Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome everyone, to a new episode of the FinOps Quickly podcast. And today we are going to be seeing things that are not in the tools. We are going to be talking about data to Action Business Value center of Excellence. And to help me with that, we have the head of FinOps at Splunk, Zak Johnson. Zach, how are you?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: I'm doing great. Victor, how are you today?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I'm doing great. I'm doing great. So I'm so happy to have you here in the podcast. It has to be a public holiday in the US to have you here today, recording. But it's, it's always a pleasure and I always like to have people from all perspectives, from big companies, small companies, and from different sectors. And we have today a more on the data side, on a big company side. And I want to start directly with an important question. That is why data, something that, you know, that is affecting a lot in your business, why do data and dashboards often fail to, to take action in organizations regarding finops? What are the causes that you're seeing right off the bat?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the biggest things we see are just lack of ownership. If nobody really feels accountable for those numbers you're seeing in those metrics or those dashboard numbers, they're not really tied to metrics or things that their engineers care about or people in production, they don't really know what to do with it. Or we're giving them so much data that they hit analysis paralysis. Right. There's. They don't know where to start. They don't know what's the greatest reward, lowest risk. So I think it's important to FinOps leaders, we understand that just giving them that data is not going to spur action. So you need to have conversations with them that will spur meaningful results. Right. Pick a few small things to start with and then start to iteratively work through your list. Start with the greatest reward, lowest risk. Sometimes it's rate optimization, sometimes it's cleaning up idle or unused resources. But you always have to have a conversation because we just see the data and they see all the infrastructure. So we've got to marry those two together.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: That's true. And can you share a specific example?
When you think like, teams had perfect visibility, but they didn't act because they didn't have anything to act upon. Like what finally break through that inaction to make some action in that case?
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So I sort of learned that a lot of the activities are driven by their product ownership organization. Right. What the engineers are working on are prioritized by that group. So had a different conversation. Right. I met with those business leaders and said there's a number of drivers or opportunities here that could increase your product margin. Right. And we need some engineers to do some work. Are you interested? I've never ever been told no. As soon as they, they realize they don't have to change the product or get more customers, they can start increasing margin with the customers and the infrastructure they have. So all of a sudden they're real interested and they're making, you know, things be prioritized for engineers to start to change that margin through finops, which is a really great thing to bring to any organization, whether you're big, small startup or large enterprise.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: No, I think that's a very useful advice and I really think that will help the team. But if you can give us one tactical thing that FinOps team can do this week to start converting these dashboards data into actual decisions, what it would be.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is getting rid of your on demand spend. Whether it's in databases, whether it's in compute, whether it's in something like elasticache. That's sort of like an easy intro, like soft steps, right. You're not asking anybody to delete anything. You're not asking people to go resize resources in production. All you're saying is if you can commit to this spend, we can save depending on all number of factors, you can save a significant amount of money compared to that on demand rate that you're, you're spending. And you know, if they say yes, you know you're going to save money. If they say no, we don't actually need this infrastructure. You've all of a sudden, you know, eliminated idle resources without having to have that tougher conversation, go clean up this waste I found in your environment. So it's really like a win win opportunity. Either way you're getting rid of cost and driving things down.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. And the point that you mentioned is that yeah, either you find something that you don't need or you just need to fake something. So either way it's a win win. And you know, you mentioned that tough conversation and I want you to dive deep a bit more into that accountability. So you know, how do you create the accountability on FinOps or in cloud codes without making the team symbol feel like they are punished? Without converting you to the FinOps police, let's say.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, at the, at the end of the day it's sort of not coming at them with you know, a place of bad intent right there.
Oftentimes it's just having a conversation. Oftentimes you find the waste. Wasn't somebody intentionally chose something that was oversized or they weren't intentionally, you know, wasting idle resources. They forgot, priorities changed. It's really, I think having those conversations about opportunities rather than coming at them with there's all this waste in your environment. Things are over provisioned, things are, are sitting unused. So it's really how can we have a conversation about what can you fit into a sprint? What can you take a look at here? And then you tie it to like a business outcome and make sure you really celebrate the efficiency wins that you get publicly. Chase it up to their leadership shared in a broader forum in, in their company and then sort of like let them know that the actions they took, you know, given the raw figures, tell them how much money they saved, tell them how much it affected the margin, then everybody wins it. The entire business organization from engineers to, to finance to product leaders.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's a very good one. Like you, you need to make it, you know, broad and you need to make it affecting to, to all the stakeholders so everyone sees the value without seeing like yeah, I'm, you know, prosecuting you or whatever.
