IT that is holding back your growth. Time for a change!: Martin Srb (#188)
- Martin Hurych
- před 4 dny
- Minut čtení: 23
How IT can either make or break your company's growth. When is the right time to change?
In a world of rapidly evolving technology, it is inevitable for businesses to face IT challenges. But the problem arises when IT stops being a tool for growth and starts being a hindrance. How do you know the right moment when change pays off and when it's better to continue with what you have? And what does digital transformation entail that will really deliver results? Today's interview with Martin Srb, founder and CEO of B-Tree Consulting.
Martin has long been involved in the digital transformation of businesses and has a clear approach to helping companies transform their IT infrastructure to support their growth. Whether it's changing ERP systems, introducing automation, or moving to modern technology - change in IT is certainly not easy and is often met with resistance. In this episode, Martin shows you how to make digital transformation not just another expense, but an investment that will actually deliver value.
In this episode you will hear:
The interview with Martin is full of concrete advice, tips and experience to help you the digital transformation. You'll gain insight into how IT can really support your business and how to avoid common mistakes when implementing new systems.
For years, Martin has been helping companies like yours transform their IT systems to keep up with modern market demands. Whether you're a small business or a larger company.
Listen to the full episode to learn how to turn your IT into a powerful tool for growth and leave your competitors far behind
"Think carefully about why you want digital transformation. Set that in stone and don't run away from it."
Martin Srb | Founder @ B-Tree Consulting Services s.r.o
IT that is holding back your growth. Time for a change!
( transcript)
Who is Martin Srb
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before I introduce today's guest, I have a traditional request. If you want to have a constant flow of news from the world of B2B strategy, business, innovation and working with people, consider adding your email to the list of over 1,300 existing emails from owners, CEOs of engineering, technology and manufacturing companies. It would make me happy and you wouldn't miss a thing. Today, I'm here to talk with my guest about how IT should work so it doesn't hinder your company's growth. For this topic, I've invited Martin Srba, hello.
Martin Srb
Hello, Martin.
Who would he have lunch with?
Martin Hurych
Martin is the founder and CEO of B-Tree Consulting. You said in the preparation that you are a technology enthusiast, you are also a technology enthusiast, you have analyzed a lot of things, a little less he passed. What technical or technological figure in history or currently would be worth your to have lunch with?
Martin Srb
I wouldn't mind having lunch with someone, I like to talk to people and be inspired. It may be a cliché, but I would happily have lunch with Steve Jobs, he's quite an interesting business and technology figure. I'd have with Steve Wozniak as well, we'd probably get on a bit better there.
Martin Hurych
I'm not an Apple guy, so I follow it from a long way off, but then Steve Wozniak wasn't of an apologist. Is that right?
Martin Srb
The history was complicated. We're looking at it now from the position of what it looks like today. I was interested in the beginning, which was awfully nice, because the guys in the garage built that first Apple, soldered it on that board, put it in that wooden box, and built that company from there. That's what's interesting about it, and I'd like to ask them about what it was like back then, how they went about it and what they hoped for it and how they thought it would turn out.
Is Martin starting a business in the garage?
Martin Hurych
You have been on the market for a short time, you are actually a completely new project, a new company. You're starting out in a garage eating pizza?
Martin Srb
It's not quite a garage, and I don't think it's quite so hot with the pizzas, but it's basically there.
What does B-Tree Consulting do?
Martin Hurych
What is B-Tree Consulting?
Martin Srb
B-Tree Consulting is a consulting firm that I started with a former colleague of mine, and we're trying to help companies do something called digital transformation, even though digital transformation doesn't exactly have a good name. It's a horrible buzzword and a lot of people have cut their teeth on it in a horrible way, so we're going to try and roll it out here as we do.
How to choose a partner for digital transformation?
Martin Hurych
That's why you're here. I'm seeing companies from the size of Etnetera to the people who do automation at Mac doing digital transformation today, and they all say they're doing digital transformation of companies. When I meet the owners and directors of my bubble, I often hear that these people are not IT specialists and they don't know who to choose. Everyone here tells them something different, the figures offered range from tens of thousands to tens of millions. What would you tell them?
