• • Dennis Hodges, Chief Information Officer, Inteva Products, LLC
  • Ronald Blahnik, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Hibbett

Transcript (Bringing Business and IT Together to Deliver Digital)

Advertisement: Welcome to CTN CIO talk network with your host Sanjog Aul, all comments, views and opinions expressed on this show are strictly those of the host guests and callers. Now here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog: Hello, and welcome to CTN, to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com and the topic today is Bringing Business And IT Together To Deliver Gigital. What do I mean by that? So you are trying to scale and accelerate your digitalization efforts, and you’re trying to rethink many of the elements that’s involved, you might be trying to figure out while we have been always talking about business and IT alignment, but here we are talking conversion, you’re trying to talk whether at the business side or on the IT side, bring the two types of workers together, let them talk together, let them solve problems together, let them learn and adopt the newer and the latest and greatest technologies together and in fact, as one family also deal with uncertainties together. So our organization’s fully cooked yet in this area where are they? What are the related challenges and the remedies that we can think of, which would help build that one cohesive unit of one family between the business and IT and to discuss this, we have Dennis Hodges, Chief Information Officer in Inteva Products, hey Dennis, how are you?

Dennis: Fine, thank you.

Sanjog: Great! great to have you and we also have Ronald Blahnik Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) with Hibbett Sports.

Hey Ronald, how are you, sir?

Ronald: Nice to see you all.

Sanjog: Great, great to have you. So Dennis, let’s start with you, I mean you know, digital, whenever we talk digital, it means you’re fundamentally thinking IT almost like exploiting its own, you know, value and or exploiting its potential, that is, IT is the very foundation and at the same time, we also know, and we should know and we should consider digital as a digital initiative for it to be successful. So while on the digital, the coolness side business shows a lot of excitement, but are they equally excited in understanding and recognizing and supporting IT which is the very foundation so that IT gets to do what it is supposed to do to make digital a reality.

Dennis: Well, I’m just glad that no one’s traveling right now because the executives are not reading the travel magazines that always have some article about how you could change things. So that just getting around but basically I think the business teams, you know, within an organization in between organizations have your early adopters, your fast followers, I’ve got that inside my organization, I’ve got some people that see the promise, and I’ve got some people that wouldn’t be the last in line. So what we try to do with them is, this work with those ones that want to do it first, get the excitement that they have, get something in place, then show everyone and it’s amazing how quickly everyone else wants to fall in line with the idea.

Sanjog: So, given what is going on right now, so Ronald, when you look at your organization and you see, the business trying to go in a given direction, some people, some of the leaders might hear something at the golf course, if they do golfing, or they would find something else, which is cool, and they come to you and the hallway conversations could potentially become expectations, but do they put the money where their mouth is and, or their sponsorship and support.

Ronald: Well, I think in our case, yes and yes, first of all, when they bring me ideas, I’m not the organization of no, I am the organization of how and so, my goal in working with my business partners is to provide the influence, so get excited that they’re coming to you with ideas, getting excited about the things that they’re seeing and the things that they want to try, find the proper mode or method to do that as a proof of concept and a skunkworks, or some sort of a digital pilot but investigate and do that collaboratively. I think one of the things the pandemic has driven for us is the higher use of digital plant or collaboration tool and so in that we’ve had to get together in virtual rooms to discuss things, things that would have in the past, probably been a drive-by or an email or a memo now are actually getting all the right people on the phone to have to have a conversation, a dialogue about where we want to go together and so sponsorships, but extremely high our business leaders wants our business partners to own the initiatives, they do not want IT the only initiatives, that’s a big transformation for us in the digital transformation was saying IT is not going to lead it, it’s going to enable it and so I put our business partner square in the center seat of understanding what they were asking for and being articulated as opposed to just sort over the wall and see what I can come up with and so those days are gone collaboration is the play and you had mentioned in your, in your leading the idea of how we get together to solve problems,  IT is a part of that without question, they’re a thought leader in that space, but ultimately we’re doing it, not for IT sake but for business sake. Is there a business value outcome? Are we going to drive the right behaviours? Will it enhance our customer experience? If we can’t answer yes to those two or three questions, we probably to be spending time on it.

Sanjog: So Dennis, besides business doling out those great ideas, cool ideas and saying, yes, I am willing to work with you, are they literally outsourcing that thinking and reimagining effort to IT? Or are they looking to grow themselves in this new digital realm and to kind of start thinking the digital experiences, what do you see as the evolution of the business looking like the business constituents, if you will.