It's going to be something that, you know, it needs to be natural and it needs to feel, you know, that is in the business of the, in the benefit of the, of the business. Right. And you know, talking about this, you know, practice and moving on to how do you make this stick into the company? One of the practices that we normally see and you know, kind of can be applied to any software or any, any, probably any, any company is the making reviews. Okay. So you know, most organizations, whenever the bill arrives or whatever after each thing they do a monthly cloud course review. Some of them do it, some of them don't. But sometimes those feel like a, you know, a bit of a waste of time. So what do you think a good phenops review, what do you think a good finops review is? What are the things that makes a good fin of review to happen?
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think it's sort of eliminating somebody just going and reading the invoice and dashboards and Excel spreadsheets or maybe they translate into a slide deck access to data that everybody already has. They're probably already getting through any number of needs. Right? So it's, how can we make that review really be focused on decisions and forward looking actions rather than just kind of rehashing and reviewing what happened in the previous month. Like if there was an increase in spend. Right. Let's tie it to a business outcome or business priority. Did we start serving customers? Did we expand in new regions? Do we add new features to our product? Let's walk through those business drivers in that monthly review so we as FinOps can work with engineering to figure out how do we best optimize that spend. Maybe there's something for us to do, maybe it's not. Maybe we're trying out new AI features So we don't want to optimize anything because we're still figuring our game plan out. So can't go into it every, every month. Assuming we're going in there to, to save money or, or claw back money. Sometimes it's how do we support the business in, in this new activity. And the ideal outcome is we save money, but it's not always okay. So it really should feel like we're strategically planning for the next month or quarter ahead rather than just counting reports or brow beating, you know, engineers for 30 minutes in front of their leadership. Nobody wants, nobody's going to sign up to continually to get that.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to get, you know, highlighted their failures in public, in a common room with executives. I don't think anybody would want that. So thanks for highlighting that and you know, talking about that. What work.
Walk us through to the structure of a highly impacting monthly review. So what do you think are the key elements? Who needs to be there and how long should it take? More or less a real example if you can.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah, so you know, people have too many meetings on their calendar as it is, so maybe something 30 to 45 minutes with a, a little bit of gap if it needs to expand into an hour with a lot of like, you know, passionate discussion we'll call it. But I think to be really successful you got to have engineering leads, you got to have finance, you got to have product owners right side outside of the finops. Right. It's kind of like a three legged stool. It's really not going to be a stable review without those three legs because they all, they understand different aspects of the business. They understand is this finops opportunity or this engineering opportunity worth the cost of not working on a feature or working on bugs? Finance can tell us, you know, we're really focused on cost of goods sold this quarter. We're really focused on operating expenses. They can help steer what's the best, you know, use of our time. Where are we getting the biggest bang for our buck? What are the, you know, the super high executive budget drivers that are affecting all the downstream work we're doing. So we need all those people sort of in there to understand, be able to give their input, to really understand where we need to focus to be most successful with the business.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: That's, that's a really good example. I think it's a pretty actionable thing that people can implement.
I will try to leave it like that short description in the, in the description below so people can take action about how to structure their monthly review. And I think 30 or 45 minutes at most, I think everyone could take at that. Especially if it means like making the course that you are doing in the cloud way more efficient and you're involving everyone, which is probably one of the most important things is like everyone needs to be accountable of this and everyone needs to do this. And you know, talking about the it, this thing because it involves a lot of stakeholders, as you mentioned. Right. So how do you keep the stakeholders, you know, engaged month after month? So, you know, when they, we know that these recurrent meetings start to feel repetitive and they may think like after several times it's a loss of time. So how do you keep them engaged?
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a tough one. And I think part of it is kind of what we talked about earlier. Right. We want to keep it strategy focused and in a wins tracker that's showing cumulative impact of all these things that you're doing. So they can see the compounded effect of their effort that they put in through all these monthly reviews. And we just don't want it to be focused on a negative. These are all the things that, there's waste, there's optimization.
