Tuesday, December 14, 2021

2022: The Year Technology and New Work Models Come Together to Enable Continuous Innovation

Transcript of a discussion on how technology will improve the ways businesses operate and enable employees to remain productive and content in the coming year.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Predicting the future took on a whole new degree of difficulty the past two years. And while we can’t always know what Mother Nature will throw our way, we can learn from what worked -- and what didn’t work -- in 2021. 

Clearly, adjusting swiftly to persistent change and leveraging digital -- and often virtual -- tools, environments, and processes were major benefits. Now, how will 2022 shape up as we extrapolate on the trends around shifting work models?

How will technology, both tactically and strategically, improve the ways businesses operate and enable employees to remain productive and content, regardless of where they are?

Stay with us now as we explore the ways work continues to be reinvented while -- at the same time -- digital technologies enhance and disrupt the means through which we all collaborate and operate in our jobs.

To learn more about the ways that 2022 will set the stage for the next decade of innovation and work adaptation, please join me now in welcoming Christian Reilly, Vice President and Head of Technology Strategy at Citrix. Welcome, Christian.

Christian Reilly: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: We’re also here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy at Citrix. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Thanks, Dana. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: Tim, do you see the speed in how work models are evolving and maturing slowing at all in 2022? Have we reached some sort of plateau yet?

Minahan: Not at all, Dana. In fact, the old adage that necessity is the mother of innovation is certainly holding true. All of the unplanned investments that organizations have made over the past two years to accommodate secure remote work have torn down barriers. That has led to new ways of operating that are going to continue to fuel unprecedented innovation and growth in the year -- and years -- ahead.

Minahan

If you think about it, when the pandemic hit, companies had to find new ways to operate. They had to invest in new technologies that took them decades worth of steps forward. They not only innovated on how they work internally, but in how they engage with their customers through new digital channels.

And the technologies they used to digitize their businesses to survive have now provided new business models and a new pace of innovation across every industry -- from a dramatic increase in the role of telemedicine and remote clinics to virtual learning and, as we’re hearing now, to the metaverse -- that will enable them to thrive in the new year ahead and beyond.

Gardner: Tim, what have we learned over the past two years as the reinvention of work solutions accelerated? What worked – and what didn’t?

Reworked post-pandemic possibilities

Minahan: Well, companies have been forced to do two things. Number one, they were forced to accelerate the digitization of their business. In financial services industries, for example, that meant increasing remote and digital financial advisory and trading services. For retail, it meant further accelerating the use of digital channels. And in healthcare, they found new ways to engage with patients and provide patient care.

But the second thing is it also caused both employers and employees to rethink work, to break down the old taboos that work can only happen while in the office. Employers have recognized the benefits that remote work plays -- not only in keeping their existing employees engaged, but in being able to reach new talent pools well beyond commuting distance to their work hubs or offices.

The pandemic caused both employers and employees to rethink work, to break down the old taboos that work can only happen in the office. Employers have recognized the benefits that remote work plays.

And employees have recognized that, “Hey, I can actually do creative and innovative work when not in the office. In fact, I may even be able to be more creative and innovative because I have uninterrupted time to focus on solving business problems and not having to deal with all the other headaches and distractions that come with long commutes and travel. I can now make better use of technology to foster more efficient work execution and collaboration wherever work needs to get done.”

Gardner: Tim, some people seem to think that the best-case scenario is that we get back to the way things were in 2019. Why is that not likely to happen when it comes to how we work?

Minahan: Because of the two dynamics that we just mentioned. One is we’ve broken down the taboos about where work happens, what constitutes work, and who does the work. Many employees have recognized they can be selective about the jobs they take and for which organizations.

Similarly, many companies are beginning to evolve to much more of a blend between full-time employees (FTEs) and contractors, especially for those hard-to-find skill sets that are required to digitize and modernize their businesses.

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Skills such as for artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, cloud, and security are often hard to find on a full-time employee basis. But when the contract between employers and employees shifts, and employees are looking to select those jobs that they want -- looking to hone their skills and be an independent -- that really opens up new opportunities both for employers and employees.

Gardner: Christian, if we’re entering into this bold new era of work and there’s no going back, why is the timing good from a technology standpoint? Why is technology in a better position than ever to support such a work-model-adaptation-shift?

Reilly: There’s just so much more choice. If we look around the technology sphere, there’s also more speed in how technology finds its way into organizations -- and that’s not always by IT, a lot comes in by demand from end users and employees.

Reilly

Just step back and recall how quickly were we able to apply technology to what I lovingly call the world’s greatest semi-coordinated remote work experiment. I don’t use the word pandemic anymore. If you really think about it, every organization on the planet was challenged from day one of the lockdown to say, “Okay, well, the technology that we had and we then deployed really wasn’t intended to support this kind of remote work.”

That is the very work that Tim was talking about as being forced upon us. It wasn’t really by choice. It was a mandate due to the global lockdown. When you recall how quickly we were able to respond to that with a variety of different technologies, that proved that remote work really does work.

So, I think it’s a great time to be in tech. It’s a great time for organizations to step back and think about what has been achieved. Now, what else can we achieve, knowing that our traditional barriers -- and the Department of No that most IT organizations have been historically -- have been turned on their heads? The ways that these technologies have arrived has given us a huge opportunity to change the way that we think about supply and demand across every industry.

Gardner: if there is no such thing as the new normal, and we can just get rid of “normal,” what’s the new new, Christian?