Dennis: Well, in our world, in the industry, I mean, which is automotive suppliers, it’s, a pretty conservative world and most of the product lines and, you know, the function is really every day being survival mode in some ways? So, you know, I feel like I’m the hand reaching down to help pull someone up to that level, you know, digitalization and understanding what we can do and my company looks at me to do that, so, you know, I think what, you know, Ronald mentioned skunkworks, things like that starting small projects, I find them, sometimes the executive in that group may or may not even really know about it, it’s just not that big a project, but it’s something to get the ball started, we’ve done that with several projects and it turned into a massive success on the shop floor where you find that one plant manager that understands systems and system thinking, work with them and then the ones that really were not interested see the benefit and then they want it. So I’m a big believer in that process, I’ve been doing this for 35 years now, and that’s certainly a better way than trying to force something down their throat or waiting for them is, if you wait for somebody to give you an idea, they may have already gone somewhere  else, you know because they hear the same vendors, you know, basically robotic process automation, some of the big ERP’s are very good at finding the executives in business lines and trying to talk directly to them. So my job in a way and while you may have worked at a company I used to work with, because they were to say no IT group, so my view is just like theirs, ours is not the no, it’s the how can we do?

Sanjog: So Ron, when you listen to Dennis, where he mentioned that he truly has to carry the book, not the burden, but the responsibility of getting things moving or getting things crystallized beyond the very idea shared by the business folks. Let’s look at your organization where you mentioned that they are very wholeheartedly sponsoring it,but then we don’t want IT people to be those tired Hercules’ who just one initiative after another and the speed at which they keep dropping on our lap keep increasing to be bogged down with fatigue and with everything on our plates, so have you seen business saying, you know what, don’t worry, Ron, I’ll have your back, I will step up, or if they’re not, are you doing anything to help them muster that courage and confidence to say I will co-create, I will reimagine along with you.

Ronald: Again, it’s a very collaborative process here at Hibbett, because I’ve got really bright forward thinking business partners, for me, it’s a pleasure, we’ve got some great talented teams on both sides of the house. Everybody brings a different skill, our business partners do a fair amount of their own homework upfront and trying to figure out the direction they want to go. We’re strategically aligned, we’re borderline and we run a pretty tight portfolio, so there’s only so much money to go around, there’s, those things that drive the greatest return on investment, there’s resources as a constraint and so what are we going to work on, and what order to make sure that we live strong and healthy we’re not burning people out. I will tell you that digitization has really increased the pace, I think my portfolio is more than tripled in the last two years, but I’ve also gotten financial support to make and bring people together and the right resources together, whether they’re inside or outside the company to make good things happen and so we are very much return on investment driven, we’re very much customer focused, we’ve got a good, strong mission that leads us to where we want to go. It’s all about now trying to create the environment for everybody to be allow for a successful within that, so I’ve got a great partnership.

Sanjog: So Ron would) you give all the credit or you’ll just say you’re (playing lucky or you would give some credit to yourself for having groomed your business people to step up to that level, that they can start thinking digital and be your, the best buddy, if you will, to help take this journey together.

Ronald: Well, first of all, while it is often the how, and it’s often the manner in which we’ll do it, I also have to share and provide a fair amount of influence and so that influence is driven towards the understanding what my business partners are really seeing and showing them a method to achieve that. Sometimes you can’t get the whole basket in one pole, sometimes you got to break it up a little bit and move it into the right place at the right time, so, helping people understand and align on those things are something that I do and can do. Would I give myself total credit? Nope, would I give myself even partial credit, I give myself credit for being a kind of business partner I would want and so if I was in their shoes, what would I want from IT? And while, and if my answer was everything on yielding and at my pace, then I really have very good business partner and business partner looks to seek demands the challenges on both sides of the fence and tries to achieve an outcome that ultimately will help the business succeed and there were just to grow stronger.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listeners, we’ll be right back after these messages and Dennis, when we come back, let’s look at the very way digital comes into being, because it is, digital is such a vast subject, if you will and if you have to get that, getting introduced into an organization you have to go bite-size and when you do bite-size and it’s too small people while will take notice, but will not be moved enough and if you tried to do way too much, then you’re going to disrupt the regular day-to-day working, how do you identify what is just about enough and how do you justify the, or kind of calculate or demonstrate the ROI, which is just about enough that the business leaders will say, ok, I will let my team people hobnobbing or network or co-create with the IT counterparts to make digital happen. How are you pulling this off, please set your listeners, we’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so Dennis, digital taken in small bites might not give enough own for enough ROI, demonstrable ROI for you to get the teams to disrupt from the regular day working and if you try to do too much, you may, there never get funding or people would not even want to start. So how do you pull something like this? Or how do you even tackle this challenge that we may have?

