others. The more you are aware of these variables, the more informed your solutions will be.

Third, understand your business. If your company is publicly traded, listen to earnings calls. Understand the metrics that are being used to manage the company. If you hear terms you don’t understand, look them up–Google is your friend. Pay attention to quarterly and annual organizational goals. Understand the current key focus, not from a mere technology perspective, but for the overall organization.

Fourth, use the language of business to frame what needs to be done to improve your overarching technology landscape. This task is an art as well as a science. As a technologist, you must understand the complexities of your technology landscape, the current gaps that exist alongside the risks associated with those gaps. You need to grasp emerging technology well enough to determine if it’s applicable to your business.

At the same time, you must understand what the business wants to accomplish and the problems your organization (not merely your department) are trying to solve. Then, you must marry these two domains in a way that earns respect from both sets of constituencies, demonstrates you can deliver, and supports your organization’s technical capability.

Fifth, you can’t do this alone. Very few people have the breadth of skills to understand business and technology deeply while at the same time being able to weave a story, create a business case, and convince all the necessary stakeholders of a course of action. Leverage the relationships we discussed earlier. Find ways to help people with their problems. Enlist help. If someone speaks well, ask them to help craft presentations and messaging. Reach out to a peer who deeply understands a particular technical domain and get their feedback.

I often hear technologists dismiss the capabilities of those who speak in business terms. At best, this view is shortsighted. The work of applying individual technologies to business outcomes is critical to the overall success of the organization and is the cornerstone of an effective technical team.

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Eyvonne Sharp is an customer engineer focused on enterprise infrastructure and business-led transformation.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

How to Stop Feeding AWS’s AI With Your Data - Last Week In AWS
While AWS isn’t sticking its nose in your S3 buckets to get data to train AI models, Corey Quinn notes that the cloud giant is training some of its AI models on your use of certain AWS services, including Amazon CodeGuru Profiler, Amazon CodeWhisperer Individual, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition, and several others. You can opt out, but AWS doesn’t make it easy. Corey describes the various hoops you have to jump through, and shares a JSON snippet you can use to set the policy. There’s other things to be aware of as well, which he describes in the post. - Drew 

SPCOR Exam Experience by Nick Russo - Lost In Transit
Nick Russo writes a guest post on Daniel Dib’s blog about his thoughts on the “Implementing and Operating Cisco Service Provider Network Core Technologies” (SPCOR) exam. Nick passed on the first attempt, but it sounds like it was a very difficult exam. Nick offers his opinions on the test and some suggestions to help others get through it, as well as links to study resources. - Drew

Trip Report – ThreatModCon and OWASP Global AppSec 2023 - SheHacksPurple
Tanya Janca reports on two conferences she recently attended. ThreatModCon is dedicated to threat modeling, and OWASP covers application security. Tanya explains the value proposition of each event, interesting sessions she attended, talks she gave, and folks she met. If these conferences are on your radar, this post could help you decide on attending the next ones. - Drew

AI Is Making Data Cost Too Much - The Networking Nerd
TAll that data you’ve got sitting around in your enterprise might be a goldmine if you could run it through an AI and see what kind of insights come out. The problem, as Tom Hollingsworth notes, is the expense of either building or buying the AI infrastructure to churn on your data.

He writes “All those hopes of making tons of money from your AI insights are going to evaporate in a pile of cloud bills. The operations costs of keeping that data are now more than minimal. If you want to have good data to operate on you’re going to need to keep it. And if you can’t keep it locally in your organization you’re going to have to pay someone to keep it for you. That means writing big checks to the cloud providers…” Someone might be making money on AI, but it probably won’t be you. - Drew 

Internet resilience, IPv4 addresses and Internet history - Networking Notes 
This post collects a variety of interesting links on multiple topics, including a recent study on Internet resiliency in a disaster, a look at whether we’ve reached a price plateau on IPv4 addresses, some networking history, and more. It’s a good grab bag. Check it out! - Drew 