New now is a great time for IT

Reilly: I call it the new now. If you go back just a few months, the world was slowly coming out of the pandemic and offices and countries were beginning to reopen. If you use the word normal in that context, I don’t think it treats us equally.

The pandemic affected everybody around the world differently. Referring to that as normal doesn’t reflect those differences. It doesn’t do enough to reflect the differences because normal doesn’t reflect what we’ve been through in the last couple of years.

But if we think about it as now, that puts us in a different mindset. Most companies that have been successful through the pandemic have had agility. They were able to shape-shift, to put their resources to work in different ways quickly to address different work challenges. If we suggest that that’s normal, it puts us in a box that might limit our thinking and creativity.

I like to think about things in a fluid way. We haven’t seen a strategy from a single company that’s going to be the blueprint for everybody going forward. So, treating every day as a new now leads us humans in organizations to be open to the things we do really well, which are creativity, innovation, and thinking outside the box.

We haven't seen a strategy from a single company that's going to be the blueprint for everybody going forward. Treating every day as the new now leads us humans in organizations to be open to the things we do really well, which are creativity, innovation, and thinking outside the box.

I prefer to think about it in terms of various phases of evolution post-pandemic, which has accelerated many things -- whether that be technology or business change, which is all very positive. 

I think normal is probably a little bit too harsh a word for what we’ve been through and what we can expect for the next few years.

Gardner: Christian, if technology is foundational to making this new era vibrant and innovative, has there ever been a better time to be in the IT business?

Reilly: From the changes we saw before the pandemic -- with organizations moving to cloud, changing their application portfolios, and in how work gets done -- there’s always been a technology underpinning of that. And if you’re in the technology industry, you have to be pretty happy with the opportunity for more change.

For many years, it was difficult for people in organizations to drive change and to challenge the status quo in organizations large and small. But as technologists, we always like to look out and try to invent the future. It was difficult to do that when the rest of the business was in catch-up mode or didn’t see the value of technology as an investment to drive the business, as opposed to being a necessary evil.

Now we’ve leveled the playing field, both in the choices we have in technology as well as in the time it takes to invent technology and the short time to get a return from that investment.

Learn How to Avoid a New

Digital Divide from Hybrid Work

It’s great, and we see examples in our customers around the world, of organizations that put technology strategies at the forefront of their business strategy. In my nearly 30 years in this industry, I can’t remember a time when it’s been more exciting to combine the technology with the business opportunity and to drive some really great outcomes going forward.

Gardner: Tim, for the business leaders out there who are also responding to this sea change, what does your research tell you? Are they as optimistic as the technologists are for 2022?

Leaders favor flexible work future

Minahan: Yes, business leaders are viewing this moment, and the investments they’ve made to support advanced digitization and engagement with their customers and in remote or hybrid work models, as a platform for driving new levels of innovation. 

In fact, Citrix recently conducted a research project in partnership with Coleman Parkes Research interviewing some 1,200 business leaders across the US and Europe. And on average, these leaders attribute almost half of their growth over the past year to new innovations, new products, new service lines, and new ways of working fueled by the adoption of new technologies and the work models we’ve been talking about here.

In fact, according to the study, investments in new technology and flexible work models over the past several years have fueled $678 billion in new revenues across these industries. Furthermore, 69 percent of those business leaders around the world say they’re going to increase investment in research and development (R&D) over the next 12 months to sustain this growth.

Because part of that growth had been constrained by our biases in thinking, as Christian just said, those longer journeys to the cloud are no more. Companies are accelerating digitization of their businesses -- including the shift to cloud. They now are taking a three-year cloud transformation project and doing it in three months because they need the agility. They see the benefits that are available to them.

The same thing goes for work models. Business leaders are removing the traditional taboos associated with working remotely and using that to rethink their entire work model. Where work gets done is certainly part of the dialogue we’re having in the market. Should employees go back to the office or work remotely continually?

But it’s more than that, it’s about how work gets done. Are we fostering these workers with a digital workspace environment that allows them to work anywhere and be as productive and as secure -- whether they’re in an office building or on the road?

And then there’s more innovation around who does the work. This is the most exciting part. Businesses are now able to access new talent pools and drive greater equitable and responsible hiring practices because they’re no longer constrained by where their office buildings are.

For example, the healthcare sector has been advancing not just telemedicine but new remote clinics that are closer to the patients. A great example is Mass General Brigham in your hometown there, Dana, in Boston. Just before the COVID crisis, they had transitioned to the cloud, which not only ensured that 70,000 physicians, clinicians, and administrators could work safely and remotely, it allowed them to be much more responsive to the needs that have arisen during the pandemic.

There's now more innovation around who does the work. This is the most exciting part. Businesses are able to access new talent pools and drive greater equitable and responsible hiring practices. They're no longer constrained by where their offices are.

For example, they opened up a remote clinic at the Boston Convention Center, literally in three days, per order of the governor. Because they were using the same technology platform, they were able to do that very, very quickly. It has also allowed them to increase their telemedicine visits by more than 27 times. And they don’t see that going fully back to the way it was before.

And, finally, using such a cloud platform delivers greater access to experts at colleges, for example, in Minnesota. They don’t necessarily need to live in the Boston area to be able to sustain this. That’s just one great example of an industry and a leader in that industry that’s not going back.

They’re using the investments they made in technology. And they’re using the investments they made in work models to fuel new ways of patient care and new innovations for their businesses.

Gardner: Christian, as we move past the previous work shackles using hybrid and remote models, how will recent technology trends – such as 5G connectivity, edge computing, AI, and parallel internets -- further enhance this process of reinventing work in 2022?

