• • Bhavana Devulapally, Senior Vice President & Chief Information Office, Ventas
  • Maurice Ferrell, Assistant Dean & CIO, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- School of Government

Transcript (Building an Elastic, People-Centric Business, Focused on Now)

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 & welcome to CTN, to learn more about the show, please visit, www.ciotalketwork.com and the topic today is, ‘Building An Elastic People Centric Business, which is focused on now’, so  we want our)  business to be resilient more now than ever, which can bounce back from all the disruptions and adversities, which we have seen in past  year. You also want that business to be able to stay relevant so that whatever they are doing today for their customers and all partners and stakeholders, it allows them to stay sustainable and profitable and then the reason we want to talk about relevance, but not in just future, we’re not going to talk about staying relevant now because future is uncertain as we all know and to that end, should we just go ahead and focus on digital technologies, go remote, start using AI and automation, promote self-service, all the things that you may have heard about and then rationalize that’s the word I would use versus discard rationalize any people, processes and technology that don’t fit the current agenda, so we become that rootless organization, or could we become a resilient organization, which is focused on now and which is trying to focus on relevance, but also stay people centric. Am I asking too much? Are we asking too much from a business? If you can do it, how do you pull that off? So to discuss this, we have Bhavana Devulapally, who is the Chief Information Office with Ventas, hey Bhavana, how are you?

Bhavana: Thanks Sanjog, how are you?

Sanjog Good, amazing to have you and we also have Maurice Ferrell, who’s the Assistant Dean & CIO with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- School of Government,

Hey Maurice. How’s that? Maurice. Can you hear us?

Maurice:  Life is great. I hope you are well, sorry about that.

Sanjog:  No worries about it, life is good, that’s why you’re enjoying it, right?

Maurice: That’s right. Yeah.

Sanjog: So, let’s start Bhavana with you the first question, so I’ve just kind of set the stage, so let’s talk about resilience as the first thing, which is same as elasticity is what I refer to, so what are we doing to make an organization elastic and a bigger question is that effort has always been on to some degree, but now people are trying to go double duty on this, but is that because of fear or people have woken up to look at their why? And that’s driving that

Bhavana: Great question, you know, and I think we look back on this past year and it’s been all about resilience and adaptability and operating with less visibility than most of us are used to and, you know, at Ventas, a big part of it was really staying true to our focus on building out a strong diversified portfolio, putting our seniors and our employees first and I think that was really a critical part of being able to be in a position to win the recovery and the team and yeah, every person involved has just shown amazing resiliency throughout, and you know, from a technology standpoint, we started up in a good place, with a lot of the infrastructure in place to be able to move quickly, and keep people productive and shift as work changed and things change and I don’t know that I would necessarily use the word fear, but I would say that lack of distant visibility or, you know, having a little bit more of a short term, view of the future has made us be more agile, you know, and I think the concept in technology has existed for a while now, and I think it’s spread more, holistically through the organization of having that long term view, having short term steps we could take there and then also really having a spotlight on contingency plans of how often should we review this? What else might go wrong? And what might we do if that happens? And so I think it’s been, you know, both the keep the focus on what we’re trying to accomplish, but also maybe more checkpoints along the way, shorter commitments on some of the work that we’re doing to get there and a little bit more focused on risk throughout.

Sanjog:  Now Maurice, when you look at your organization, right?  So let’s paint that context you are, in academia, students are the customers and students are what you live for, essentially. What is the environment that they’re looking for in terms of resilience that you would offer and how does that differ from your vision of resilience for your own organizations, ongoing working, if you will?

