Interview mit Lindsay Keim: «IT has to enable business productivity»
Vom Ausstatter der Infrastruktur zum Möglichmacher der Transformation: Die strategische Bedeutung der IT wächst. Im Interview erklärt die neue Chefin von Citrix Schweiz Lindsay Keim, warum die richtige Balance von Security und Produktivität jetzt die entscheidende Herausforderung ist.
Wir freuen uns, dass Lindsay Keim am 15. September den Digicomp Citrix Day 2021 mit ihrer Keynote «The Future of Workspace» eröffnet hat. Denn nicht nur für uns, auch für Lindsay Keim war es eine Premiere: der erste öffentliche Auftritt als frisch ernannte Regional Director of Citrix Switzerland and Austria.
Gemeinsam mit den Teilnehmenden blickte Lindsay Keim auf die Megatrends, welche die Art wie wir heute und in Zukunft arbeiten, verändern werden und wie Citrix diese Herausforderungen mit Hilfe von Technologien angeht.
Lesen Sie hier das vollständige Interview auf Englisch.
You were recently announced as the new Regional Director of Citrix Switzerland and Austria. What excites you most about your new role at Citrix?
The opportunity to support our customers with transforming their own businesses. And, as market dynamics shift, helping our partners and Citrix itself change. As a leader, I am very motivated by driving innovation inside and outside of the organization.
What are your top 3 priorities you want to tackle for the next 1-2 years?
First and foremost, I want to continue to deepen our understanding of our customers – in particular their business goals. This allows us to find opportunities for our technological solutions to drive the outcomes that are most important to them.
Second, we will reinforce our channel ecosystem, strengthening relationships with our existing partners and ensuring they achieve business success. We’ll also be onboarding new partners that are strong in the area of security and cloud, to have the best and most complete ecosystem with which to serve our customers.
Finally, team agility plays a critical role. Our company has been in a constant state of transformation for the last five years, and we expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. One of my most important responsibilities as a leader is to build a resilient, flexible team that can adapt and learn as the needs of the market and our customers change. For me, fostering a growth mindset is absolutely key, while providing the team with the framework and support for rapidly developing new skills on-demand.
«The quality the digital environment IT provides is now a key driver for business success.»
We are currently and constantly facing many changes in our workspaces. In your opinion, what are the most important topics for IT professionals to prepare for future challenges in our work environments?
For years, organizations and business leaders’ expectations of IT have been growing, and the rise of hybrid work has only accelerated this trend. IT is no longer considered simple foundational infrastructure: The quality the digital environment IT provides is now a key driver for business success.
This means that IT is becoming even more strategically relevant, while also assuming a higher level of responsibility. IT has to enable business productivity, providing users frictionless access to do their work and enabling the business to run as efficiently as possible. And IT remains responsible for keeping the workspace secure, amidst unprecedented cybersecurity threats. Having a unified approach with which balances these demands, namely security and productivity, is probably the most difficult and most important challenge IT leaders have to face in the coming years.
What are the key tools, apps or strategies to help IT professionals moving forward towards modern workspace environments?
It doesn’t come down to any single app or tool – it has to be a multi-faceted approach, and in my mind it involves leveraging a few fundamental tactics.
First, start with the users: Make sure you have a strong understanding of what your users do day-to-day, and translate that back into business and technical requirements. This isn’t just a one-time exercise though – requirement gathering must be part of your ongoing cadence, so you are ready to address evolving needs.
Second, develop design principles that your IT team can use to make consistent, aligned technology decisions, based on the strong understanding of the user and business requirements you’ve just developed. This provides a framework or blueprint to ensuring a unified approach.
Lastly, treat big IT implementations as projects, and not as business as usual. This means establishing project goals, assigning a project team, allocating a budget, and defining milestones with a method for reporting back to key stakeholders. This also allows for augmentation of staff through services from partners or vendors to ensure the project moves forward while the core IT team continues to keep the lights on.