Martin Srb
We take it from that end, we try to understand what they want to achieve and where they are today, and because we are techies, we go at it in a structured way. We use something called enterprise architecture, we describe that company from top to bottom, we describe what business capability that company has, what they deliver and what they use to make it work and what processes are hidden in those capability. We'll find out what roles are there, how that ties to some data, how that then ties to applications and to specific software that's used that company. That creates a model and visualizes where that company is today and suddenly we have a tool to talk about. It's no longer that it's terribly big and complex and if we replace it, it's all going to break. We can now say specifically that when we talk about something, it's this box and it reaches into these processes. That's the beginning of it, which I'm not saying is going to downright help the founders because they don't even fully understand this. They want to tell them what to do, what it's going to get them and how much it's going to cost them. This is an awfully hard question to get to, it takes a long time, and those funders can get impatient. What we are bringing to them is a structured process to get to that question.
The second step that we do is that once we have the model, then we can talk specifically about the requirements that we can map into the model. By doing that, we ensure that we have some 100% coverage of the requirements for new systems. Again, it sounds terribly technical, I understand it's not quite digestible for those founders, we're learning to talk about it, we're learning to sell it. But it's not the purpose of this digital transformation to replace one system with another system and assume that the new system will do exactly what the old did. That wouldn't help anything, we would help ourselves technologically, but we wouldn't move anywhere. We are looking for a way to describe what they have today, but in a vocabulary that is not that someone in the finance department fills out an Excel template, saves it on a shared the disk, and the lady from accounting will read it. We say somebody in the sales department has a need here and there and that's some user story. When we have the model, we go after those individual components of that model and we map those user stories to that.
We map the user stories to that model to create that coverage and those user stories are no longer implementation specific, but it's the need. Once we have a list of those needs, then we can go to that market with that and tell the market what they think about it, how they would implement it, and we do that second part of it. That's organizing some sort of tender process and we have the material that we can compare those bids over. We're very good at explaining to those companies that I can give the bid to what we need, why we need it and in what context we need it. At the same time, when we get 5 bids, we are very good at comparing them because we see that this one covers 80%, this one covers 70%, and that's where they are asked to explain how it covers it and if it doesn't cover it, how they think we should cover it. We can pull quite a bit of knowledge out of that market about how that market is thinking about this thing today because that market is evolving, those tools are new and those companies are not keeping up. Even we as consultants can't keep track of everything, I don't know all the ERPs. I don't have pricing in mind, I don't think there's even one SAP consultant who knows all of SAP pricing. That RFP is the tool that we use to give that answer to what I'm going to get and for how much.
When is the right time for digital transformation?
Martin Hurych
I have to say that you have a terribly thankless job, because as soon as you started, I heard things like enterprise architecture, processes, analysis. Those are almost dirty words in my bubble because everyone is terrified of them. Then I was intrigued there that if you go through this hell, there's something called change management, because heaven forbid people are going to learn something new. Let's take it up to that managerial level. At what point should I stop tolerating what I have in the company and should I think about all these unpopular words because without them, it's not going to go on? When is there some tipping point or some company behavior where what I've installed over the last 10, 5 years and I'm afraid to touch it is really holding me back and I need to take that step forward that you're going to take with me?
Martin Srb
That point is when it really starts to bother me, because as long as it doesn't bother me, as long as it doesn't hold me back, it's such a terribly painful and difficult process that there's no point in doing it. It costs money, it consumes my people's time, because we have to talk to the heads of those departments and document what they're doing, then do reviews with them and so on. That means that I have to have some real pain to it, and that pain might be that I'm expanding abroad and I have an old ERP system that won't work in foreign markets anymore because maybe it doesn't have English localization. There may be some new thing that comes out in the market that causes me to not be competitive, it has to be a major thing. I that I want to be prepared for the future, that now it's kind of brewing and I want to be prepared to then adapt some new technology.
How not to fight with the CTO or CIO?