Maurice: It’s a great question and, you know, if we really were to reflect over this past, you know, 15, 16 months, for a lot of us, and especially in academia, you know, it was all about survival. So we had solutions, that we thought in this gets to my thought of resilience, we had backups, we had opportunities to do remote learning, we had all of those things already in place. However, the culture was simply, let’s bring people together in rooms, let’s have face-to-face conversations, because that’s what real learning happens, right? Is when we’re all in the room that we get those nonverbal cues and we’re able to pick up on those things, but what happened was with the, with the pandemic, with the unfortunate events that happened over these past 16 months or so, it forced us to really think differently about how we are engaging our students and so to put in software, that was not just a second thought, but was the primary thought it really forced us to be locked in and committed  to creating resiliency within the network, within our framework, within our decision-making process and now students, I believe are expecting not only to have a robust in-person experience because that’s what we’re planning to do here at UNC, but they’re also expecting to have a robust virtual experience. So, we cannot lose sight of this hybrid, I think we talked about that earlier is that it’s really important to think about this hybrid model and then there’s an impact around that, right? Because now you’re supporting in-person and hybrid, so you’ve got to think about your support structure a little bit differently.  You’re going to have to probably have more people lined up and so this resiliency really is about commitment and ensuring that you have infrastructure in place to support this vast array of very good offerings that that people in customers can be excited about.

Sanjog: Now, so Bhavana, based on what Maurice said, so he’s trying to do some things and he’s in a way talking about some balance, but I’d like to bring that same question back to you, it’s always been a, not a tug of war, but there is always a balancing effort people put within, okay, I want to keep it resilient that means I need to have stability, but then I also want to be relevant that means I need to innovate and when I innovate means I’m going to shake things up, one is the investments and others, the very act, one being counterproductive for the other. What is being thought about this balance in today’s context, especially when we are saying let’s focus on now?

Bhavana: Right, yeah, and I think that battle has always been there, right?  How do I continue to invest in my core and how do I innovate further? But it’s probably like everything else come into sharper focus you know, during the pandemic and through the recovery and so within the technology organization, I think a lot of how I think about it is, really building up that capacity to take those things that are operational, that always have to have to happen to support the ongoing business and really optimize those to then be able to create capacity in my team and my tools and the infrastructure we use, I think that a lot of organizations as we move to the cloud and have the ability to scale up or scale down as things happen as we move to more agile development methods so that we can switch more quickly, you know, these allow us to move faster and change direction more quickly, so that we can kind of start and stop a little bit more the way that we use our partners for services and you know, how can I ramp up or down based on  the business environment and the volume of work I’m able to take on for various reasons on what else is going on in the organization. So, I come back to, I think that you always have to do the operational that’s necessary you have to support the business as it is today but know if you’re not always investing in that future aspect as well, you know, you’re going to be struggling a lot more going forward too. You’ve got to free up that capacity both from a people and a technology standpoint to be able to accommodate that.

Maurice:Can I build a little bit on what Bhavana just said, because I think it’s really important you talked about the operational excellence that has to take place so you have to keep the lights on, you have to make sure people’s machines and the network is there, I would also argue that that gives you the credibility to shake up the environment that gives you the runway to be innovative. So if you’re not able to keep a robust infrastructure, no one’s going to trust you. So, if you are able to have a robust network and one that is supported appropriately, that gives you the credibility within the organization to say, Hey, I know you’ve got these things working well, how can we now do the next thing? How can we break the system and rebuild a new system?

Sanjog: So when you talk about technology stuff and I’m not going to undermine anyone’s potential here by saying that, Hey, many of the things like infrastructure, etc, it’s table stake now, if anyone says, oh, I’m going to build this and that’s the only thing I’m going to think about, then you’re not doing justice to your role, especially when you are more business facing role than ever now. So, imagine you started on a project, you went ahead and, and provisioned your cloud and bought some cloud and got that in place. But then just that would not cut it because you got the people and the processes, which are to be tweaked, to accommodate the strength and the capacity and capability built through the technology and that’s where people, sweat and how, so Maurice I’ll bring this back to you, how would you say after you’ve had your share of building or playing the tech, do you take it to that next level of leadership and people management and the process improvement where you’re at most influencing it,  it’s not just your IT department, right? The people who are business users, not the people you who report you and the business unit leaders say, what do you know about my business? You know, that’s what you hear from them, so how do you deal with relevance and resilience building, while I’m keeping them happy and maybe go to drinks with them?