Dennis: Well, let me use an example that I have that happened recently, Robotic process automation, no tools, automating tools, we had a number of projects that spanned across the business, the good thing was rather than having 20 projects for AR or AP or supply chain what we tried to do was narrow it down so that there were a small number in each area, but it was big enough to fund the initial one and we could show the ROI, we could show the playback in the cost benefit analysis without, you know, one scaring people that RPA was going to take everybody’s job and, you know, just also show that we could do this incrementally now, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, when you do a new ERP or something like that, that’s where you’ve got a much longer sales pitch and, you know, you may take six months just, you know, finding those people in the business that you know, would benefit from something, getting them on board because you know, like we thought the offline leadership is really the key to driving in technology, you know, I’ve never seen technology able to drive leadership in the right direction. You know, you can get in a car with a hundred miles an hour with autopilot on, but are you going to end up where you wanted to be? You know, so that’s kind of my take on that one, so again, I think that, you know, you start a simile and you start small and it almost turns into that snowball rolling down the hill just grows and grows and again, you got to be able to keep it between the ditches at that point is your main job.

Sanjog: So Ron, in your case, granted, you have the blessing from the top, but I’ll just come down a level down, which is your business unit leaders. They are essentially being measured on how they get a business unit to perform and yes, they could definitely benefit from infusion of digital and maybe even have a mandate from the boss, which is your executive management to get certain things done but an everyday, they are still watching to see that nothing that they do disrupts in a significant manner, whatever they have going in us with stability and here you come as a technology leader, excited about a project, even though you and Dave were in the same room, but when it comes to execution, there could be a tug of war or there could be a passive or an active resistance to say, I’m not going to let my teams spend endless hours, IDA team doing white boarding, where they could be doing whatever they’re supposed to do in your day job. What have you done? Like you smoothing the road with executive management to also get these business unit leaders by your side, so that there’s less friction there.

Ronald: Well, two things, and I’ll start with Dennis example of an ERP, we are now presently implementing HR finance, payroll ERP for the company, it’s a heavy lift, no question about it, what are the best price for getting there? Well, go in as vanilla as possible, find the right match for your company, and then don’t try and customize it the way it used to work. You learn how to use it the way it works today and change your business process) and in doing that and for our company our head of HR and the head of finance both of the executive sponsors, so it (originally was suspicious- Ron’s going to own this project would it end up being before we’d got to final ROI was the business leaders on the project, Ron’s helping them deliver it and so that allowed us to work together. We did a lot of things throughout that process, I could do a whole session just on doing an ERP, but that’s a big bite, right? What we tend to do is on everything else other than the EPS is called under promise over deliver. So break it down into smaller bites, be bold, right? Find your ROI, classify and rank those first, because what ends up killing most projects) has kind of been floor is the pile on effect. So someone had a good idea to do this and give us a good, nice million dollar return on investment by the time all the ideas got added to it, right?  The ROI was gone and so the idea is find out what the minimum lift is to give you the maximum ROI and then decide whether or not that last five, 10% of ROI is worth the triple digit, a millions of investment to get it, right? It’s the difference between being a tier three data centre or a tier four data centre, a tier five data centre, you measure those in mega millions. But if you’re a tier three data centre, you’re probably good enough for most lines of business, unless you had, you know, the NSA or DOJ or something like that, so alphabet soup. So for us under promise, over deliver, be bold look for the ROI, don’t let hangers-on, talk about phase two for additional value if someone can justify it and make sure everybody is aligned all the way up to the board, our board sees our portfolio I present it every quarter) and so they get a chance to see what we’ll work on and they give advice as well. When we came up for review of the portfolio this last quarter, they said, I want the portfolio portion for ERP to be presented by the business sponsors from HR and finance, Ron, I’d just like you to just go ahead and comment if you have questions or if you feel like there’s (infamy 21:18) that was the board telling and reinforcing our senior leadership, our CEO’s statement, that business owns the process) and they must own the initiative and the cost and the impact if it fails and so that’s brought us together much closer as a leadership team knowing we’re helping each other win.

