Abe Wood, Founder and CEO of Abreo Technical Consulting, speaks with Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer of Securiti, in a video interview about pain points concerning business and IT, the need for education and partnership between IT and business, and the main drivers in the era of AI and ML.

Speaking of business, Wood highlights that the primary issue is that IT teams often lack a comprehensive understanding of how business operates. He recommends having some sort of pipeline or educational process to address this gap.

IT would not be here if it weren’t for business, says Wood, and without business knowledge, one can never build pipelines, data warehouses, and AI platforms on top of it. Not understanding what the business is doing and what it needs is the number one lacking point.

Another related challenge is ensuring that security is integrated once IT teams understand the business. Taking the example of his career, he states that there has been a heady focus on SOC compliance, but it could be a challenge without collaboration among multiple groups.

Once IT teams understand the business’s pain points and where its data comes from, they can start building effective solutions, says Wood. At that stage, having a skilled architect who thoroughly understands the organization’s infrastructure and structure is critical.

Moving forward, Wood states that one of the areas in his career that has been consistently pushed back on is citizen development. Elaborating, he says that in this scenario, the business starts developing solutions independently, losing trust in IT, and purchasing or building their systems.

Addressing this, Wood says that there needs to be stronger education and partnerships between IT and business teams so the business understands that IT has the expertise in technology, particularly in implementing security and data pipelines. The lack of collaboration in these citizen development initiatives highlights a significant gap.

Delving further, Wood stresses funding, and if there is a scarcity, there is a need to establish a partnership to secure additional budget and demonstrate the need for building a structured framework with security integrated into it.

That security aspect, such as SOC compliance, is critical, says Wood. Having worked extensively with SOC 2 in previous roles, he asserts that it has never been easy to manage. However, by building a partnership with the business, both teams can work together to determine the next steps.

There are ways to implement things more quickly for the business, but this goes back to understanding the business and establishing that partnership, says Wood. He maintains that throughout his career, he has prioritized being honest and collaborative with the business, focusing on building partnerships rather than simply taking orders.

One of the main drivers in this new era of AI and ML is going to be the cost of systems, says Wood. For instance, he says that Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and Azure are all very expensive, whereas Snowflake is more affordable and AWS is reasonably priced.

Wood believes that there will be direction from the IT side to gain the necessary expertise and present the business side with a clear ROI. For instance, transitioning from an on-premises system or an Oracle database to something like Snowflake could save a significant amount of money. That savings could even fund the hiring of an additional contractor to help implement the solution.

In conclusion, Wood says that the focus will also shift to identifying the easiest systems to integrate for AI and ML. He opines that IT will need to become more educated across all aspects of architecture to support these initiatives effectively.

CDO Magazine appreciates Abe Wood for sharing his insights with our global community.