Maurice: Absolutely, great question and being here at an academic institution, it is really important that you have buy in for the process or the innovation or the area that you’re trying to move into. So one of the things that we try to do here is that we try to set up we’re calling an IT governance infrastructure where we introduce new technologies, we introduced new innovations, we talk about a frame of how to move forward and we really positioned it with metrics that show, Hey, this is actually growing our institution. One of the, things I think that has really been helpful for us as we think about remote learning and how we are investing in that and how we are able to hire new people is that, we showed that we were able to, so we have a continuing education part of our school, we show that how in a pandemic, we were actually able to educate more people, generate more revenue for the school, through our remote offering and so we needed to, if we’re going to take that to the next level, we needed to invest in more of a learning management system, we needed to invest in more instructional design people. So we wanted to make sure that we had in place all of those things, and we needed buy in from the faculty, because if we take money and invest, it’s going to be less money for them. So we had to show them that this was a positive way and how this was going to positively impact the work that they were going to do and it’s not easy, by no means I don’t want to sit here and say, yeah, it just works, it does not work, you have to build allegiance, you have to have those relationships with key stakeholders within the organization, and you have to be able to paint the picture in terms that they can process and most business leaders understand profit and loss and if you can show profit and you can show resiliency specially in what’s supposed to be a down year, I think it does help your ability to not only secure investment for the tech, but also secure investment in people and direction.

Sanjog: So Bhavana, when you look at any of these things that are happening, one is that you are in the Ivory tower and trying to do things what are best for the company with the best intent, other is the people as they’re watching you and you’re like a driver of that big truck, which has got 10,000 people on it, who are looking up to you to do things in a certain way, what you do, what you don’t do, what you say and what you don’t say, all of that matters, so in this journey of transformation that you’re talking about, what is it that you have to do so that you come across as a pied Piper, not someone who’s hypnotizing them, but taking them along and they willingly follow you, what is it that you have to do as a leader, but hold your thought, we’ll take a quick break, we’ll be back and let’s talk and listen to Bhavana.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so Bhavana, we do talk about technology leadership, we did talk about building the infrastructure and also balancing resilience and relevance, and that’s great, you’re doing a great job, painting the strategy, and some are getting people along, but there is something which these people who you’re trying to get to follow you or follow the vision have in their mind, how do you become that inclusive leader? How do you become a less, a fairly right, I don’t know if that’s the ultimate aim that you have so that they willingly come along, but they just don’t follow you, they in fact could step up to lead you in the right direction and use all synchronize.

Bhavana: Great question Sanjog and you know, to build on some of what Maurice was saying and the earlier questions, yeah early in my career, someone once said you can be a technology leader, or you can be a leader in the organization who manages technology and I think that’s a really important distinction. I know people like to talk about the business and IT, but we’re all part of the business, right? We’re all here to make the organization successful and so I think a lot of it is listening and really being embedded with the functions that we work with so yeah, I think her on the governance and having cross-functional teams, I have members of my team who are then partnered up with other functions, they sit in those organizations, so it’s being able to be relevant, which means that you need to be, aware of everything that’s happening, you need to tell this story, you need to build the culture around we’re going to continue to look for better ways of doing things. We’re going to understand what’s happening, we had held a story to the audience that we’re talking to, right? So, when I’m talking to finance, I might talk to PNL when I’m talking to marketing, I have to help understand what that is, you know, so it’s really, building that culture throughout the organization on how we interact, but then in the department as well, right? You mentioned the ivory tower and I think we got to get out of the ivory tower, right? I mean, you have to set the vision and then you have to be willing to listen and, you know to walk the talk, so if I say that I want leaders on my team, not followers, then I can’t tell them everything to do, I need to listen and I sometimes need to let people fail within reason to be able to, you know, own that and own their own accountability, to be able to grow into the leader they want to be, and we want them to be.

Sanjog: Now, Maurice, when you are looking at all the work that you’ve done so far, we learn most not by successes, but mostly by the bruises we get, as you’ve tried to do the school things, right? Whether you talk technology infrastructure or process optimization, working with your business unit leader, or getting people to come together and make that become a people-centric. Where do you feel the most wounds, the bruises, the dark side, I’m not trying to have you open up your dirty laundry, but it’s more to learn from what a person, if you were, if you were to do this again, what would you do  differently? and yeah, so just, just share with us, if you can.