Sanjog: So Dennis, based on Ron’s response, a question pops up digital is not about, again, just the same old, same old you’re rethinking, you’re reimagining, and you might have to wear your Steve Jobs hat and since you’re not the CEO, because Steve Jobs was, he could call the shots a hundred percent, you would still have to go to the boss and the boss is always looking at hard ROI, how would you ever get those, not truly a futuristic, but projects, which don’t show immediate ROI, but they could definitely be a great gamble, if I were to use that word to really get your (quantum What do you, do you even go that route to try to be a Steve Jobs or like Ron, you mentioned that, you know, there’s a hard ROI requested for each of them and I’ll come to you about that too? But Dennis, I wanted to ask you this question, have you ever tried to go play Steve Jobs and get accepted on the potential ROI versus harder ROI?

Dennis: Well to start with discipline, my son went by saying, this is I’ve never wanted to be a Steve Jobs, because he’s kind of a term I won’t use on the radio but I understand what you’re saying as far as, you know, being bold, you know, thinking about the big ideas that may be initially hard to show return that long-term good, again, I really think it gets back to relationship you know the person you’re trying to convince has to believe that you and the others that are involved really understand the business and you understand where we’re trying to go to as a company because, our old CEO just retired a new one was their sales VP, he’s got a little bit different perspective and he’s quite a bit younger because we got just retired, but you know, his mind-set is we’re data-driven and so he is willing to listen to new things that eight months ago would’ve been a lot harder to bring up to the table because they would’ve just, it might’ve been just, you know, stopped at that point. So knowing your audience, I think is really important to try and to sell  something. Now a little inside in TIVA, IT runs at about 1% of revenue, so we are not the ones out there trying to champion the, you know, the no payback for five years on a project, but we are out there trying to show, you know, what can make improvements, we brought zoom in, in 2014, it was the same price as the audio conferencing we used, but we didn’t have people clamouring for video, over the last year and a half everybody’s so happy we have this tool in place. We didn’t have to go out and bring it in, we already had it. We were already doing some remote work one day a week, so the you know, that big switch when people didn’t come in March of 2020, we were able to keep running and we spent a total of $14,000 about one more firewall so we could do VPN for people to come in. So, you know, I know that Google was looking at a thousand dollars a user that’s 119,000 people to be able to make the work from home project work out, you know, it’s all about thinking ahead and you’re trying to see the future, even though you can be very quick

Sanjog: So Ron, coming back to you about that hard ROI thing, I wanted to kind of pose the similar question the only thing is not every project would be that dreamy project, so of course you will earn your stripes by delivering some of those hard ROI projects but do you get any play money for those dream projects because you earned them.

Ronald: I pitch for things that make sense that are aligned with what the business outcome we seek, I am responsible for strategy innovation and research so yeah, I get, some small monies to work there, those have to be spent very well. I also have strong vendor community there’s very little that I haven’t wanted to investigate or do that I haven’t been able to find a partner that was willing to do that with me on their nickel. They had genius people working for them, they’ve got engineers and analysts and PhDs and they love a challenge, like something like that, I’ve done enormous efforts for relatively small dollars just for the opportunity for them to play out in 1100 stores, all right, so they do something in my lab and the potential out of that, maybe a one in 10 that they actually get something that works and we want to go all the way out to the chain, that’s the price they’re looking for, so they see the long-term, they’re investing in the potential of an opportunity. I definitely play that with my vendors to make sure that there’s investment there and then as far as you know, well, everything has an ROI, no, some things are just mandatory and regulatory there’s things we do in the security space that someone say your ROI is not being hacked, I tell the board virtually every quarter, it’s not a matter of if it’s a matter of when and the depth, the defence in-depth strategy I’ve implemented has cost the company a good deal of money, no question about it, someone would say every day, where’s my payback, it’s in the environment you’re operating in and it’s in the associates confidence that their data isn’t going to be stolen and that their company’s looking out for them both personally and professionally. So there are lots of opportunities, the thing is find the right angle and Dennis said it best, if you don’t understand your audience, don’t start the conversation, what resonates for me and what I think about what keeps me up at two in the morning, it’s not necessarily the same thing that resonates specifically with the CEO, my peers or the board, what does re resonate with them is how can I apply what I’m thinking to an outcome that the business is focused on? If it’s something I can tie to a customer experience, it’s going to get to the ears, they’re going to listen to it. If I can make an associate in the store five minutes more productive a day, someone say, well, that’s not much change the time of that by 365 times 1100, now you’re talking about real money and so it’s not hard to find our line what’s hard is sometimes wrapping the analytics behind it when all the things that are delivered come to fruition, which one actually drove the ROI and so you have to do that and build that as part of the project. So for me, if I hear the word, no, I didn’t ask the right question and I didn’t present it in the right manner, that’s the way I think about it.  Sometimes it’s not now, it’s when, right? So you can do the same thing I can do as well but if I’m hearing flat nose, I’m not thinking right,