Hyperconnectivity everywhere

Reilly: To your point about networking, I think it’s the unsung hero of what we saw during the pandemic. With the number of people being asked to work remotely, locked out of their physical locations, the demands for bandwidth were essentially catered to around the world. That speaks a lot to the underpinning of the infrastructure.

And if you think about this world of hyperconnectivity, of always-on, and advancements in 5G technology, the speed and capacity that comes with that … It’s incredible. I don’t think we would have been able to do what we’ve done in the last two years with the constraints around the networking technologies from a decade ago.

Need Some Good Reasons to Innovate?

Citrix Research Uncovers About Half a Million.

All sorts of different providers are now building their own undersea capacity across the world, just to carry the growing demand. You can assume in the next couple of years there’ll be no such thing as never connected. Whether you’re in an airplane, on a train, in your own car, or in a coffee shop -- or whatever -- the ubiquitous connectivity is going to power a lot of this next generation of the economy.

We tend to talk about what’s on top of the network, and obviously it is security, which is important. But performance, reliability, and availability will be there for the folks out there who want all the world’s applications and data served to them.

I made a comment a few months ago about the major cloud providers building parallel Internets. The traditional Internet consists of different carriers interconnected at various points around the world in Internet exchanges (IXes). There, the name of the game is exchanging data from a peering perspective, where there’s equity between the transactions.

And if you’re a commercial customer, you can buy bandwidth from there and act like a carrier. But if you really think about what goes on in the IXes, there’s a question about how we can fairly exchange data that means that nobody loses out from a cost perspective.

Now, think about what we’re seeing where the Googles, Microsofts, and the Amazons are all building these giant networks of their own so that they can essentially offer better reliability, performance, and availability -- loads of different points of presence around the world, some carried on subsea, some carried on terrestrial technologies. I think what we’re seeing there is a huge sea change in the way that we think about carriers.

If you want to be able to get your application served by the best network in the world, you may be looking at different providers, i.e., the big hyper-scalar cloud providers, than we saw a decade ago. There’s a significant element to that, which has an upstream effect on where organizations choose to place their cloud services and the data and applications, of course.

From a wireless perspective, we’ve been talking about ubiquitous connectivity for Internet of things (IoT) for many years and we’re seeing the evolution of that now with opportunities in edge computing. Lots of workloads will continue to be delivered by edge because that last mile connectivity that we used to struggle with will disappear with the continued rollout of 5G and the availability of that around the world.

What really excites me is what's happening in the developing nations. Doing net build-outs will give rise to real economic growth in areas of the world that were disadvantaged historically. I'm excited about  a level playing field across networking.

What really excites me is what happens in developing nations. In the Western world, we’ve been very fortunate to be on a journey from different types of networking. In some cases, they had to be built and rebuilt and built on top of existing physical infrastructure, such as cell towers, physical fiber, and so forth. For the opportunities of the developing world, they don’t come with that set of problems. Doing net new build-outs will give rise to real economic growth in areas of the world that were disadvantaged historically.

I’m really excited about a level playing field across networking that drives important economic effects and social interactions for countries that have not been able to participate in the global economy because they’ve been held back by their physical infrastructure. It’s super exciting. If you look five years from now, will we see the gross domestic products (GDPs) of countries differently by virtue of the fact that they’re hyper-connected and have much more opportunity than they’ve had historically. 

Gardner: Tim, the good news is the technology enables things that hadn’t been possible before. And, at the same time, we’ve gained a clean slate to reinvent work, having moved past former taboos.

But the bad news is this is uncharted territory, with a lot of options.

What challenges do businesses need to overcome to make the most of this unique -- unprecedented, you might say -- situation without becoming overwhelmed or paralyzed?

Hybrid hopes and fears

Minahan: It’s a very good point, Dana. There are some choppy waters that people need to navigate because these are uncharted areas, as you mentioned.

The biggest risk companies will grapple with in the coming year is around the concept of hybrid work. Finding the right fit for right role and the opportunity of hybrid work is a tremendous opportunity, as we mentioned. Employees are liberated to work wherever they can to do their best work. Employers can tap into new talent pools well beyond commuting distance to their physical office hubs.

But the challenge is to create an equitable work environment, regardless of where employees are located. Hybrid, by its very definition, means we’re going to have employees that are in the office collaborating and executing work together with employees who are not in the office.

And there’s a risk of creating a tiered level of the employee base, or levels of inequity in the employee base if you default back to an office-first culture. Many of our customers and Citrix itself – look and ask, “Okay, what does the environment need to look like to be conducive to capitalizing on the benefits of hybrid work?”

And, just as was done decades ago, we made big investments in physical office buildings and in creating collaboration spaces. Well, if work is now happening everywhere at the same time, and employees are distributed across physical and remote locations, that means we need to create a digital work environment, a digital workplace, that provides equitable access to the tools that all employees need to be productive: their applications, content, collaboration tools -- regardless of where they are.

To Christian’s point, they also need network reliability so that the applications are not only available but perform the way they should. They need the security capability so that the company has confidence that their information is secure, no matter where an employee is doing work -- whether in an office, on the road, or from home.

But that flexibility needs to be coupled with processes and cultural policy changes that foster an equitable work environment that isn’t office-first or remote-first culturally. It has to be a truly hybrid culture.

Finally, the physical workspaces need to adapt, too. They need to be purpose-built for their new uses. If the physical office becomes a place where we come together to collaborate, we need to retrofit rooms to facilitate inclusion of those working remotely.