Martin Hurych
When I talk to guys who are remotely similar to you and offer some IT services, maybe in manufacturing or in services, across that segment I hear the owner want and tell their CEO to pick something. You can't go through him a lot of times because Franta knows best, Franta logically defends what he has built there up to that point. Suggest a hack to get past Franta or how to make Franta your friend.
Martin Srb
It's difficult, our approach is that we put the arguments on the table, we try to visualise what is there. If the discussion is somehow irrational, that we don't understand it, it's terribly big and dangerous, it's going to be terribly expensive, then we try to put the facts on the table. We get those facts from the analysis and then from the tenders because then we have specific processes, specific implementations, we know what it costs. We are able to deliver that competitive bid through that tender and we are able to ask for that reimplementation in that bid. By being able to supply enough detail to make sure that the potential contractor doesn't get lost in that, we believe we can put those numbers together, bring them in with some accuracy, and then rationalize that discussion.
Martin Hurych
Most of the time, when Franta lets you go through the analysis, he'll lighten up because he understands that you can really help him. How can you do the analysis with minimal help from this Francis?
Martin Srb
It's almost impossible. If there's such a conflict in that company that, say, the CIO is already at a stage where he's going to try to boycott that activity, we can try all we want, but we probably won't get past it.
Martin Hurych
So is it better to put your feet on your shoulders and try the next door?
Martin Srb
I don't think the majority of people are that keen to boycott it. They're worried that the detail won't get captured and that no one else but them will see the complexity. But when they understand that we can bring that complexity to the table, we bring their argument to the table. It's not that we're digging for business to somehow push the CIO somewhere, but we
we're balancing the discussion. If he takes the positive end of it, I think it's good for him that we're helping him.
Where is the disconnect between the business and the CTO/CIO?
Martin Hurych
Where is the biggest spark between business and IT at this stage?
Martin Srb
I think it sparks until they don't speak the right language, until they understand each other. It's understandable because business sees visions, business sees needs and numbers and IT sees completely different problems. They see the complexity, they see that the thing has to be stable because if it doesn't work tomorrow and it doesn't work for half a day, of course the business won't be happy. Every change is a disruption to the stability of that IT solution and somehow they also guard their own capacity because in those non-technology companies, IT tends to be quite under-built. They have maybe 3 people and they run everything on that and they do little miracles for the business and now they feel that the business is ungrateful, that they don't see those miracles. That means that even in that discussion, when they then change the IT in some way, it's on the table that maybe the number of people in that IT is going to change.
How do I know that the digitalisation is progressing as planned?
Martin Hurych
When I embark on a digital transformation with you, what should I watch out for, or how will I know that I'm on the right for me as an owner or even a CIO, that I'm not going anywhere? Now, I don't mean this purely project-wise. Are there any parameters somewhere that I should be watching to know that I'm keeping that train on the right tracks to the right destination? Because what I'm watching in my bubble is that it's not a problem to spend the crown, the problem is to spend the crown and feel like I'm spending it in the right place with the fastest return. So if I believe you, I let you into the company, we agree on some sort of schedule, how do I check that it's not swelling too much under my hands, or on the other hand it's not going completely sideways? How am I supposed to supervise or manage that in any way from the highest position?
Martin Srb
This is about what kind of people I delegate this to as CEO. Either I have to be involved myself as CEO and make sure that I don't get away from that vision, or I have to have people on my team that I delegate it to who understand the vision and can keep an eye on that vision. The whole change should be driven by that need and that vision.
If it gets out of the way, it may that a technological upgrade is being made, which is not a bad thing, but it will not have the effect that is expected. Replacing one ERP with another ERP that is technologically better and has nicer screens is fine, it will probably be more expensive and cause a lot of costs, but I need the benefits there.
What is a technology upgrade and when is it a real transformation?
Martin Hurych
This is a great moment. When do I, as a semi-amateur, become a technological exchange and when is it a real transformation? I don't a lot of these trade-offs of something for something, because I don't see enough of that anymore, and I don't feel like there's that much process change in these companies. A typical example that I hear a lot is that it's slow, it's not enough anymore, but at that moment we need to think about processes. But the typical reaction is that we need something faster, something cooler, something that's good enough, but nobody thinks about the fact that maybe the company is doing it wrong.