These are the wins, but these are the things, you know, we, we still need to do or keep it, you know, really strategic business conversations where nobody feels like they're, they're being, you know, browbeaten or anything like that. Talking about negative things, it's all positive things. It's all opportunities, it's all understanding the context. So I think we in FinOps, a lot of the data that we have is inherently negative. There's waste. There's rate optimization up there, there's idle resources. The. You pick something way oversized. These all these things are really kind of negative at the end of the day. So how can we figure out how to make these things as positive as possible? Right. Because a lot of the data we have inherently is really quite negative. Right? It's not. These are all the things you're doing Great. So let's talk about the things we did great and the things that we can do great the next month and pull those back and celebrate and look forward at the next opportunity. I think finops is really very much a people business. Even though all the numbers there are like numbers oriented, they're really not a numbers business, but it really is people oriented at the end of the day and there's business decisions behind all of it.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. It's way like with the amount of stakeholders that it involves is definitely a people's business and you would say, you know, we need to keep people engaged on play some. I've heard a lot that the gamification of Phenix is pretty useful and to keep people involved and trying to get winners and celebrate. And with these meetings, and these are monthly, I think we have as a finops enough time to prepare. So before this call to make it as quick and as efficient as possible, what preparation work needs to be done as a finox to make the actual review better?
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So in an ideal world you have a pretty good understanding whether it's tagging, virtual tagging, all the products, call it something different, but you have some way of allocating or tying accounts, products, services, shared services, accounts together in some meaningful way, depending on the size of your organization. Because the bigger the organization, the more reviews you're likely to have. Ideally you have somewhat of a structure and you can probably work with finance to figure out how your business is set up and aligned at the end of the day. But. But ideally there's some kind of automation that really pre analyzes your anomalies, your top decision points or opportunities, whether it's querying the curve directly, pulling data out of a tool that you built using some kind of off the shelf thing, using even something open source. And so hopefully there's a way where you kind of automate these reports. All the data is pulled in a way where the FinOps analyst can review it, shrink and condense it into a PowerPoint to prepare. And oftentimes we want those good relationships. So usually we want to give our engineering leads a heads up. So when they're in front of their boss or their leadership that they may not spend as much time with because they're on the business and finance, we're all aligned about what we talked about and if there's a reason why maybe we didn't take action or go after they have the opportunity to present kind of the engineering or the business reason behind that decision. So nobody feels like they're getting Ganged up or surprise because this is really just a really collaborative effort because we're in finops typically don't own the infrastructure. We don't own the prioritization of the business or the product. So we gotta figure out a way we want these people as allies and not really see us as maybe an adversary inside the organization.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Definitely, definitely. I think that is pretty insightful and we need to, we are here to collaborate, we're here to help the they all to make a better result. And definitely the goal is that not to be against anyone. Especially so since these type of meetings have different people.
So how do you make the meeting is the same meeting for executive, for engineering and for finance. Do you do different formats? How do you structure?
[00:16:45] Speaker B: But yeah, I think you know, for finance we typically have a separate sink because it's really focused a lot on numbers. They don't necessarily care about any kind of the engineering driver. So it really becomes more of where do we as finops need to go focus our time because maybe that's where they're looking at budgets and P Ls at, at a level we're not. So they can kind of give us guidance on what they're seeing budgetary wise finance world side, PNL side where we need to go focus to work with engineering and product teams to figure out, you know, how do we save money or increase margin or how do we examine an area where they're not understanding the business story that they're seeing in the in numbers. So they need somebody to kind of translate what they're doing into finance speaking. You know, we're typically that bridge between know.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, talking about that language and that language barrier. So I, I, I see that there is the, the struggle of you know, communicating value beyond like the save money or the cloud cost reduction. Because as we know like finops is more than is, you know, optimizing the dollars and not just save money because you know, saving money is just shutting everything down. So you know how, how teams should be framing the conversation to make it more towards okay, measure business value instead of saving money or reducing crowd cost.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think you can translate that into business speak or whatever you want to call it that's outside of dollars and cents. Right. And so you can say we saved $100,000, we use that to hire two new engineers or we saved $100,000.