Learn How to Avoid a New

Digital Divide from Hybrid Work

At Citrix, for example, we use the Microsoft Teams environment and are retrofitting our conference rooms with 360-degree cameras, and with cameras on the whiteboard, so that regardless of where an employee is, we are taking the equitable work policies that came with remote work and bringing them into a hybrid-work world.

So, everyone has similar access to information. Everyone has a similar opportunity to voice their opinions and creativity in meetings. These are the types of things that folks are going to need to navigate through in the months ahead if they’re going to capitalize on the benefits of what hybrid work can deliver.

Gardner: If we are to use hybrid work as the starting point, and we don’t know where we’re going to end up, do we have any existing examples to learn from? I’m thinking about the gig economy and gig workers.

Tim, is the gig economy a bellwether for what we should expect of hybrid work models? Or can we learn from that to do even better?

Beyond the office with benefits

Minahan: When the gig economy emerged, we were still in very much of a mindset of a work environment that hadn’t changed much since Henry Ford. It was an extension of the Industrial Revolution, where everyone came together in a manufacturing facility. When we went to knowledge workers, we just adopted that work structure and said, “Well, everyone, of course, should come together in an office environment.”

What the opportunity affords us now -- by removing the taboos, having the technological infrastructure to support equitable work across all environments and domains -- is the opportunity to go to a new class of, if you will, gig with benefits that provides flexibility and autonomy to freelancers.

They gain an economy that the contracting gig workers crave along with the stability that’s become increasingly attractive as the pandemic wears on by being associated with a given employer, with appropriate benefits, and everything that comes with being a full-time employee.

And so, I think we’re seeing literally people redrafting the social contract between employers and employees for the first time in decades.

Gardner: One of the nice things technologically, as we go about this redefinition of work, is we have at our disposal analytics tools at scale and at costs that are very attractive.

How do we use that to understand the best models of the future of work without it just being trial and error? How do we apply the best of what analytics and automation can bring so that we can get to that right definition for the right company at the right time?

What else can technology do for us in the next few years when it comes to helping us through such an experimental process?

Minahan: Yes, over the past several years, we’ve seen the introduction of machine learning (ML) and analytics into the workplace, along with automation. And those have fundamentally changed the way we work. 

Number one, they help clear a lot of the noise from an employee’s day and guide them to the next task, or the next insight, that’s valuable to move them along in the process. But number two, it’s elevated the skill set of the employee and the performance of every employee so that they’re performing at their best.

That’s true whether they’re six months on the job or an employee of the month consistently for the past six years. Technology can guide any employee to deliver the best customer service and to attain the best answer to execute processes even faster.

An example that highlights that necessity is the mother of innovation is City National Bank of Florida. They adopted our digital workspace technologies not only to ensure that they could remotely deliver the applications and tools that employees need in a very secure environment, but also to utilize the ML, automation, and enhanced workflow capabilities to improve the steps needed for their mortgage loan review process.

As a result, they knitted together some of the key tasks and insights across multiple systems – customer relationship management (CRM) systems, mortgage and loan systems, and approval systems. They gained an ability to guide employees to the next step in the process, and by pulling information from other databases. They were able to process six years of loans in six months during the pandemic.

That’s just one example of how bringing together ML with automation is fundamentally creating a new level of skills, particularly at a time when we have a global talent shortage for certain skills. This technology helps fill the skills gap that many companies are suffering right now.

Gardner: Christian, what’s your take? How will ML and the analytics capabilities we have, along with automation, help us attain a new, better place when it comes to work, work processes, and the redefinition of work?

Reilly: The skills gap is kind of a paradox. We talk about the skills gap and how we’re going to address that with technology, whether it’s software, robots, or an automated workforce. And yet, the other side of the coin to be concerned with is how much of this technology comes in and replaces physical workers. 

To go back to Tim’s Henry Ford example of many years ago, there was an argument then about automation in the automotive manufacturing industry replacing the physical work force. And that’s something we’ve discussed and politicized for many years.

Democratized tech increases jobs

The real question to me is, how many more jobs does technology create? That’s the bit that we don’t talk about, and I don’t think we have a good opinion on. From a pure technology perspective, the most fascinating element comes as a category of democratization.

And, if you go back far enough, there are many examples. When Microsoft Office first found its way into organizations it democratized word processing and letter creation to the detriment of the classic typing pool.

If you follow that path of democratization, what we’re seeing now through the evolution is citizen developers using low-code and no-code platforms. It’s the exact thing that Tim was talking about in terms of bringing the technology to augment the workforce. We’re very rapidly seeing that in the worlds of low-code, no-code, of citizen development, and also of ML in general. It’s a democratization trend, of literally being able to take off-the-shelf components, products, and services and apply them in a new business context.

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The key is better enabling the line of business people who deeply understand what the data needs to do for them. They understand the business process inside out, they understand the workflows inside out, and they’re far better placed to deal with that than traditional IT and developers.

So, the speed at which technologies are becoming democratized is essential. For a few cents an hour, you can have ML services running in a public cloud. And then those very same ML services can find their way into client-side applications.

It becomes obvious very quickly what the impact will be. Just as we’ve seen with changing work demographics when we have the younger generation come in as business analysts, but able to write algorithms in Python. We’re going to continue to see that. And we’ll see much smarter applications being put to work for those workers, too.