Martin Srb
These are two things that need to be addressed in some way, but they are not necessarily connected. I may be in a situation where it doesn't work for me because it's already out of date and there are no hacks that can fix it in some way. Alternatively, the vendor of that solution no longer supports that solution and says they won't make any more fixes to it and won't develop it further. There, even if I'm not doing a transformation in the sense of changing the company, I'm forced to do the upgrade. If I'm not going along the lines of what I have today, it's a simple upgrade and I need to do a replacement, then I'm in a very similar situation and there's that opportunity to make some other changes to it, but I don't necessarily see those changes. At that point, what we can do is if 're already changing it, we can what the market looks like and they can be open to AI implementations in the future. We can add in some technology requirements that will prepare that company for how it should be operating for maybe the next 5 years. That's one view.
The second one is the transformative one in terms of the business and the consultant there can't figure it out for them. They are the visionaries, the consultant can then come up with ideas on how to implement those things, but it won't work without their vision. They are the ones who want to create a new department to support a particular process because another department is overloaded and this department needs some more efficient tools to do that. That's the thing that the business has to come up with, we're not going to come up with that for them.
What will B-Tree Consulting make of it?
Martin Hurych
So do I understand correctly that B-Tree Consulting ends at the point of selection, or do you move into implementation after that?
Martin Srb
We offer a project and program management service, so we can orchestrate the execution afterwards. In addition to that, once we have described the processes and we understand how the company works, because we absorb a huge amount of know-how about how the company is built, we also try to recommend some implementations of some AI automation.
How to work with people's expectations?
Martin Hurych
We'll get to AI automata for sure, I'm interested in one thing I excelled at at the moment. At the point when everything was being thought up and written into blueprints, we were all coming up with great things to . Then it came to implementation and we all almost turned into total critics because either we didn't understand something or they didn't understand us and suddenly the company was full of jerks on one side or the other. My point is that how it turns out is often important to the success of a consultancy, even if you're not there anymore. How do you work with the expectations of those people or then the change management so that the de facto people who aren't there for the first intent don't ruin your reputation?
Martin Srb
That's an interesting thought. I think we will have to grapple with that, I think we are still rather in the analysis and the tenders and some experience of the execution is still to come. Of course, I know from history how these things work because I spent 10 years at DHL, we did systems all over the world and it was a big deal. It was a big problem to the point where we implemented a system in Asia and nobody complained, everything was great and then we implemented the same system in Europe and it was thrown at us in a terrible way. My boss then put me on a plane to that warehouse in Belgium and told me to go and see what was going on because it was impossible. I had to go there with them process by process and take pictures of the screens and do documentation of what they didn't like about it, which was interesting. That rationalized the resistance because suddenly it became clear that they were bothered that an operation didn't take 3 seconds, it took 4, and they said that was something that was going to kill their whole business. But suddenly it was found out that it wasn't and it was documented and I had it on camera. So sometimes you have to do things like that because the pushback is quite often irrational. Being prepared to rationalise that pushback is the same as rationalising the pushback of IT not wanting to make the change. It's best to go after the facts and if the facts say it's a problem, then address the problem and if they say it's just some emotion, then convert it into some rational argument.
Where to use AI in digital?
Martin Hurych
This is a good example, because very likely it was just a cultural thing where the Asian prefers to be quiet, while the Belgian is cheeky in a good way and speaks . On AI, let me maybe again at a very high flight level tell you what is possible to do with AI today.
Martin Srb
I can't say it quite like that because I don't know everything that's brewing in the AI field, but I can say what I think can be done with it, and they're basically two things that I see as very practical. One I use on a daily basis, and that's kind of that chat, where it kind of helps us sort of sort of sort of sort of sort of sort out your thoughts, sort of redact documents, sort of understand a lot of documents. Then from that I can do some summaries, I can query what's in those documents. When I make some of my conclusions, I can check that they fit the documents. That's kind of most people use today.