We use that to focus on expanding into new regions for our customers or we use it to get new features out. So what did you spend that money on? Or what did you use that money for inside the business outside of just like increasing margin or you saved X dollars and cents. Right. And so I think that's important because you send that up to an executive, they're going to really connect with that. But if you saved $100,000, they might say, why were you wasting it? Is $100,000, you know, enough to move the needle for me at a humongous company, not at a smaller company. Obviously we're just using that number as an example. But I think they sometimes need that business context, business language beyond dollars and cents, because without all the other, you know, information behind there, they're not going to understand. Is that a significant amount? Were we doing things wrong for a long time and all of a sudden we save money? Why were we doing things wrong? It could open conversations up you, you may not want to have. But translating it to the, that business executive speak, you know, is something that moves in, you know, especially when people are looking at their career. People always talk about executive presence. That's the kind of stuff that, you know, people are talking about when they want, you know, people who want to rise in their career to have that executive presence. It's sort of moving beyond just dollars and cents into like business language that executives can digest in the 10 seconds that they read your message or email.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I think you touched a very interesting point. I think the executive always talk about the business and I think in general coming from the engineering side, we need to focus more on how the business works and less about the technology. And sometimes we have this barrier about the features, the technology, all of that and we lose a bit of track about we are in a business and you know, it needs to come to business, business outcomes. And that's really helpful, like making yourself the effort to focus on that. It's, it's way, way better for, I think for the general understanding on the business, but especially for, for finops. And you know, can you give us an example of, you know, this connection of cloud coast to business outcome that really, you know, resonated?
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. So, you know, working on a project at a company, we really optimized our pipelines and infrastructure's costs. They were sort of out of control. So in theory we connected that that was a much lower pre transaction cost for us to ingest and our customers to make that transaction, transaction and all of a sudden, you know, the product was in a place where we could go capture a market share that wasn't available to us before because our per transaction cost was much lower. So that really, really resonated with every single area of the business.
Right. And without having that like business understanding, which is I think an area all engineers can certainly spend more time on, I think as an early engineer I didn't realize the value like the later in my career was like the more I do this, the better I am for the business. And so, you know, something like that is seemingly, you know, just a finops thing. We just optimize pipelines. But if you connect all the dots that, you know, that little project, it's really like remarkable transformation and just major win for everybody in the organization. So I think a project like that is a great example that it looks like just an easy optimization opportunity, but you connect all the dots. It's, it's really a game changer for your organization.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And you can see with this example how a real finops case can be translated into a super important business outcome. So thanks you for bringing that case. And it's really interesting because we normally are. As you feel like you become better as an engineer whenever you feel you are more attached to the business and you understand, especially when you swap companies, you are not always in the same company. So you need to, it's not always the same job. You need to think about how the company makes money and what's your role so that you can understand better and how you can help better the company. And that's probably going to help you a lot in your career independently of the company that you, that you work for. And you know, one thing that they want to check is that how do you measure these things? So how do you quantify the value of things like the better deployment, better pipelines or better resource allocation that doesn't show up like direct savings. So how do you quantify and how do you showcase that?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the ultimate end goal for any FinOps team is to get to unit economics, right? And your unit can be defined anyway. Maybe it's cost per transaction, cost per customer, cost per gigabyte of data ingested or processed or stored. You know, whatever your business is, you could, you know, if you're in the manufacturing space, it's, you know, cost per widget you produce. So the ultimate mark to demonstrate are you truly driving your cost down is getting to unique economics. Right. It extrapolates all that out from new customer growth or feature expansion or region expansion or oftentimes when you show, you know, your leadership that look at all this money I, I saved. And they're like, well, how come the bill is $10,000 more this month.
Well, you could say, well it was customer growth and you know, without like a unit economics, you're not really showing, you know, in, in the bill form, if that's all they're looking at that that's how you're actually improving. So I think really, you know, economics is very difficult to get to, but once you get to it, you know, that's the ultimate mark of any, any FinOps team is being able to show that because it's the, the tr, everything combined, how you're driving your cost down and you need a lot of people working together. You need good tagging, you need good cost allocation labeling, you need disparate systems. You know, maybe your kubernetes data brought in with your cloud provider data brought in with some other data. But that's, that's the true, true way to get there is unique economics.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And yeah, of course that's the ideal and that's where everything like because it's as mentioned before, that's something that a business would show up, would showcase in a quarter presentation to investors or to stockholders, anyone.
It's normally metrics that are mostly active users and therefore cost per active user and things like that.
That's why I always say you need to focus on the business. Say maybe check the reports that the company is saying because everything is built up to that the company is making the work so that those numbers are growing so that people are happier, so the company provides more revenue so that the stock gets better and the company is more valuable on its own. And that's what everyone is building towards in business, right?