The challenge is it potentially creates more data silos because we’re writing point solutions, like cloud and applications sprawl. We’re likely to see more of that as organizations empower individuals to be productive by bringing in their own technology to work and using off-the-shelf components to enhance personal applications.

A few years ago, we began talking about bring your own device, and bring your own identity. I don’t think it’ll be very long before we talk about bring your own applications and that will be largely due to the democratization of technologies and the power of these new generations of applications and insights.

Gardner: Christian, is it too soon to be thinking about a third-party reality that can enhance work? We’re hearing about the metaverse, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). Where do you see the opportunity for using these concepts to solve some of the reinventing of work challenges?

From Ford to VR, we still work together

Reilly: I’ll use Tim’s phrase again about necessity being the mother of innovation, and, in some cases, the mother of invention. Over the past few years, we’ve seen steady technological growth in VR, AR, and MR. And, yet we’ve never really seen a killer application.

There are plenty of examples of customers and companies using those technologies to solve certain things. But we’ve never seen mass adoption. As humans, we’re fascinated by futuristic things such as The Jetsons, time travel, and teleportation. We’ve seen it in science fiction movies forever.

But if you start to think about things that are part of the metaverse, whether it’s digital twins or photorealistic immersive worlds, it’s pretty easy to let your imagination go and understand how some of what we’ve found difficult to replace during the pandemic, which is human interaction, can be done.

How do I feel in just two dimensions looking through a laptop screen with a number of other people on a video call? I think there’s a lot more to it than that. If we could figure out how to transcend the physical boundaries using a virtual world -- and I’m not talking Second Life here -- I’m talking about much more.

It’s where the office is not a building per se. It’s much more of a virtual construct that has all the things that I need to get work done, whether that’s signing contracts using distributed ledger or collaborating in more of a physical way with a representation of myself in the metaverse.

We may look at that as science fiction, and yet, if you look in the consumer world to where the younger generation is, there are plenty of examples of children using technologies such as Minecraft and Roblox that are their own virtual worlds where they learn to collaborate, learn to play by the rules of that particular game, and they learn how to immerse themselves in that to collaborate and to do tasks.

I don’t think this is a million miles from the reality of where we may end up in terms of the hybrid work that Tim talked about. We’re trying very hard to replace physical interactions that aren’t always possible on different sides of the world. I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to think about the metaverse as much more of a business-enabler underpinned by lots of different technologies. Maybe we can bring more personal interactions with it as we establish this new now going forward.

Gardner: Tim, how does the current generation of digital workspaces and the progeny of those workspaces start in 2022 to get to the vision of metaverse as business-enabler that Christian just painted?

Minahan: It goes without saying that the only constant we’re going to have in this world of hybrid work is the digital workspace within which we access the work resources, our content, and the insights we need to make decisions. And it’s how we engage and collaborate with our peers, both within our company and outside of it.

We’ve been talking about digital workspaces for quite some time, along with the need to ensure we reliably and securely deliver the work resources that employees need to get their best work done wherever that needs to happen.

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated digital transformation and opened people's eyes to new ways of working. A lot of these new AI and automation agents are being incorporated into the workspaces to ensure that everyone can perform at their best and not be distracted from even greater creativity and innovation.

The pandemic, if there’s one small silver lining to it, has rapidly accelerated digital transformation and opened people’s eyes to new ways of working. As we look at the digital workspace technologies that underpin them, you’re going to see not just ensuring reliable high-performance access and secure access to the work resources you need, but a lot of these new kinds of AI and automation agents are being incorporated within the workspace, which will ensure that everyone can indeed perform at their best and not just be distracted by the technologies but can harness them to drive greater creativity and innovation.

I’ll just close off where we started. The crisis-driven adaptation has not just transformed organizations, but it’s altered the mindset of both the employer and the employee. I’m particularly positive and optimistic about what the future holds over the coming year -- and the next few years ahead.

We’re reaching a new plateau as these items are all converging at once. The technology is there and available, and the taboos that have hindered our ability to adopt that technology have been torn away. There is a new mindset both in the mind of employees and employers that is going to set us on a course to engage through new digital means and to work in new and more hybrid ways.

Gardner: Tim, Citrix has done an awful lot of research and is helping organizations better understand this progression. Where can people go to learn more? How is Citrix making some of that information available?

Minahan: You can always go to citrix.com. We also have a thought leadership platform called Fieldwork in which we not only promote and make available all the research studies and benchmarks that I mentioned, but also use it as an open platform for dialogue among leaders in businesses as well as the IT organizations.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how 2022 will shape up as we extrapolate on the trends around shifting work models that are taking us to the new level.

And we’ve learned how speed will only increase in how digital technologies enhance and disrupt the means through which we all collaborate and operate in our jobs and lives.

Please join me in thanking our guests. We’ve been here with Christian Reilly, Vice President and Head of Technology Strategy Organization at Citrix. Thank you so much, Christian.

Reilly: Thank you, Dana. It’s been a pleasure.

Gardner: And we’ve also been here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Thank you, sir.

Minahan: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate the dialogue.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Future of Work Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your community, and do come back next time. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Transcript of a discussion on how technology will improve the ways businesses operate and enable employees to remain productive and content in the coming year. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 01, 2021

How Houwzer Speeds Growth and Innovation for Online Real Estate by Gaining Insights into API Use and Behavior


Transcript of a discussion on
how a cloud-based home-brokerage-enabler, Houwzer, constructed a resilient API-based platform as the heart of its services integration engine.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Traceable AI.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Complexity and security challenges can hobble the growth of financial transactions for private-data-laden, consumer-facing software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Add to that the need to deliver user experiences that are simple, intuitive, and personalized -- and you have a thorny thicket of software development challenges.