The other thing is AI agents and here I think there's a big shift in that market of what an AI agent will be and what an AI agent is today. One thing is that AI agent should be autonomous in the future, I tell it a requirement and it will figure it out. I'll say I want to fly from Prague to London and he'll get all sorts of things after the API, summarise and tell me what's the best ticket and if I want it, he'll buy it. I don't think we're there yet, those autonomous agents get lost quite often. I've played with some, I said, here, set up an Excel and he did, then I said, let him write something down and he asked me where to write it down if he doesn't have any Excel. So here I think there's a reserve where the market is going, where it wants to be, but it's not there yet.
Where it's very applicable is basically structured processes as we know them today from some process flow, whether it's Logic App, Make or something like that. It's actually a deterministic flow, some kind of process flow, but I can put some element in there that can make decisions that are not based on structured data. It can be read an email, see if it has what I need in it, and if it doesn't, I'll respond again in human language and ask who sent the email. Here I think it's very usable because the result of what the agent produces, I'm able to somehow revalidate it in a structured way before I let it go on into the system. I can take some there, so that if I detect some sentiment from that person, for example, I can forward it again somewhere for a human agent to take over and so on. That seems like a pretty stable thing. It's not quite what that AI could do in the future, it could be significantly better and it could be more autonomous, but these days I think it helps quite a lot.
What can AI really do today?
Martin Hurych
I meet a lot of people who are supporters and fanatics in AI, or even have a professional background in AI, and they say that there are tons of things that are possible today and they will do everything. On the other side of that ditch are the amateurs who know there's some Chat somewhere, have been chatting about it for a while, and are waiting for a cookbook to tell them what all is possible in Digital Transformation 2.0. Because if I don't know what to expect, I don't know what to demand.
Can we high-level within those digital transformations and those processes say a couple of examples like, an enquiry comes in that doesn't have all the parameters on it, and without the trader seeing it, I go back and ask?
Martin Srb
Exactly such things are possible. I need to call 100 clients once a month and ask them questions. Maybe that's a nonsensical use case, but I'm dealing with a use case right now where this customer needs to ask several thousand of their suppliers on a regular basis over the course of a year if their data has changed.
They do it by emailing them or phoning them. That's an agenda that I can take and dedicate it to some agent like that and then just watch that I don't get sidetracked. That way I think I can save myself a lot of work or I can manage the tenders in some way. Not for the complicated ones, of course, but for the standard office supply type purchases, if I wanted to do a , it's terribly complicated. But I can send it out to 10 suppliers, say what I want, then collect what they've sent in and automatically do some research from that and tell them to buy it from one of the top three.
How to think about scenarios - specialise or generalise?
Martin Hurych
So it is often referred to as a one of, as a one-off event. Can these agents then also be used by pouring paperclips into it once, pouring mothers into it once for production, or do I really need to have a one-off action set up for each item? How should I think about this as an owner? What I see is that an inquiry comes in, we check it, we send it on, something comes in, we do another scenario for it. I've got a million scenarios myself and I'm starting to get lost in them, it's just like with people where very quickly the more people you have in an organisation you don't know which one is doing what and why they're doing it and you start going corporate. Should I as an owner think of agents as one-off events where each one has to be monitored and controlled? Vera sends something once every month and I need an agent to do it accurately, quickly, and I don't have to worry about it anymore, but there's still one agent. Or should I think of it the other way around, that all the emails that at this company they send out once a year, can I include it under one thing?
Martin Srb
I would think of it as individual agents for now. Because if I want to deal with all the emails that are sent in that company, it would have to be a flow that really just deals with those emails
emails and no context. I don't think that's where the AI will be of any help, unless it collects the replies and somehow classifies them according to some general criteria, and again, that's not that valuable. So, I would rather treat it as I have some specific task, some agenda that somebody is doing today and it takes them maybe one day a week, so I'll try to automate it. I'm going to make it an agenda that it's going to take him an hour a week.
Martin Hurych
I'm terribly small compared to what your clients are doing, but I'm seeing it with them as well, that they are automating on AI processes where it's actually not economically worthwhile at all.