Maurice: Yeah, that’s, I feel like I’m on the couch now, Sanjog they’re like, you got me on the couch here and I’m great to talk about all the bruises and, you know, things that keep me awake at night and things I wish I could have done differently this past, you know, past year or so and I think, for many of us, it was an opportunity for us to, you know really align IT with the business. I know we talk about that a lot, but this year more than any year, we’ve had to align IT with the business. It couldn’t be just the shiny green light in the server room, it couldn’t be the fancy Cloud provision, it really had to make sense, it really had to make money, had to create an opportunity for students and faculty alike and I think one of the things I think I learned most, or the thing that I got bruised up by the most was really making sure that I had really good partnerships with business partners, with those who were supplying the tech, who make promises that they’re going to be able to deliver and in many cases we, we didn’t make the timeline, or we missed the mark with the technology and so then you have to re-invest in, re-engage and so I think for us, we learned a lot about who could really deliver, and we sort of re-established our business partner portfolio to where we’re maybe only dealing with a couple, two, three people and the other piece of that and I think is really, that really was eye opening is that we can’t do it all, that it is okay to be really good at one or two things versus trying to spread yourself across the spectrum of IT and so you know, those were the bruises and the lumps that I’ve taken and you know, I feel like I’ve aired all my soul here, right on this podcast today Sanjog.

Sanjog: Well, you know what, we are all about being authentic, right? So, Bhavana what about you? What are the revelations and where do you go back and reflect, ‘hey I saw the mirror’!

Bhavana:  Right, you know, similar to Maurice, you know, your mind goes through all of the, you know, the past history and that digs up some uncomfortable situations, but you’re right, that’s where the learning comes from and, you know, you talked earlier about the technology being the table stakes, and it’s never the technology component that comes back. It really comes down to you forgot to include a group that you didn’t realize was impacted by something you were doing or you know, you failed to communicate an aspect of something or thought that something was understood to, you know, to me, it comes back to talk to as many people as possible about what’s happening. I’m fortunate now to also have within IT we’ve rolled our business transformation group into my organization and they’ve got wings into a lot of different functions because it’s never intentional, right? It’s a more of the, oh, I really just didn’t think this was going to hold up, I think to get that joint ownership, so Maurice’s talking about finding those key individuals in different functions who really are passionate about this but they having real skin in the game on the people who want this and feel strongly about this because they’ll help make this and they’re going to be the driving force and bring different skills to the table than we traditionally have in the IT function and you need all of that to make this successful and not just for the project, but for the ongoing value to the organization.

Sanjog: So, when we are looking at the people centricity, so I know we touched people’s side but then there is another aspect. If it was business and usual, as usual, people would have normal lives and you were trying to move or pivot in whatever form that you wanted to and people will say, yes, I have a job and I love this job or some people don’t love it as much, but whatever they will do, it will still be normal. But now you’ve got someone who’s an elderly or somebody has a family member who either unfortunately passed away or had sickness, or they have some other shifts that happened with them and on the other hand, you’re saying we cannot stay in a status quo, we got to be able to build strength, we have to stay relevant, we have to do things differently because even the office environment has changed that’s way too much for any soul to handle. So, if you were to even be empathetic, but just showing empathy, doesn’t cut it to get things done, so, what did you do truly to get them to say, ‘I have a warrior in me unleash that warrior because that’s the only thing that would work.’ What did you do, Bhavana?

Bhavana: You know, and I’m going to start by saying some of that culture was already, and like so much of that was already built into our culture here at Ventas we have highly talented, highly motivated individuals and a culture of caring about people, right? So, it’s a, I don’t think these are either, or I think you can recognize people’s humanity and people have throughout time had to balance things that were happening personally and at work, it just now there was, it was more widespread, right? And so, it came to the forefront and I think it brought that discussion forward and actually, I will say our struggle was less, you know, for people to rise up to the challenge, it was giving people sometimes permission not to be on 24/ 7. So, the shift to remote made people feel like, well, I need to be on all the time and it was really trying to counter that and that’s probably telling of our culture, right? Where people very much passionately believe in this and we also, you know, if, we talked very openly throughout the entire leadership organization around that balance, but I think it was so true and consistent to who we already were, that message resonated and felt yeah, genuine and continues forward and, you know, the specifics are going to manifest differently over time and based on the different circumstances and all of that. But I think, it’s the mentality and the culture of the company, it comes through and I think you do have to be genuine and how you do this and I think when you do, people will bring forward their own solution that works for them when they feel like they’re empowered to do so.