Stay with us now as we explore how streamlined and cost-efficient home-brokerage-enabler Houwzer constructed a resilient application programming interface (API)-based platform as the heart of its services integration engine for buying and selling real estate online.

To learn how Houwzer makes the most of APIs and protects its user data while preventing vulnerabilities, please welcome Greg Phillips, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Houwzer. Welcome, Greg.

Greg Phillips: Thanks, Dana. It’s nice to be here.

Gardner: Greg, what does Houwzer do, and why is an API-intensive architecture core to your platform?

Phillips: We are more than just a real estate brokerage. We’re also a mortgage brokerage and a title agency. The secret sauce for that is our technology platform, which binds those services together and creates a seamless, end-to-end experience for our consumers, whether they are buying or selling a home.

Phillips
Those services are typically fragmented among different companies, which can lead to an often-chaotic transaction. We streamline all of that into a much smoother experience with our salaried agents and a consistent technology platform across the whole transaction. We are rethinking how real estate transactions are done by making it a better experience across the board, inclusive of all those services.

Early on, we decided to build, essentially, a protocol for conducting real estate transactions. There are laws and regulations for how to conduct such transactions in different jurisdictions. Instead of having an unmanageable variety of local rules and regulations -- in one area they’re doing it one way, and in another area doing it another way – we looked for the common elements for doing real estate transactions, mortgages, and for titles.

We’ve built into our system these common elements around real estate transactions. From there, we can localize to the local jurisdictions to provide the end services. But we still have a consistent experience across the country in terms of offering services.

That’s why we began with an API-first architecture. We focused on the protocols and building-blocks of the platform that we offered to our agents, coordinators, and mortgage advisers for their services. Then we layered on the front end, which has a lot more localization and other services. So, we very intentionally thought about it as a protocol for conducting real estate transactions, rather than building an app to manage just specific types of real estate transactions in specific jurisdictions.

Gardner: When say API-first, what do you mean? Was that how you constructed your internal platform? How you deliver the services? Was it also for the third-party and internal integration points? All of the above?

Real estate transactions gain flexibility

Phillips: All of the above, yes. We wanted to build an API core that was flexible enough to support lots of variants within different types of real estate transactions. We’re already in seven states. And we’re still pretty early in our journey. We’re going to be adding more states and jurisdictions.

We wanted to build an API core that was flexible enough to support lots of variants within different types of real estate transactions. ... We put a lot of thought into our data model and our API platform.

So, we knew from the get-go that was our direction. We put a lot of thought into our data model and our API platform, such that we wouldn’t have to rewrite or break up the APIs every time we entered a new jurisdiction. We wanted a flexible underlying API that we could use to offer a finished product, even though it might look a bit different in Maryland than it does in Pennsylvania, for example.

Gardner: It’s evident that such flexibility, speed of development, and reuse of services are some of the good things about APIs. But are there any downsides? What can detract from that versatility when going API-first?

Phillips: One of the downsides of APIs is once you put it out there into the world, you are supporting that API, for better or worse. Things get built against it. And if you want to change or rethink what you do with that API, you have downstream dependencies reliant on that API.

It’s not like you’re a single code base, where if you want to refactor, you can use your idea to go discover all the things that might break if you change things. With the API model, it’s harder to know exactly who’s out there using it, or what might break if you change the API.

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That means there’s a semi-permanence to an API. That’s somewhat unique in the software development realm where things typically move with a lot of flux. We have libraries that are updating all the time, especially in the JavaScript ecosystem. Things are going a mile a minute.

When you deliver an open API, you have to be more thoughtful about what you put out there ahead of time, because it is harder to change, harder to version, and harder to migrate. It’s by definition something you’ve chosen to set in stone, at least for some period of time, so people can build against it.

Our API interacts with third parties. The vast majority of the usage of our API is for our internal front-end application. It’s not like we have tons of different stakeholders on the API. But we need to factor for those third parties and partners. 

Obviously, then, security is another huge undertaking when you put an API out there. This is not an API that is just sitting behind a firewall. This is an API on the Internet for conducting real estate transactions, which are highly sensitive transactions. So, obviously, security is a huge concern when building an API.

Gardner: With so many different parties involved in real estate transactions, to get people to rely on Houwzer as a hub, there needs to be an element of trust. Not just trust about performance, but trust that the activity is going to be safe, and privacy is assured.

What did you do to bring that level of resiliency to your API? How did you troubleshoot your own API to make sure that others would view it favorably?

Keep data safe from start to finish

Phillips: From the very beginning, we’ve been really concerned with security. Even before we had any transactions running through the system -- and we were just in the design phases of the API -- we knew we’re in an industry that’s constantly under attack.

The most common and dangerous thing that happens in the real estate brokerage industry is when some non-public information about a transaction is somehow leaked. There are a lot of criminals out there who can use that information to attempt to exploit our customers. For example, if they find out information about when a closing is supposed to be in the name of the title company, they could pose as an agent of that title company and say, “Hey, for your upcoming closing, the wiring instructions have changed. You actually need to wire ‘here’ instead of ‘there’.”

There are a lot of criminals out there who can use that information to attempt to exploit our customers. It's been a huge problem in the industry. We need to make sure that the information stays private.

We’ve seen brokerages across the country fall victim to that consistently over the past five to 10 years, if not longer. It’s been a huge problem in the industry. So, while an API enables a great user experience by having very streamlined transactions, we need to make sure that the information stays private to only our clients, agents, and coordinators -- and not leak any of that data to the public through the API. That’s been paramount for us.