Martin Srb
That's possible. I think it's a bit of a fashion today to have AI and we don't want to sleepwalk through time, so we want to have some AI and sometimes things are done that don't have value.
How to think about the economic returns of digitalisation?
Martin Hurych
This Vera sends it once a month and it takes her an hour, so we automate it because that's the easier process we see it on, it's going to cost us hundreds of thousands, but we could have three of these Veras in there. Now that we've touched on the economic side of things, if I look back at the big picture of this, if YOU come to my company to overhaul this whole thing, modernize it, speed it up and move me into the 22nd century, what kind of return on the whole process should I count on to make sense?
Martin Srb
I think you should have some expectations of what you expect from the transformation business-wise. That's where it starts, with that business vision, unless we're talking about a technology upgrade where I don't have much choice. If the transformation is business, I should have it figured out as CEO. If I'm expanding from Europe to America, I have a business sense of what that will bring. IT is some kind of enabler of that, and it's not going to happen without that. Now I have some expectation of how much this thing is going to make me business-wise and then it has some cost, on the cost side is the transformation of that IT to do that.
Martin Hurych
When you combine that with the growth that IT is supposed to enable, I understand. Do you have a calculation on your projects where I'm going to turn the company around first, start saving money, and get that team ready to freed up towards that expansion, where that transformation is going to come back to me?
Given some transformational management, doing two things, expanding into America and changing IT at the same time, is murder. So a lot of companies prepare internally and then go . I understand that if you put in the business time as well as the following or future revenues from that new market, that there is some return. If I were to optimize and digitize myself and stay in the territory that I have at the moment, is there any way to tell how quickly that digital transformation will pay me back without those future revenues from the new territories? Do I have a number that I have to have in my head so that when I talk to you and your competitors, so that I can measure what they're telling me?
Martin Srb
That's pretty hard to calculate, because we'd have to go into detail and we'd have to say, I'm pulling horse carriages here and I'm going to invest in trucks, so I'm going to calculate how much I'm going to save on speed by driving those trucks. Those companies today are not in a state of doing those things pencil, paper and now they need that computer and somebody to explain to them that they have to do it digitally, that's not the case. Now they're waiting a little bit for that AI to do something like that, but it's not there yet. So when we do digital transformations today, it's mostly out of a need that either IT has died or we need to change something radically. It's just case by case and I don't think digital transformation will always solve that. Quite often it can be incremental change or the adoption of some new tool.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If people were skipping through this podcast and they missed something and they heard the next 3-5 sentences and based that, they would listen to the whole thing again, what would you want to be left at the end in the information noise around us?
Martin Srb
I would go back to the digital transformation and say that I need to think carefully about whether I want to do it and why I'm doing it. The why needs to be set in stone somewhere and not forgotten because if I lose that along the way, I'm going to get lost in the process, spend an awful lot of money and very likely not get anywhere at all. That's probably the one message I think I want to leave here.
Martin Hurych
I think this one message is the only right message to leave here. I wish all the best in your new company, that you do dozens, hundreds and thousands of digital transformations properly and I hope that maybe in a few years we will talk about how you have expanded internationally.
Martin Srb
Thank you for the very nice card.
Martin Hurych
If you're looking at the badge you're looking at right now, if you're looking at your complete IT a little differently after this podcast and thinking about its role in your company and your business, then Martin and I have done our job well. In that case, I have some recommendations and requests here. Martin and I didn't talk about this in the podcast, but I'm going to knock out a bonus from it for you, which at this point is already somewhere on my website,www.martinhurych.com/zazeh . There you'll learn exactly the top few points that you shouldn't miss during your digital transformation. If you want to be kept up to date on B2B strategy, business, innovation and working with people, you can join the 1,300 email addresses of owners and CEOs of engineering, technology and manufacturing companies. It's my pleasure and you won't miss any of what I generate for you. If there's one more thing you'd like to help me do, consider helping me make my way through the Internet and giving this episode a like, a subscription, or sending it somewhere where it might also provide some inspiration. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed for you, wishing you success and not just in your digital transformation, thank you.