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break,  listeners we’ll be right back and Ron let’s continue our conversation on another topic, which is very much important is agility because which is one of the mantras every business has today and digital also in a way, promises, agility have done right. At the same time if you were to look at, we are trying to keep your organization fit for now and fit for the future, which means both business and IT people should learn together and be able to assimilate all the knowledge that we get and evolve as individuals and as groups. But since we want to get things done yesterday, one project after another, sometimes it is you know, totally, crazy, if you will, if I were to use the crew term here, in the spirit of agility, what do you do while we achieve agility to not sacrifice the individual growth, both on the business and IT side, so that  they evolve and as a result, we build that organization that’s fit for today and for the future, how do you go about striking that balance? Please stay tuned listeners we’ll be right back.

 Sanjog: Welcome back, so Ron, when you look at agility we want to move fast and pivot and turn on a dime and everything else that digital would expect from us, or we would expect while working on the digital initiatives, as well as, even as business as usual, we want to be nimble and agile, all that said, we also have a responsibility to help get our people to grow both on business and IT side, and also have them work together and make sure as a result of that, the outcome of it would be not that you’re doing digital for today, but for the future. How do you strike this balance where you tell business I will get the project done yesterday and still not burn out people and still allow the learning and assimilation to continue to happen between both and business and IT groups?

Ronald: Well, for us, it’s because of the collaborative nature of work and because digital, if you think about e-commerce where most people’s mind goes to they deliver in 2, 4, 8 weeks’ sprints, a major release eight weeks, the old waterfall approach in IT says the miracle will occur here and that’s usually 9 to 12 months out but those days are gone, there are certain things where that makes sense, you’re doing an ERP incrementally build tenants, and then you roll them but the idea is the beginning to end of our ERP journey will be about 15 months all and that’ll be pretty fast by comparison to averages. But on the digital side we’re releasing stuff literally every week, we got multiple teams running, a breakneck speed, to your point. One of the things that we’ve done, we’ve done a couple of things, one is we’ve developed a training and learning programs for our associates, particularly our technical technology folks to career path them to where digital is going to require them to go, we make that a part of their job and we tell them that they have to spend X number of hours per week in training and the idea there is to help them help themselves and also help the company. The second thing that we’ve done and I contributed as much to learning as anything is immersion, so our IT people don’t sit on a divided wall away from our business partners, we sit sometimes right in the same cube areas they do. If we’re working on the  DCF I want my people stationed at the DC, then you’d understand what distribution all about, the challenge that they face every day and that means you’re going unload a truck, you load a truck, you put product, you pack product, you manifest, you do the paperwork, you understand the ins and the outs, if you understand, and take time to understand a business from any business or user’s perspective, you’ll come away with a thousand ideas of how we could have made that better The idea that we thought that that was a business process or a SOP that needed to be written and ultimately we’d find out that could have been automated to 50, to 80% of the workload we’re putting on our users. We do the same thing with stores, now we require folks to go shop stores, not that they have to buy, although we enjoy that they buy and they get a huge discount if they do, but the idea is that you don’t understand what your customers are going through and what your associates are going through and trying to serve the customers. You’re not doing the right things in the digital world when you’re trying to merge both e-commerce and brick and mortar channels that becomes paramount in understanding how does the associate best serve a customer who is shopping a small mobile device and how do they connect that cart that they may have started online and wish lists online to a full basket in store and increased sale. Those are some of the challenges, what it’s done for our associates and what I hear the feedback is they’re happier now because they get to be a part of the business, as opposed to, they felt at one point to be a victim out.

