Editor’s note: Nader Qaimari, Chief Product Officer at ISACA, was interviewed by ISACA CEO David Samuelson on 7 May in a LinkedIn Live discussion on ISACA’s digital transformation and how it is supporting the evolving learning resources for ISACA’s professional community. The following is an excerpt from the conversation. Watch the full LinkedIn Live recording here.
DS: What are some of the most important factors that have guided the decisions that you’ve made in terms of our digital transformation for our product development?
NQ: One of the main things is scalability. We needed to move to more unified platforms and unified processes, and make sure that we can actually build the foundation that would allow us to scale and start developing products more quickly. And then we also had to think about products and services that can scale globally, so making sure our technology would support translation capabilities, multiple language user interfaces and things of that nature. COVID kind of forced us to accelerate things a little bit, but even pre-COVID, we had really started doing a lot of things to reach those objectives in moving to a single platform and starting to build products on that platform.
DS: Every time you do any kind of transformation, there’s a lot of change management. … What are some of the pain points that you think we’ve gone through in trying to move to a more modern architecture and more modern delivery for some of our products and services?
NQ: When you’re building products and trying to do these really full-scale, large solutions, a lot of times you have to rely on partnerships and vendors, and other technologies that plug into your technology. It’s a pain point in the sense that you have to do it, but it’s one that you overcome, just finding the level of integration that needs to happen to make sure the user experience is seamless and fluid. A lot of times you are expecting a certain set of requirements when working with a vendor and sometimes those requirements aren’t met, so it’s really figuring out how to navigate beyond that and still delivering that user experience that your community is expecting.
DS: Can you share some of our thinking about how we can become more accessible in more ways when we think about the way learning is going?
NQ: Learning really is a science. It needs to be studied and it needs to be researched. Really understanding your demographics in who you are serving and who you are trying to serve is extremely important, and then from that you start developing the solutions. For us, we still feel like print and narrative content has a place, but it’s more about what companies are requiring in terms of skill sets. We really want to make sure that people can apply skills. … We want to get people up to speed using performance-based learning labs, and we also want to make learning interesting and fun. Gamification has become a buzzword, but it’s really about bringing competition into things. We’re big in cybersecurity, so hackathons, red team vs. blue team scenarios, etc. are what we want to offer because they’re exciting and interesting, and they make learning fun. It will continue to evolve.