Sanjog: So  Bhavana), your responses of course, spot on in terms of what people did when we were in the big, deep into this pandemic, right? So now hopefully I know vaccine is out and people are doing things, and now we are trying to feel hopeful and bringing hope to all people and they themselves are a little more hopeful, but then our idea about still becoming resilient so that we don’t go through that level of mess again, because we do not know what’s going to come and then build the relevance and that to keeping it now and even be more people centric, coming back to you Maurice, what would you do now, if you were to do a Delta report on how you are running it, what was taught or what the life taught us? All of us and the business environment taught us and now you become a $2,000 hour consultant going to someone else and say, this is how you bring relevance, this is how you bring people centricity and all along, become resilient like that, when next time, I hope there is never a next time, but if next time there is a disruption similar to it, you do not struggle, your people don’t struggle at least that much.

Maurice: Another great question and I think for us, one of the things that really helped us to kind of lock in or stay focuses our mission, so if our $2,000 per hour consultant, I would actually tell the company to make sure that you are solid in what you are trying to accomplish as a company. So, what is the mission? What are the overall arching goals of the organization? And then from an IT perspective, how does the day in day out work, help advance that mission? The past year was obviously stressful, and definitely unprecedented, I think that’s a word that we have used a lot in this past year, so, you know, when people went home to do remote work, I think Bhavana hit a great point, allowing people, if you’re going to be people-centric to help get to that goal because there’s research that shows that when people are satisfied with their job, they will do whatever they need to do to ensure that their work is going to move forward to meet the mission. So, you know, allowing people to be able to turn off I know, I don’t know about Bhavana, I felt like I worked twice as hard last year at home, I feel like I was always on a zoom call or teams call , google meet, I think I’ve learned every WebEx, every virtual platform there is to be on, I was on it and so finding ways to create a work-life balance, when you’re not really going into the office per se, was really critical and now that we’re opening back up, we’re trying to do that safely, we’re trying to find ways to interject the new normalcy in our lives again so one of the things I think is really important for us not to miss out on is what lessons that we learned from this previous year, what things work well, what things may be were challenged and how do we now position ourselves to again, I think  hybrid is going to be the new buzzword as we go forward. How do we create hybrid environments where we do have people in the office, but also working from home and allow that work, allow that innovation to meet our goals, still take place in these different places, because we proved for a year that it is possible and I think it would be just a horrible thing to waste a crisis, right? To not learn lessons from what just went down and to improve our process, improve our leadership abilities and more importantly, improve our offerings to the clients that we serve.

Sanjog: So, Bhavana, would you say that is clarity today? One is to say, yes, it’s unsafe, but if I know how to deal with uncertainty, and there is clarity and confidence, right? Is that there among the leadership and among the people who wish to follow the people who are to be followed and the people who follow both should know what to do next.

Bhavana: Right, and I think resilience and past struggles give you confidence for future. Should I goes right? And early on in here, I would call, we in the pandemic, we actually did a call that had some of us as senior leaders get on and talk about some of the past struggles that we had encountered to give you kind of that view for some of the younger employees, because it might have been the  33:17 first crisis that they had seen and I think it’s important that, you know, these scars that we all build are what, give us the confidence to face that next challenge and it gives people that reminder at all levels that they can do it and they can do more and people are a lot more adaptable than I think they even give themselves credit for now, clarity is a tricky one, right? I think we have some of the, how well we operate the exact, what will we do? I think we have to remain flexible on, but I think that clarity of how do we depend on one another? How do we communicate through this? How do we evaluate all of those things? I think you know; we’ve got a lot more clarity on.

 Sanjog: So, let’s take quick break listeners, we’ll be right back and Maurice, when we come back this juggling of, yeah, we don’t have certainties, so we should talk about now, but we traditionally always learn, just thinking now is very being very myopic. So, while I mentioned that as part of the topic and this discussion throughout that you got to be relevant now so that you can get by, but how do you get over this catch 22 and come out as a winner, in mid to long-term as well. Should we think about it? Or we are just unnecessarily puzzling ourselves. Think about this question will be coming back and get your views. Please stay tuned listeners, we’ll be right back.