Sanjog: So Dennis, when you look at your organization, have you been able to, what I call is a constructively slow down for you to calibrate because sometimes business would want to go at a warp speed, but that to be, to do, they will do so at their own peril and if you tried to slow them down, if at all you tried that, did you get a pushback? How do you handle that part? How do you calibrate the speed at which the business should run to adopt and embrace digital, to get the most value while not killing the whole learning potential and business and it working together potential?

Dennis: Well, know, like Ron, we embed our people, not necessarily physically, but figuratively in the business. I’ve got about 120 people in our team, there’s only about 15 to 20 that is actually in their corporate office. The rest of the 120 are at a site, you know, a production site, tech centre, you name it and I would say that most of them feel like they’re as much a part of the business as anyone else in the plant, for example, the plant IT people officially reports to the plant manager, that chain, they get direction from me and they get direction of where we’re going but I think that way they feel a part of the team and you know, the idea that a lot of our IT folks in the plant, they know what it’s like to go out and fix a problem on the shop so, and you know, our other area we’re a little different than Ron is that we don’t have, you know,  direct sales to the consumers, we go through about, you know, 20 to 50 OEMs, you know, that we’re selling part too that sell cars and trucks, we have huge engineering presence, we design in cooperation, in collaboration with our customers, in a lot of sense, you know, especially if it’s an area that we’re very good at, like some of our interior products, our instrument panels and our dashboards, we bring a lot of technology there, which is really, you know, become very important in the real world, the old, I guess, Jay Leno joke of the 1955, Buick, whatever with the steel dashboard, you know, we don’t have that more leather, it’s stitching, it’s illuminated, stitching all things we’ve been able to bring to the party and then the technology behind it, you know, it was always been done in collaborations that how to make that better, how to make it more effectively, less scrap and ends up making it less costs rest to produce it. The scrap and waste are our enemies that if we can reduce that, that’s a dollar for dollar to the bottom line, that’s where we really try to focus and when we do that, we’ve been able to gate the activity, I think, fairly well, we don’t have a big team, but our operations teams are not that big either, I mean, they’re stretched to the max every day, so it’s not really been a problem we’ve seen it as far as, you know, people trying to push faster than we can run.

Ronald: I guess I’d add to that because of the digital nature of the efforts we’re working on today, it’s nothing’s big bang anymore, it’s all features, right? And so what we’ll do is we call it, it’s called box card, right? So there’s only so much that can fit in a box car on a train, it’s finite, right? If I’ve got 10 things, I’m going to try to accomplish in our next sprint and Beethoven kit , get there with high quality and two of them cant, the two get moved to the next box car and we have that discussion about, okay, you’ve got eight or 10 features are on time, on budget with quality, two of them got kicked in the next one and here’s why, that’s becomes a very positive conversation as opposed to, oops, we’re not going to deliver anything and in digital, that’s not an option, you’re going to deliver something. The question is, what feature set are you going to deliver? And so sometimes we get a little bit our call out over our skis and things in terms of the number of features we may want to fit in a box car or someone is using the old shoe horn technique and try to get something else in there generally, what does is it causes things to cause it to tip over, right? It’s just a little bit too much and now the rest of the deliverables suffer and so we’ve gotten pretty good at measuring what we can and can’t get done and if we learn something along the way we check and adjust, that’s a very transparent, sprung technique every morning, what did we find out yesterday? What are we going to do about today? And if it’s something that’s going to be a barrier to delivery, let’s talk about what’s the right thing to do to save the most features for this release and then we moved from there, that’s agility and business partner, acceptance and responsibility and participation in that is essential for it to work well.

Sanjog: So, let’s take a quick break listener, when we come back, Ron, question for you is going to be that while there are some heroes in the company, and then you being the top leader, you come with that responsibility that you have to lead the charge and maybe business unit leaders too but there are regular people who may not have signed up for this crazy excitement, if you will, right? Because things are moving fast, things are new, things are changing all the time because you want to keep pushing ahead, which means something needs to inspire them, versus them working under the fear of a potential job loss if they don’t listen to whatever is being told by the boss or by the management, what do you do? Whether as a technology leader or working alongside the business leader to paint a picture or to show a holy grail or something else so that you become a pied Piper and people willingly follow you to that digital Zen, if you will, please stay tuned listeners we’ll be right back.

 Sanjog: Welcome back, be the piped piper Ron, show the digital Zen to the management and allow your people, the regular mortal souls to have a life so that they can live to work, actually not live to work, work, to live. How do you do that?

