Architecting Transformation At Scale with Nick Reed, Chief Strategy Officer at Bizzdesign

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.506) Welcome back to the winner circle. We are here with Nick from Biz Design and he is a big awards for business winner 2025. And they kind of had the transformation of the year. I'll let Nick explain it, but Nick, welcome to the winner circle and congratulations on the award. Nick Reed (00:15.688) Thanks Russ, pleasure to be here. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:18.348) Now give us a little bit of background on this design and this big transformation that you guys went through. Nick Reed (00:25.046) So BizDesign is a enterprise transformation tech company, so software as a service, and spanning about 19 countries where we have offices. And basically this transformation that we did, we merged with two former competitors who were each similar size in revenue terms. So pretty much tripled the size of the company and that was a pretty. major transformation that we've been going through off the back of that event. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:58.316) Yeah, going through any size transformations hard, let alone one where you're tripling the business and you have all those complexities. But then again, you guys are used to transformation. It's what you do for a living, right? How did you get into this business? How did you get into this weird business of helping people, you know, transform their business? Nick Reed (01:11.188) Right. Nick Reed (01:18.278) So I've been in the tech space for longer than I care to remember. And through the course of my career, know, been helping customers adopt new technology, working for tech companies and came across this kind of space called enterprise architecture, which at the time I hadn't heard of before. And it seemed super niche. And then I had this aha moment where this is like this amazing enabler for large organizations that are complex and have all these silos everywhere. And, they all have strategies and want to change. And it's these silos that get in the way of that change, either teams not having that enterprise wide perspective or different teams having different agendas. Not being able to get hold of the data they need to understand, you know, the impacts and dependencies of that change. And I found that this space called enterprise architecture did exactly that just created these, these models of the enterprise that helped. Large complex enterprises get their arms around all that complexity, you know, understand how. they can implement strategy, all the stuff that has to change, you know, the processes, the teams, the applications, technology and data and make sense of it. And it was like this aha moment. I studied maths at university. I like this kind of models and structure and it just all came together and it's like, this is definitely something to be involved in. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:08.704) Yeah, and I imagine AI is playing a huge role in kind of the evolution of what you're doing. We'll get into that. But give us a sense of what an engagement looks like with your organization and kind of what the the software aspect is of it. I mean, how do you I mean, are you just putting in kind of the org structure of of the existing company and asking the tool to help you, you know, redesign to make it more efficient or, you know, what is that process like? I'm new to this. So. Nick Reed (03:35.251) Okay, so we're a software company, so we're providing the tooling to our customers so they can do this stuff themselves. And essentially, we provide a repository where you can create these models and bringing in data from different data sources that are typically not connected together. And we're all about making the connections across these different data sets, joining them together so you can see the big picture and understand the connections between all these things. So you understand the impacts and dependencies. So when, you know, the chief exec of a company says, okay, we need to pursue this certain strategy, you can map that onto the things that the business does. i.e. the business capabilities and the business processes, and then understand what do those processes depend on? What people, what data, what technology, and how is that going to change in the future to realize strategic goals? And of course, then once you change one thing, you need to understand, what else is affected by that? What other teams might be impacted? And that's usually where all the friction comes in, where you get these, you know, unforeseen impacts that slow you down and cause rework, overruns. That's where business cases go out the window. And so we're all about helping manage that complexity upfront so that everyone gets aligned around shared roadmaps and you don't run into those unforeseen consequences of change. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:21.932) Yeah, and the pace of change is astonishing these days. you know, between the economy regulations changing, especially with administrations, and then you have the effects of technology on all of this. You know, it is a massive undertaking, I would imagine. I would imagine it's challenging to adapt your software to, you know, meet all the needs of all this change. Nick Reed (05:49.565) Absolutely. I mean, there's, there's a confluence of events happening that just increase the, the urgency and the importance of being able to change. you know, the pandemic was, it was a real example, which actually accelerated a whole bunch of digital transformation where all of a sudden no one's in the office. Everyone's working remotely. And, you know, we had customers who said, What happened in the pandemic brought, you know, multiple years of transformation and just compressed it into a matter of weeks or months. So that was obviously a very compelling event that accelerated a whole bunch of digital transformation. Obviously the biggest game in town right now is AI and generative AI. And, you know, that is literally top of the agenda for pretty much every C-suite in pretty much every organization. When you're talking about, you know, $1.5 trillion invested in AI in 2025, expected to rise to $2 trillion 2026. And there's very definitely first mover advantage with this stuff. And so being able to get your arms around the complexity and accelerate that AI transformation is a real critical competitive edge right now. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:23.66) Yeah, and if you don't have software, would imagine, or a system like you have in a process to develop it, I would imagine you run into all sorts of roadblocks. What are some of the common roadblocks that people run into if they're not leveraging a platform like yours? Nick Reed (07:39.701) So one of the first things that happens is everybody gets busy experimenting, trying new tools, gets the credit card out, signs up for chat GPT or Gemini or Copilot or whatever. And so you have all these different initiatives that are happening, which is great. And then someone says, hang on a minute, am I doing something that someone else is already doing? And are we using the same tools, different tools? You know, who's spending what? Is it compliant with our security policies, our privacy policies? And you get what we call this AI sprawl going on where there's lots of activity, but it's not coordinated. And how much of that is actually contributing towards the business's strategic goals? So. Tools like ours enable you to get visibility of what's going on. So you can create that list of everything that's going on in terms of the AI initiatives and then put it into a business perspective. So which of these initiatives are supporting which business capability? okay, we've got five initiatives doing the same thing. Maybe we should have one rather than five. And then you can get visibility of which tools are being used. Is there a standard tool for certain things that we should be using? And where can we reduce the tech sprawl from this stuff? Then you can map on the compliance status. What is compliant to our policies? What's not? So you can start getting your arms around what's going on and start focusing and prioritizing. And importantly, when you find an experiment that works, you can then scale it across the organization, across all the teams that might benefit from it, as opposed to it just happening in a silo and limiting the ultimate value you're getting from it. And all those initiatives that may be duplicating effort, it's just waste, wasted effort, wasted time and cost. And every time you're wasting, Nick Reed (09:59.443) effort and cost. It's opportunity cost, which means that you're simply delaying or limiting the value you can get from what works. So just applying this kind of portfolio management approach can drastically improve the impact from these kind of initiatives. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:16.492) Well, and I think you said something at the very end there that I really wanted to hit on, which is you said you've got to focus in on what works. And I think one of the tricks right now is what works, especially in AI, changes on a day-to-day basis. mean, you can try something one day and then the next day it works. The pace is really, really astounding. And what I see you guys doing is blending the architecture. Nick Reed (10:37.642) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:45.774) strategy and then really tying into the governance angle and trying to blend all that together. And that's not an easy thing to do. Nick Reed (10:54.918) It's not, and governance is a kind of super interesting topic when it comes to AI, because yes, you want to put governance around all these experiments and initiatives and then think about how you scale what works across the organization. But of course, as we move into a more agentic approach to AI, where you have agents taking on increasing amounts of work, know, maybe automating business processes, maybe even collaborating across different processes. What used to work from a human governance perspective, where you have humans reviewing new things and approving, yes, we go forward with it. When it's agents doing it, it's happening dynamically in real time, faster than humans can actually deal with it. So the nature of governance is going to change where in an agentic world, we're going to need to actually write down our governance rules and principles and policies as code or as data that those AI agents can understand and provide those guardrails. So they are operating within our guardrails that we set out upfront. But it's definitely a time of massive change in many different aspects of how companies work. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (12:23.278) Yeah, and I think the governance angle will help kind of keep a bounce on it. It can help a CEO or an organization kind of keep bounds on it so that it doesn't kind of return to that sprawl. You know, I would argue that that initial phase of kind of exploration is important and it may be, you know, cost wasteful and resource wasteful, but I think there is an element of brainstorming and creativity that happens so that humans can start to understand what's possible with these tools. And without that kind of playground, I think the worst case scenario is having IT come to you or a strategy team come to you and kind of jam something down here. down your workflow, it's more of this exploration that I see happening with a lot of teams and then corporations coming in and saying, we want you to do this, but here's the tool set to do it. I think that's very... Nick Reed (13:15.286) 100 % agree, 100 % agree. the experimentation aspect is super important. So you don't want to limit the creativity, limit that innovation. And then it's a question of, you know, failing fast on the stuff that's not delivering the impact and value, but then how you transition the stuff that works into, you know, broader adoption. embedding it into the operating model of the enterprise. And that's where this kind of tooling helps to actually give you that perspective of what is the footprint of this new solution going to be and what kind of change is involved in actually adopting it across those teams. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:01.238) Yeah, it's almost like you guys wrote this playbook yourself as a marketing campaign or something, having this big transformation yourself as a transformation company. But what better way to, I guess, eat your own dog food, as we say. Is that American saying? Nick Reed (14:16.213) Yeah, and we are doing that. mean, yeah, or drink your own champagne as an alternative. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:21.272) Drink your own champagne. That's probably a better one. As you guys went through this process yourself, what were the technical and kind cultural challenges that kind of surprised you? Nick Reed (14:35.295) So I think tripling in size and actually more than tripling in headcount is hard. And we knew it wasn't going to be easy. And I think those cultural aspects are actually super important. And I would say that the technical aspects, the technology aspects of merging while not trivial. are not the big thing. And it's definitely about the people, bringing people together. We just had our company kick off last week, got the whole company together in one place. And it was great because you get that energy, the alignment, people making the connections across teams, geographies, know, where different companies that people have come from. And we're now very much in that one team, one operating model, you know. all under one brand. So we've taken huge steps forward over the past year and things like, you know, merging our CRM systems into one, the back office finance systems, that's still in progress. But it feels like we're much more one coherent whole now going forward. And that's pretty powerful. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:51.522) Yeah, well, it's the cultural aspect of that, especially with that many people. think it's a great idea to have in all hands, just getting people to see eyeball to eyeball is something. And then I think everybody probably breathe the collective sigh of relief that they were all there. I know during those types of transitions, you're like, are we going to make it? On the other side of the house, you've got your customer base. You have these three customer bases coming together. I imagine there was some overlap. Nick Reed (16:08.693) Please. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:21.71) amongst the three. How did you protect that customer experience? You obviously had three cultures coming together. How do you deal with that from a customer experience standpoint? Nick Reed (16:34.015) So that's a good question. And, there are some complexities around that and there was and is some overlap between the products that came together in the portfolio. And so now we take very much a solution approach with our customers. thinking about what solutions do they need rather than products, and then we help them identify, you know, what's the best fit of the products in our transformation suite, as we call the collection of these three products now, to meet the needs of the customers. And one of the benefits of coming together is the geographic fit between the companies was actually really nice. So each of the three companies had strengths in different geographies. So Biz Design headquartered in the Benelux was very strong there and the UK. mega international French company, really strong in France, Italy and Latin America, alphabet headquartered in Germany, really strong in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, but also the middle East. And, know, we all had some presence in North America and Asia Pacific, but, you put all that together. We now have really good global coverage. So it really helps with that local customer support, local customer intimacy. When now those customer facing teams. can focus on customer needs but with more options in the kit bag for customers. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (18:10.698) And you mentioned your product suite and you've got a couple of different things in that portfolio. Tell us kind of how they complement each other. Nick Reed (18:19.812) So when we talk about enterprise transformation and what we do, how we help our customers, we're all about helping our customers bridge the strategy to execution gap to accelerate their transformation, increase their chances of success. And we think about transformation as three key pillars, transformation planning, design, and governance, where planning is all about aligning the portfolios of initiatives, applications, technologies in support of those business goals. Transformation design is all about architecting what that future enterprise should look like across business, data, technology, connecting the dots across all those different areas. And transformation governance is all about ensuring you're realizing the benefits of that change in business operations and have the right kind of governance around that transformation. And so the three products, although not pigeonholed into any one of those areas, naturally align with those three pillars of transformation. And of course, with AI becoming more mainstream, we have a lot going on around AI enablement across that suite, but also adding a if you like, connective tissue collaboration layer across those three products to really engage more users who can get more value from the data they already have. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:57.004) Yeah, tell us about that because I see that as, well, one, was one of the reasons you won your award. And two, I see this happening. I spoke with an accounting firm yesterday that did a similar exercise. And that layer across domains really is proving to be one of the most resource efficiencies that they're getting. Nick Reed (20:22.625) So there's a couple of interesting points of research that led us to where we're going right now. And the first was our own customer interviews, talking to customers and non-customers actually, who said, for the kind of stuff we do, historically, a lot of the tooling has been expert tooling. So used by... architects of various different types, business architects, solution architects, technology architects, and of course enterprise architects as a core user base. And many business stakeholders wouldn't really use this kind of tooling. And actually when you look at where transformation starts, it's not purely top down from the C-suite and the strategists, it's also bottom-up emerging from people who are doing day-to-day operations who spot opportunities to improve. And that transformation starts in workshops with sticky notes on the wall or maybe a virtual whiteboard where people are collaborating, throwing ideas around, of mapping it onto the kind of changes that they want to see. And so we identified this kind of disconnect between where transformation starts and where it ends up being analyzed and planned and structured in these more structured architecture tools and repositories. So that's kind of the direction of travel. wanted to bridge that divide and connect all the stakeholders where they can collaborate in a nice kind of easy, engaging, freeform kind of environment for everyone. But importantly, having access to that high quality repository of governed enterprise information. when they want to transform their customer service, for example, they can have the whiteboard, but then say, well, how do we do that today? What processes do we have running? Who's operating those processes? Which technology and data are they using in those processes? And then they can start. Nick Reed (22:38.423) sticky noting around that and architecting that change together so everyone's on the same page upfront. So that's kind of one key bit of research. The second bit is most transformations fail to achieve their objectives. That's kind of well-known 70%, 83 % is the latest number we saw. Yeah, it's hard, but you ask, so, why do most transformations fail? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:59.084) Oof, it's going up. Nick Reed (23:08.221) And there's some interesting studies out there that most transformations fail at the start. So it's a combination of taking too long to get mobilized, just running around for months, trying to find the data to plan the thing in the first place. Second, it's misalignment of stakeholders. So people leave the workshop. Everyone thinks they're on the same page, but they leave with completely different understandings of what they're actually going to do going forward. And the third one is cost and time overruns from emerging impacts and dependencies that were not foreseen upfront. And that's when you get all the rework, the delays and your business case goes out the window. so that's the challenge we're solving. that's how we're kind of moving. That's the direction of travel for business. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (24:03.47) I kind of feel the I've been through several transformations. And I think the most memorable memorable to me was when we outsourced customer service to a third party. And the first thing that we recognize, and I think the business recognizes, they needed to do it. They put the model together. You know, all the stakeholders were yes on board, the budget was aligned, the savings were, you know, outlined and literally like you said that first step was okay let's go through our processes and it was like Where are they? And so the organization had to step back and go, oh no, we got to start over. We need to go now build all these. We need to go review all of them because we had these kind of, we didn't have, we had processes, but we had a lot of kind of these home run scenarios where a single person would fix it because they had institutional knowledge that should have been shared with everybody else. And I'm sure there are lots of common problems, but You're right in that they get started and you instantly get hit with some sort of roadblock that makes you step back, take, you you may have to push that project to a side for a minute and go deal with something for a bit before you even get back to that transformation. And I imagine, you know, that's half of your battle is just getting them prepared. Nick Reed (25:34.899) It's the preparation. It's also those kinds of situations where that customer database we were going to integrate with for the golden source of all that customer information. That's being deprecated next month. There's a whole different thing, you know, we're going to, you know, all that works out, you know, it's kind of the oh shit moment of your transformation where. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (25:52.098) Yow! Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:00.013) Yeah. Nick Reed (26:01.239) the business case is gone and it's tough times. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:05.838) Yeah, I feel like it's like building a house or doing a restoration or something on your house. Your architects come over, your designers come over and everybody comes over and says, it's going to cost you 50 grand, $50,000 or whatever it's going to cost you. But as soon as you get into it, you know there's 30%, 50 % overrun because you didn't know everything. Nick Reed (26:29.111) It's very much like that. And I think the job of enterprise architects is very similar to, you know, building architects. The job is to understand all the demands and the needs and the constraints and find the best trade-offs between what the customer wants and what the customer is actually prepared to pay for and what they have time for and make sure all that work happens in the right order. You know, the key difference in our world from building a building is everything's changing all the time while you're in motion as well. And I think that's the key thing in many ways of our profession is that idea of planning and design and execution while all the moving parts are changing continuously along the way and being able to kind of keep. in sync with all of those changes and adjust as needed as things progress. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:33.362) As we get into this kind of AI, we're now deep into this generative AI world. And now we're in this agentic AI, as I have an AI working in the background over here doing some work on my website. Where do you see the greatest value of AI playing a role in these transformations? Nick Reed (27:44.779) you Nick Reed (27:55.712) So for us, we are definitely rethinking the approach to how we serve our customers and how they will manage their transformations going forward. And just to give you one example, a customer that I was with recently said, the mandate from their board is they should 10x the speed from which they go from an idea or a vision to the value of that thing running in production and really a massive, massive acceleration in how they go through that process of planning, designing, and governing and executing on a transformation. So that requires thinking about what can be automated. How can the data that exists around the enterprise be made available to the people that need it? And obviously generative AI is great for that with natural language, conversational interfaces, making these kinds of insights much more accessible to stakeholders. But we're also thinking about how can we multiply the impact that our users, the architects in these organizations can have in their organizations by increasingly automating the grunt work of what they need to do so they can focus on that high value activity of understanding the needs of their stakeholders, providing that advisory. service around the trade-offs between different options, providing the governance around how new solutions are going to support the business. And so, you know, in our plans, we are building a series of agents that can take on some of that work that the architects do, but isn't necessarily the most value-added work they do to free up their time to do more of that high-value Nick Reed (30:17.033) impactful work. So we're not just kind 10xing the speed, but we're 10xing the coverage of those teams to support more transformation in the enterprise. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (30:28.62) Yeah, everybody I'm talking to is saying the same thing. It's not about replacing jobs. It's about doing more with the same amount of people we have. And I'm sure there will be some position shifts, but we need people. those companies want all the gains and productivity gains and dollar gains they can get out of this. So they have the budget for those people. Nick Reed (30:53.493) Yeah, and I mean, it's we're in we're in very exciting times. And this is one of those huge inflection points that's probably similar in nature to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of computing. So fascinating and, you know, very exciting times to be living in, you know, kind of potentially scary as well, because we just don't really know what the full impact is going to be. But It's exciting to be in the middle of it for sure. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (31:24.556) Yeah, give us a sense of kind of a before and after of one of your transformations. It doesn't have to be a giant one, but give us, you don't have to use any names either. Just kind of a sense of like, kind of where did they start and where did they end up? Nick Reed (31:40.376) That's a good question. think about energy. There's a bunch of oil companies out there who've spent over 100 years taking oil out of the ground and refining it and selling it in gas stations. And that as a business model is not going to sustain those companies going forward. So They need to drastically transform those organizations to do different things, to become more green energy partners, for example, building wind farms, solar farms. What do they do with that four-core retail space if they're to have less gas stations? So it's, know, how do they transform the retail operation? How do they transition from traditional energy grids to smart energy networks where households are contributing energy back to the network from their own solar panels. How do they manage the pricing and billing and rebates on all that stuff? So that's just one example of the kind of fundamental transformation that many companies are going through today. Think about automotive as well, going from the combustion engine, building physical things to electric engines and having much more of a real time sensor information for a digital twin of that vehicle where you can start thinking about predictive maintenance or self driving cars, for example. These are all sectors going through very rapid transformation. And you look at the whole kind of professional services space around legal consulting. generative AI is going to have massive impact on all forms of knowledge work. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (33:39.532) Well, and you guys seem to be helping everybody through these transitions. And I think a lot of times we get stuck into architectures and automations and everything. And we have to step back and realize, A, we're doing it for people, our own employees. We're also doing it for our customers, who are generally people. Everything we do on Earth is generally for people. What leadership principles kind of drove your methodology in dealing with these principles and dealing with these people? Nick Reed (34:14.084) Ultimately, it's customer focus. know, we are here, we exist to create value from our customers and we will be successful if they are successful. If what we deliver to them in terms of our software products and our services enables them to create value, they will continue investing. And if we don't, they'll vote with their feet. So I think customer centricity, customer focus and maintaining that focus on customer value is the kind of guiding principle behind all of this. And when we approached this three-way merger, we absolutely did it from that customer perspective as much as possible to really look at, okay, the steps we take, how does that improve the customer experience, the value our customers can get from the things we do. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (35:09.294) And so if I'm a COO or a CIO watching this and I'm thinking about my legacy business and transforming it, what's the step or two I could take now to kind of ensure that I've got a smooth launch into getting this off the ground? Nick Reed (35:29.493) So. Getting busy with running experiments around AI, I think, is really important. Any organization that's not running experiments is running the risk of being left behind. One crucial thing about AI models is they need context to improve their reasoning. So that could be when you... want to write something, you provide a bunch of files for your tone of voice, the kind of subject matter that improves the responses you get from those AI models. When you put that into an enterprise transformation context, having that information about the assets of the enterprise and how they relate to each other and all of those dependencies between them is great context for these AI models to give better answers about how the enterprise may change to deliver better insights to those users. And of course, you know, we have that repository of those enterprise models and all the relationships between the moving parts of the enterprise to provide that context to these models. so, you know, having a model context protocol server that these enterprise AI tools can connect to to get that context we see as an important part of what we're doing going forward. And of course, we want to be able to take advantage of that ourselves, building our own agents to help as well. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (37:07.037) Russ Fordyce 🏆 (37:12.27) Yeah, that the MCP couldn't come soon enough, could it? It's really that secret sauce that's going to make all this work. I have a hard enough time explaining AI to people and how it's really predictive. And now I have to explain that this is really just an API. And then they say, what is an API? Well, very interesting, Congratulations again on the win and all the success and the merger and that transformation. Nick Reed (37:16.174) Thank you. Nick Reed (37:33.549) Yeah. Nick Reed (37:39.319) Thank you. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (37:42.414) Not easy to do, you know to transform and to run a transformation business at the same time But congratulations on the win and and we look forward to seeing all the great success that you guys have next year Nick Reed (37:53.228) Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. It's been a great pleasure.