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Yeah. That's why finops is sort of a new practice. But it's the same as manufacturing was like 200, 300 years ago. We're just trying to get our, our cost per unit down. We're just doing it, you know, in the cloud now. Rather like on a, you know, giant industrial plant.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I think it's been like, that's why I always say like, is this going to, you know, it's, is this a trend or is this something that is going to stay forever? And for me it's like, yeah, you are. Every business has been optimizing costs like from the beginning of time, like Walmart was optimizing their use of the storage or I don't know, Coca Cola, probably their industrial thing.
But now it's on the cloud so it's just optimizing the cost on the cloud. I think accountant has been there forever, so definitely it's going to be for a long time, as long as the IT cost is going to be there, which has been like for ages. So I am, I am very, you.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Know.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Bullish on the FinOps turn, as you can see. Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: FinOps isn't going anywhere definitely.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: And you know, one of the things that I have seen and it's very interesting for me is for big companies when they are like using this happenspoke model, so you have like a finop central team which is like the ones that are more specialized and the ones that are following all the trends and defining the best practices and all of that. More of a model that security could do or cloud could do. And then you have the champions divided across all the teams, the experts. So let's talk about building a FinOps center of Excellence. So what are the essential building blocks and what can be done later? So what's your experience on, on the center of Excellence?
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the very first thing you got to decide before you start a center of excellence, whether it's a huge company, medium, small company, is, is this like a decision making body? Right. Are we putting in forced, you know, seps to prevent, you know, old volume types? Are we putting in forced auto mediation? Are we forcing architecture types on people or is this just an informational sharing body? Right. These are scripts we ran, these are automations we ran. These are architecture patterns that we followed. Maybe your team would be interested in following them as well. This is how we optimize for our on demand spin. You know, we use maybe a stability model, you know, using math to figure out how stable was our spin over the last three months. If it's really stable, it's a probably easy compute or instance savings plan and maybe sharing out with that, those, those other teams in the organization may not have a FinOps team or looking to, to do that themselves. Because I think where people really get themselves into trouble is like sometimes they try to be a decision making body, sometimes it's information. They're really mutually exclusive. You can have both but the, the body cannot be both. Right. Because the audiences are different. The people who are representing on the, on the board for the center of Excellence are very different. When you compare like a decision making versus an informational sharing body.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's way different. And you know, if you would have like, you know, all the, you know, all the choices that you would think is like what do you think for you is the right structure for a finop coe? Like what do you think are the evolution. So what are the critical roles and which roles are nice to have that you may have in a more advanced company?
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think you need somebody who has good financial business acumen with strong technical chops to kind of be your chairperson or lead.
Then you're going to kind of need major liaisons in your organizations, your products or services or engineering teams. However, you're divided. Right. These are people that understand the architecture, they understand how the product's set up, they understand and the roadmap of where it's going. And then sort of your advanced analysts, your automation engineers, the people who can code up everything that you're trying to do, people who are tool experts for your cloud cost tool. Maybe it's something you bought, maybe it's something you built in house, maybe it's an open source. All those people can come later, right? Because they're just people utilizing kind of the tools or the roadmap. Those people, you know, decide. But you can't go serverless if your core architecture for your products are not set up in a way where everybody can move to kubernetes. Right. So you need those engineering technical leads who, who can be there to explain those things. If somebody proposes, somebody with financial acumen may not understand. They think it's a good idea, looks great on paper. In theory it's a good idea, but in practice it just doesn't work like that. So you need those architecture people there. All the other people can certainly come later. And I think all the audience as well can kind of come as you scale because you don't want one meeting. People get a bad taste all of a sudden nobody's interested in coming again. And that's practicing that you have great executive leadership because if the executives tell people, I don't need you to go to this, don't worry about this, this doesn't affect us.
The COE is never going to be successful. So you really, really need top down sponsorship I guess as another thing to have before you really start to roll that out.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, no, for sure. Like that. This kind of initiative can be suggested, I would say from a lower team, but it needs to come from executive because it means like a lot of resource allocation, like human resource allocation. It makes an organizational change because you need to basically create a whole new team for just starting at least and it needs to come down from there and from these COEs. What do you think are one of the most critical factors that people normally forget or underestimate to create a finops coefficient?
[00:32:37] Speaker B: I think the biggest thing they underestimate is the human element, how important the executive sponsorship in top down alignment.