Ronald: Well, for our organization and for my team, just like I have to know my audience when I’m speaking to the CEO or the board, I have to know I’m honest when I’m speaking to my team, understanding what’s important to them and you mentioned that, you know, a balance of life, right? Most of the folks in my organization are excited about the digital trends they certainly are excited about the learning of new technologies, you know, it used to be five years later,say, when can you send me to class, right? Because I need to learn something new, I don’t hear that anymore, I’m learning something new every day. So it’s been by experience that if you come to the table with a charge, right?  30% of your staff are going to run, run right at it and run right with you, don’t no need for explanation if you think it’s the right idea, I’m with you a hundred percent as 30% or the next 30% will say listen, I’m happy to go along the journey with you, help me understand what’s in it for the company and more importantly, what’s in it for me and then there’s probably that lighting 30% that says, listen, I read for not to change, but unfortunately, in the digital world, that’s really not an option, there is going to be change, but one of the things I have been able to do is we have folks within our teams that are very good at what I would call support day-to-day maintenance, they carry the ball, they keep us call KTL people, we have some folks who’ve migrated to those roles, it’s what they know best is what they like to do, they like to solve the problem every day, the thing that’s broken every day, they go home and feel very good about that and I’ve got a part of the organization that wants to be on a journey that they know is not really going to end, every day is going to bring some new challenges, they’re going to have to learn, they got to grow it and they’re going to have to stretch, so helping people find the right role for them and right fit, so it doesn’t become a yes, or else, the idea is to try and help people find the right fit for them when we talk about people joining Wellstalked about finding your fit and so this is true within the digital world as well. Whatever the role has to be, whether it’s in dev ops, sec ops, day-to-day main supportive legacy systems, ERP, or out on the front lines of creating something new or an innovative in the digital space, I’m just happy to have a broad buy-in thing that wants to engage in at every level. Some of that is leadership Dennis mentioned it earlier, I will, say that, I’m not the leader that goes out and waves the flag, I definitely show people where the water is, I show them that there’s an opportunity for the drink, I definitely do share the value to the business because everything I present to my people is a business value and so when I think about IT, I run it as a business, there’s an ROI, there is a bottom line , there is the cost to do business, there is cost of innovation  there is cost to investment and my people are at the center of all of that.

Sanjog: So, Dennis, what have you done so that there is an intrinsic motivation, which is kindled among your staff versus you having to, I’m sure you don’t hammer it down, but at least, you know, the extrinsic motivations are short-lived, but you want them to be inspired for good, if not for life.

Dennis: Well, one of my direct reports has a quote that he puts at the end of his email and it’s from Harry Truman, I mean, he based in Mexico, so it’s kind of unusual, he quotes Harry Truman, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit. I think that is such a positive because you find groups that want the credit, you find people don’t want to walk with them anymore, but if you’re willing to say, you know, it was done and here’s the people that worked on it and they did an outstanding job that draws people in as, you know, encouraging and a welcoming approach.  I think that really worked and, you know, like Ron said, you’re always going to have a certain number of people that just want to be part of what’s getting done and then some others just got to explain it to them, the challenge and I think, we’ve been fortunate at that last 30, that is, you know, I don’t know about this is, so many of the  IT people that work for me are at these facilities, when they see day to day, the little tweak that they made do sitting here with the old fashioned stereo, where you’re not using your remote demands, you, but you have to knobs you turn it a little bit and you see how things improve. You know, I go back to when I one of my previous jobs, I was controller in Korea, we had a plastics plant that could run more efficiently than any plan we had anywhere in the world, no one believed how efficient it was, though they came and saw it and what it was those engineers that manage that process would sit there and learn if that 90 seconds in I’ll do this, you know, 110 seconds, I’d do a little of that, that they could actually improve the process. I mean, they were making better products in a little less time when anyone else could, I’ve always tried to use that as you know, again, that small tune to the knob, you know, if you tried to crank it to volume 11 right off the bat, you’re going to scare people off. So, I think it is building that encouraging inclusive environment.

Sanjog: Once again, thank you so much, Dennis and Ron, for sharing your thoughts on how organizations, leaders, both IT and business can collaborate, get your middle managers work together and so do your field staff and make it such an organization where you’re all pushing towards that digital Zen, if you will, but at the same time, everybody learns and grows. So thanks so much again for all your tips and insights.

Dennis: Thank you.

Sanjog: And listeners, please connect with us on social media and subscribe to our podcasts, once again thank you for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul, till the next week take care and God bless.

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