From AvePoint to Apptio…

Excited to announce I’ve made a transition from AvePoint to Apptio as part of the product marketing team there! AvePoint gave me amazing opportunities, as well as more incredible friends and memories than anyone could hope to have as a professional.

The team as well as the warm, welcoming atmosphere at Apptio makes me excited for the future as I look forward to new growth and opportunities!

I am forever grateful for all the talented friends and colleagues who’ve believed in me, encouraged me, and inspired me to get where I am today.

 

Apptio is focused on something I am particularly passionate about- helping IT run as a business. This especially involves IT financial operations and most importantly proving financial outcomes to help organizations see IT as an investment rather than an expense. Apptio is a mature and successful ISV with ISO and FedRAMP creds and is a thought leader in its space.

So far it’s been a great adventure, with a really dynamic and friendly team of passionate professionals. I look forward to a great future there!

Buzzkill Podcast Series

A friend and colleague of mine at AvePoint, Jay Leask, runs a podcast network and has asked me to run a series with him!

We are announcing the launch of our “Buzzkill” Podcast that addresses the less popular topics surrounding Digital Transformation in an effort to surface their importance to organizations that dismiss key aspects of change management, data governance and other topics vital to log term productivity success. We hope you’ll subscribe!

Digital transformation, digital shift

There’s a lot of change happening in the tech industry these days, and the workloads are becoming more advanced.

Established organizations are just beginning to understand that they can invest in IT solutions and see a real ROI not just in their IT budgets, but in overall productivity. This is helping them see the true potential of what technology can bring to the table.

In addition, IT teams are beginning to understand that they can learn from the data and information that exists within their collaboration platforms. They are also learning that there is a lot more critical and sensitive information in those platforms that they previously understood.

Though there will always be a demand for platform migrations, the major shifts for most organizations to cloud based collaboration platforms are for the most part either partially or heavily underway. The reality of today’s collaboration environment is that organizations that claim their files and collaboration are entirely server based are simply unaware of the shadow IT that is going on either semi-officially (a manager or even business unit has paid for licenses of a platform like GSuite or DropBox for their employees) or entirely apart from any official process (small groups of employees communicate and work on projects on unofficial platforms, and only deposit their final product into “official” systems).

We see this every day. Execs and organization leaders are confident that things are going well and that they know what the organization needs, meanwhile the workers on the ground and the mid to low level IT teams laugh when we talk about Shadow IT, rogue processes, and employees not following the rules.

There are still ubiquitous disconnects and huge challenges to change management, accurate data governance and information security and the benefits that structured collaboration and automation can bring to businesses, large and small.

We’ll see over the next few years if all of this improves or gets worse- and I for one will continue to do all I can to help make it improve!

 

I hope that you’ll join me.

CMS Wire Contributor of the Year 2019

So thankful to be honored as a contributor of the year for CMS wire!

This really was an unexpected surprise, and I had fun answering the questions they asked for the post that came with this. 

2019 was a great year for me and for AvePoint, and I hope for the chance to help even more people with digital transformation success this year!

There are a lot of great features that will be rolling into OneDrive and SharePoint, as well as Teams this year, which means there will be a lot that many people will need to learn about and stay on top of.

Personally I’m really looking forward to the improvements that are coming to Graph, to the security and data management features that will be coming to Teams (as well as more potential APIs), and I also know there will be a TON of SPO APIs rolling out this year, which will be really cool for a lot of different reasons.

I think one of the most directly helpful things coming to Office 365 for many people will be the massively improved ability to upload an Excel file directly as a list in SharePoint Online (modern sites too!) and have the full functionality of a list available in a Teams tab without having to add it as a ‘site’ with authentication (almost there now anyway! Yaay!)

Buzz from the MS world is that Dynamics will be big this year too.

I was in to flight sims when I was younger, and I’ve recently started this old habit back up again- I’m definitely looking forward to Microsoft’s Flight Simulator releasing later in 2020!

That’s all for now! Special shout out to the bot that totally wiped my old sites’ WordPress install (.tech domains are expensive anyway), and here’s to hoping that actually attempting to secure this one works for a while!