As far as performance goes, we’ve been fortunate that our business has relatively few high-value transactions. We haven’t had to achieve super-scale yet with our APIs. Our security concerns are a 10, but our scalability concerns, fortunately, are at a two. So far, it’s not open to the masses. It’s more of a premium service for a smaller audience than a free service on the Internet.

Gardner: Given the need for that high level of security, you can’t depend on just the perimeter security tools. You need to look at different ways of anticipating vulnerabilities to head them off.

Phillips: Yes. You must be aware of what you’re putting out into the world. You must assume the worst about who is going to interact with your API, and make sure there is no way for an unauthorized person to gain access to information they’re not privy to.

Since the beginning of building this platform, that kept me up at night. One of the things that ultimately led me to Traceable AI was that I wanted to effectively gain more confidence about how my APIs were being used out in the world. You try to anticipate as much as you can when you’re building it.

You reason: “Okay, who’s going to be calling on this? We don’t want to expose any additional information here. We want to have just the information needed, with no additional information that might leak out. We want really strong access controls on each API request, such as what parameters will be accepted, what will be updated, and what will show in each scenario based on all the different users’ rules.”

Obviously, that’s a lot to keep track of. And you always worry there is some misalignment or misconfiguration that you’re missing somewhere. You want to be able to monitor how the API is getting used -- and, essentially, have an artificial intelligence (AI) capability look for that type of thing in addition to your ability to query for it.

That has been very attractive for us. It’s given us a lot of confidence that, in practice, we are not leaking data. It’s an additional level of validation. Instead of enforcing a perimeter and not letting anybody in, we’re very careful about what we put out there beyond the perimeter. And not only are we careful about what we put out there beyond the perimeter, we’re also monitoring it very closely, which I think is key.

Monitor who’s doing what, where, and when

Gardner: Such monitoring gives you the opportunity to create a baseline of behaviors, so that even for unintended consequences of how people use your API, you have a data record. And you’re doing it at scale because there’s a lot of data involved that humans couldn’t keep up with. Instead, you have machine learning (ML) and AI technologies to bring to bear on that.

What have you learned from that capability to observe and trace to such a high degree?

Phillips: We have discovered a few vulnerabilities that we weren’t aware of. So, there were areas where we were exposing, or potentially exposing, more information than we meant to through a given API endpoint. That was identified and fixed.

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We’ve also seen some areas where people have tried to attack us. Even though we don’t have the vulnerability, we’ve seen malicious actors hitting our API, attempting to do a sequel injection, for example, or attempting to read a file on the file system, or to run a command down the system. You can actually see that stuff and observe how they’re doing it without having to parse through raw API requests, which aren’t humanly readable. Those are the first order of insights we’ve gained.

The second order of things we’ve seen are also very interesting. We can look at the API requests segmented by our users and our user roles. That means learning what API requests our clients, agents, and coordinators tend to make. We can now examine how these different stakeholders interact with the API. It has been really interesting to see from a planning perspective.

We can look at the API requests segmented by our users and our user roles. We can now examine how these different stakeholders interact with the API. The API is a living, breathing thing that you can look at and observe.

Even outside of security, it’s been fascinating to see how the system gets used, and the kinds of natural rhythms that occur, such as when is it used during the day. What are these types of things happening versus these other types of things happening?

It’s interesting to see that which would be very hard in the non-human-readable API requests. When you aggregate it and display it in an information display, you can see that stuff. The API is a living, breathing thing that you can look at and observe as it’s out there in the world.

Gardner: Not only as it breathes and lives, but it’s easily updated. So how do you create a feedback loop from what you learn in your observability phase and bring that into the development iteration process?

As the CTO, are you the one that has to cross the chasm between what you can observe in operations and what you can subsequently ameliorate in development?

Security now part of every job

Phillips: Generally, yes. I view that as a key part of my role. Our software engineers are in there looking at it as well, but I hold myself accountable for that function. Also, I try to recruit generalist software engineers who can take security into account, just like with user experience, when they’re building things. 

I find it very hard to build a cohesive and secure product if you are just throwing requirements over the fence to the software engineers from different departments, saying, “Build this.” I think you lose something.

Rather, there has to be a complete understanding in one accountable individual’s mind to deliver the complete product. And that’s not to say those areas of the company shouldn’t have input on what gets built. But the engineers in my mind have to have a deeper understanding. I like to give them as much data as possible to understand what they’re putting out. Then they have that all in their minds when they’re writing the code.

Gardner: Have your developers been receptive to this observability of API behavior data, or do they say, “Well, that’s the security person’s job, not mine”?

Phillips: All of us on the team feel a responsibility for the security of our systems. I think everyone takes that really seriously. I don’t think anyone thinks that it’s “someone else’s” problem. We all know that we all have to watch out for it.

That being said, not everyone is a security expert. Some people may know more or less than others about information security. None of us are dedicated information security professionals. We rely on the inputs from the Traceable AI platform and from what we’re seeing happen to learn about the things that we should be worried about. What are the things that we don’t even know about yet?

It’s about having a culture of learning and having generalists who want to get better at building secure systems and to convey secure APIs. That is increasingly part of the job description for software engineers, to take that into account. That’s especially critical as we see higher value services, like our own, being offered directly on the Internet.