I think they often can overestimate the amount of power they can have. I think part of the coa, I call it, define what good looks like. It's probably going to work for 80, 85%, but there's always going to be outliers. So whenever you're building, it can't be an absolute mandate. It's got to be this is what good looks like. This is the way, you know, you're able to opt out from these, these mandates or these processes. And then, you know, once you have that list, you can start to have more in depth conversations on how do you move them from being kind of outside that core pattern to in and you know, every business organization is set up certainly differently. Maybe you want to eliminate old backups and snapshots, but they're legally or contractually obligated to keep them. Right. So all of a sudden they're outside the pattern. Doesn't mean they're doing anything wrong or against the COE mandate, it's just that's how their business is set up. So you really have to be flexible knowing that you're only going to really be able to define what good looks like. There's never going to be an absolute mandate whether you had a smaller or a huge company. There's always going to be, you know, use cases that exist out of what you define as good.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. Like it needs to be flexible and needs to be adaptable to the safe consensus. Right. And you know, as of a roadmap for building phenomena, so how do you see the evolution of that entity change from let's say the building like year zero to let's say GR3? How, how do you see that roadmap?
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Good question. I think, you know, in my past experiences, like year one is really establishing processes, relationships, getting quick wins out on paper, not only in like financial numbers, but connecting it to that, that top level, you know, business value. We talked a little bit earlier in the podcast and year two is like, how do we get like automation in there? So we come up with a plan that as of this date we're going to fix everything that's not optimal in a forward looking matter. So can we use automation to fix it backward that way as there's going to be a certain date where we've prevented it from ever coming back in and we've got automation to clean up everything that existed before we sort of, you know, really had that mandate and then like Year three is more like big architecture, strategic business level discussions. How do we wholesale move our company into a direction that's architecturally sound, finop sound security sound from the very get go. Right. Because starting to add in financial and security optimization after a product has been existing for 10 years or five years, or is this you've bought and acquired or you're using a bunch of different open source packages and cobbled it all together. It's really hard to start optimizing everything you know after it's already live in production and serving customers. So how do we like look at the future for anything new? Is setting us in a direction where we're not going to have problems in three to five years that only becomes available to you after you've kind of got all of that trust, that predictive modeling, all those wins. Everybody's bought into this wholesale process. That way you're not trying to do too much too quick. Like it comes in time and there's, there's data and there's numbers and there's trust to back up everything that we've done in the past.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I think that's, that's a very good one. I think it needs to go. You know, we always try to, especially now like we try to make everything, you know, work perfectly from scratch. And you just need to make a bit of compounding effect so you build the foundations, then you start to apply some automation, some prediction and some decentralization so you can focus on more advanced things. And then you evolve so you don't have to make everything from scratch. You just need to evolve with time and with the team so that it makes better things going. But you cannot make everything from, from day zero, right?
[00:37:07] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And then everybody feels like they were part of that process. Building the CoE, it wasn't just mandated or forced on them. They all felt like they had part in building the CoE. It really I think is all back to the human element we talked about earlier. Especially at big organizations. You can't do it alone and you can't deal with allies.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And I have one question that I always like to ask that is for all the people that are listening, if you have one thing that they need to implement to improve their FREENOS practice like tomorrow or this week, what it would be.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: So I think this is one thing. I joined Splunk recently in July. So I haven't been here super long. First thing I did, any engineering lead, any product lead, any technology lead that I met or introduced or saw in a meeting or Saw in an org chart reach out 30 minute chat.
How can FinOps help support you in your business? What's your business about? Where are you going? What are the things that drive your business? And it's just that building relationships with as many different people as you can in the business on the tech side, the business side, finance side, it unlocks more value than any dashboard or policy or report that can give people.
So it's really about getting like that alignment, not just numbers. So I think dashboard's important, reports are important, costs are important. But start like making allies in the business, introducing yourself, meeting people all over the business. So when FinOps comes knocking, they know who you are, what you're about. You're not there to get them in trouble. And when you're involved in a project with FinOps, like it's a great outcome. Typically every, everybody wins, looks great on your resume, good for your career, everybody feels happy about it.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's, that's a very good advice and I also think like it will help you your journey across the job and it also makes some friends that you never know where they could, you know, help you in the career or you know, become real personal friends. So it's a good excuse, let's say also to bring some friends in the company and not to be, you know, the enemy that we don't want to be in phenoms. Right.
So yeah, that's very helpful advice. I think with that it's a very good way to end. So thanks for all the insights. It's been like really, really insightful episode and thanks for taking the time for being with us.
[00:39:50] Speaker B: Yeah, appreciate you having me on. Let me chat about finop.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: Yeah, looking forward to chatting again and to everyone. See you in the next episode. Bye. Bye.