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TECH NEWS 📣

Synthetic Diamonds and Ultrapure Glass May Make The Coolest, Fastest CPUs Yet  - Tom’s Hardware
This article looks at early research on using synthetic diamond wafers replacing silicon wafers. The word “may” is doing a lot of work here since the post points out that undisclosed, private testing is not a lot of progress. Intel is working on ultra pure glass as an alternative which might be more practical. Better thermal performance means larger chips but switching manufacturing away from silicon is a very big deal. But there is lots of free money from governments right for new chip factories - Greg 

Cisco Releases Security Advisories for Multiple Products - CISA 
The US government is taking notice of serious vulnerabilities in Cisco security products. Once again it’s Firepower and ASA software that continue to have serious security failures. - Greg

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

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RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Open-Source BGP Configuration Labs
Ivan Pepelnjak has made a set of BGP labs freely available. You’ll have to acquire and set up the virtual environment to run the labs (such as netlabs or Virtualbox) and get virtual instances of a NOS, but then you’ve got a whole series of exercises you can run to learn BGP essentials. - Drew 

Command Line Interface Guidelines
I know a bad CLI when I see it but I couldn’t tell you what makes it bad. This “open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day”  might help you with more intelligent criticism when its needed. In particular, I’m reading this and thinking how different NOS CLIs would be if usability was a key issue. Legacy thinking is built-in to network operating systems - Greg 

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Real World Quantum Network Deployments - Aliro Quantum
Quantum Networking has been developing for about twenty years and it might be ready for the mainstream. First, quantum computing has reached a point where most companies could access it from a provider and a few early adopters are already building quantum into their business plans. This also means that existing cryptography is threatened in various ways. As best I can understand it, quantum networking allows for secure key distribution for quantum resistant key distribution. Aliro Quantum has non-paywalled paper that I found to be a useful primer and I think you should read it. - Greg 

Introducing Falcon: a reliable low-latency hardware transport - Google Cloud Blog 
Google Falcon is a open-sourced protocol stack for DPUs to perform hardware-assisted transport. The promise is a consistent protocol mapping for RDMA, NVMe, and unknown future protocols to consume a hardware-accelerated path off the server. This would dramatically simplify the adoption path for existing software and encourage the adoption of DPU cards in servers. Once in place we should see more upper layer protocols emerge for other functions. Today Falcon works on ‘Intel IPU’ DPUs but is expected to extend to other DPU hardware in the near future. We have missed another chance to put Ethernet into the history books. - Greg

ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA Sets New Industry Standard for Simple, Secure Network Access - Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks has announced a new secure access offering called Universal Zero Trust Network Access, or Universal ZTNA. Like other ZTNA offerings it aims to combine secure connectivity via encrypted transport while also enforcing fine-grained access control based on user, role, device, and location. Components include a client agent for secure remote access and device posture checks, but it can also be used in the campus. There’s a clientless option for IoT devices. The policy repository and identity checks are cloud-based, using Extreme’s ExtremeCloud service. It also offers RADIUS as a service.  It integrates with identity providers including Azure AD and Google Workspace so you don’t have to build out a separate identity store. - Drew

Gluware, the Industry's Only Out-of-the-Box Network Hyperautomation Solution, Introduces Innovative Features and Flexibility to Accelerate Deployment and Digital Transformation - Gluware
Gluware, which makes network automation software, has announced version 5.2 of its platform, which includes almost forty new features. Chief among them, according to the press release, are enhancements to its config drift detection and audit capabilities, including the ability to customize config drift monitoring to your own environment. - Drew

Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a personal computer - Apple 
In less than one year Apple has iterated its M-series CPUs to M3. The M3 is 15% faster than M2 and 30% faster than M1. Compare this with Intel and AMD, which typically deliver about 10% improvement every two years. In addition, the Apple M3 includes AI accelerator improvements and GPU improvements but also improvements in the DRAM memory performance. I would argue this demonstrates that serious investment in ASIC design delivers dramatic results when you aren’t interested in profit maximization and marketing. Custom silicon is not dead - Greg

OpenAI Holds First Developer Conference: What It Means For Consumer Digital Experiences - Forrester 
OpenAI held an event and this is a reasonable summary of what was announced and what it means. ChatGPT has made a huge impact and it's stunning to remember that it’s been less than a year since they opened up the service. - Greg 

LAST LAUGH 😆

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