Things are so different now. Years ago, real estate and other financial transactions had some kind of application front end. Then some person would put it all into a mainframe that night and do the financial transactions. Then, the next morning, after it ran on the mainframe, the humans would look at it again. And then they would update your bank account.

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Now there’s far more automation. Things happen live via APIs on the Internet. And that’s created much more reason for developers to truly understand the security implications of what they’re building. You simply can’t insert a failsafe as easily, as you start to eliminate process friction, which is what consumers want. There are less natural insertion points for a true dedicated security or dedicated fraud prevention review. You have to do these processes live and in an automated way. Security therefore has to be built into the thing itself.

Gardner: Of course, these transactions come with high urgency for people. This is their home, one of the biggest transactions of their lives. They’re not interested in a wishy-washy API.

How easy was using Traceable AI to bring automation for better security into your organization?

Data delivers better development

Phillips: What I like about the Traceable AI user experience is that you can engage with it at multiple levels. On the most basic level, you log in and it’s pushing out immediate alerts of threats. You can view what has happened since you last logged in, and you can review your bots. It surfaces the most important things right away, which is great.

But then you can also pursue questions about the APIs in production. For example, you can plot how the APIs are being used. They give you great tools to drill down so you can navigate to different ways of aggregating the API usage data and then visualize, as I mentioned before, those usage patterns.

What I like about the Traceable AI user experience is that you can engage with it at multiple levels. It surfaces the most important things right away, which is great. They also give you the tools to drill down so you can navigate to aggregating the API usage data.

You can look at performance as well as security. So even if you’re feeling good about the security, you can determine if latency doesn’t look great, for example. There are a lot of things in there to show where you can go really deep. I don’t think I’ve gotten to the bottom. There’s more to discover, and there’s tons of ways to slice, dice, and look at things. I tend to do that a lot because I’m a power user and like to figure things out. But at the same time, Traceable AI does a great job of using their intelligence to surface the most important things and the most critical security concerns and get those in front of you in the first place.

Gardner: It sounds like these data deliverables provide you an on-ramp to a more analytics-driven approach to not only development -- but for improving the processes around development, too.

Phillips: Yes. I would even extend that into the processes around our business operations, our real estate operations. We’re offering a product through our technology that is ultimately a real estate transaction engine. And we can actually see in the API things that we need to do to make the real-world solution better.

We have three critical stakeholders: the buyer client, the real estate agent, and the transaction coordinator, who makes sure everything goes smoothly. And, using these tools, we can see if the user or coordinator are trying to do something, meaning they’re getting errors. We can see if there is a point in the real estate transaction where we might not have everything included. Maybe the information that was expected to be there is incomplete, and so they are not able to get to the next step of the transaction.

So, you can actually uncover things that are not explicitly in the technology, like a process problem. We need this information ahead of that point in the process, and we don’t always have it. We want to then know what next to build into our protocols for the future.

Gardner: Greg, what are your suggestions for other folks grappling with the API Economy, as some people call it? Any words of wisdom now that you’ve been through an API development and refinement journey?

Take one real estate step at a time

Phillips: Start small and expand. Don’t try to put everything and the kitchen sink out there all at once. We currently represent people selling their home, buying a home, and getting a mortgage, people who need title insurance -- people doing all of those things together all at once.

However, the first transaction through our system was just people listing their homes. We said, “Let’s take on this specific process.” And even at the time that we launched, it was a much less detailed version of the process we have today. It’s really important to release something early that is complete but limited in scope. Scope creep -- of trying to pack in a lot at once -- is what causes security issues. It’s what causes performance issues. It causes usability issues. So, start simple and expand. It’s probably the best piece of advice I have.

Gardner: Assuming you are going to continue to crawl, walk, and run, what comes next for Houwzer? What does the future portend? What other transactions might this protocol approach lend itself to?

Phillips: We thought about all the things needed to consummate a real estate transaction. We have covered three of those. But we are missing one, which is homeowners’ insurance. We consider the core services to purchasing a home as brokerage, mortgage, title, and homeowners’ insurance. So that piece is in the works for us.

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Outside of those core pieces, however, there are lots of things people need when they’re buying and selling homes. It could be resources to fix up their current home, resources to move in, guidance around where in the country they should move to as a remote worker. There’s lots of different services to build out to from the core.

We began at the core transactions, and now we can build our way out. That was a very intentional strategy. When you look at Zillow, Redfin, or some of the other real estate technology companies, they began with the portal and then tried to bolt on the services.

We’re trying to build the best technology-enabled real estate services, and then build from that core outward into more of those needed services. Some of the next things in our product road map, for example, are pre-transaction, helping our consumers make more educated decisions about the transactions they’re going to enter into. And we can do that because we have this bullet-proof, secure, battle-tested system for doing it all and great real estate agents that will help guide you through the process.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how a streamlined and cost-efficient home brokerage enabler, Houwzer, constructed a resilient core API platform.

And we’ve learned how protecting user data and preventing vulnerabilities across an end-to-end API services approach has allowed Houwzer to deliver user experiences that are simple, intuitive, personalized, and trusted. So, a big thank you to our guest, Greg Phillips, Chief Technology Officer at Houwzer. Thanks so much, Greg.

Phillips: Yes, thank you as well. It’s been a pleasure.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well for our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect API resiliency discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Traceable AI-sponsored BriefingsDirect interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your business community and do come back for our next chapter.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Traceable AI.

Transcript of a discussion on how streamlined and cost-efficient home-brokerage-enabler, Houwzer, constructed a resilient API-based platform as the heart of its services integration engine. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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