Sanjog: Welcome back, now a little more in the future or somewhere along out there in the future, how do you first of all see what today’s environment is Maurice, how much off a rolling the dice would you want to do and invest money only to know that you will have throwaway work or how would you listen to your gut and say, you know what, frankly, it’s not that bad and let’s roll the dice anyway. What should we be doing? Because I spoke about talking about relevance now, but is being myopic a bad idea today.

Maurice: It’s a great question and you got me really pondering this a little bit more what I would say is, I’m not so sure that things are clear I think what I am clear that things are not clear. I think that’s where I am, and I think from a perspective of how, you know, for example, you know, , we’re going to open campus, the plan is to be open like we were pre COVID with some modifications, obviously, you know, there’ll be some masks wearing and those kinds of things, we still don’t know what that means yet. So, does that mean we opened and things going to change and we have to make adjustments, so I’m clear that things are unclear, but I am clear that we are trying to move to what or settle into what is called, what I’m terming the new normal. So, which means is from an IT perspective, we are investing in those things that we know we need and we are setting aside things that are for the unpredicted future here. I think it would be, they would be wrong to just go clear off in a direction that you’re not quite sure as to how things are going to settle in as of yet and so even from the perspective of how we are working, we’re not bringing everybody, quote unquote, back into the office all at one time, we’re doing that in a staged approach where we will re-evaluate you know, sometime in September, October, you know, as things are starting to sort of, after, you know, you’ve had 30,000 plus people on campus, you’ve had students, you know, you’ve had gatherings, you’ve had athletic events, you’ve had the proverbial college party and if things kind of, you know, are able to sustain, then I think you can start to make plans.  But I think it’s really difficult to go all in on a plan at this point without things being really settled, if that makes sense.

Sanjog : So, Bhavana, when you talk to your leadership and you guys are basically discussing things, okay, what to do, what not to do, what is the sentiment on the ground, being prudent? Nobody’s going to say I’m going to be rash, but at the same time is fear or uncertainty a doubt, part of the equation and there is nothing demeaning about that because that’s the environment you’re in, right?

Bhawana: Yeah, I mean, I think that you have to take that into account, right?  And so, I come that non regrettable decisions, right? There are things that I’m comfortable investing in and even some of the bigger investments where we know that we’re going to need certain things long-term, there are short-term efforts that we know are going to continue progress and we may eventually redo them, but the effort to get there and get some incremental value and measure that where there, you know, where we might revamp, in a few years, but you know, even for those couple of years, that improvement is absolutely worth the effort. And there’s other areas that I think are going to take a lot of investment and we don’t know where those are going to go, but I think that there may be small tests we can do, Hey, this is a test, you know, and within the technology area that, you know, Hey, this could be big, but we don’t know, but how may we run some small tests, so we have better information, so as we get better clarity into the future, we have a good recommendation and we have more information on how we would get there. So, I think we can still make progress in that, it’s just a question of how much time, energy money you’re going to invest in each of those areas. So, I think (he hinted it40:41) has to continue to monitor and you don’t want to overstretch your commitment, beyond where you feel comfortable.

Sanjog: So, Maurice thinking about any environment that you have, where there are variabilities, you don’t feel as warm and fuzzy about it and to reduce variability is like it happened in the case of pandemic where people could not work, they felt sick and, or were not available, or you had to move remote. Now that you went through that turbulence built a remote work environment and before that even happened, we had automation and AI and other things were happening, which were in a way abstracting out people from that equations so that business must go on, so do you think the conversation of saying yes, we would need people and fundamentally start rethinking the organizational structure, how work gets done and start moving everything which could perhaps be required as essential, or even for relevance or resilience, move that to these technologies and then allow people to work from wherever they are, the business doesn’t suffer in case of any such a disruption happens, so everyone is happy. I know there would be a side of it to say more people will lose jobs, but I guess when you rethink organizational structure and the roles and new things you could do, I’m sure you will, more than offset that job loss by retooling people and getting them into another position. Is that sentiment, is there an investment being done or is there a thought process in that direction?

Maurice: Absolutely, one of the things that we are really moving down the path on is this whole notion of how people work and where they work, for a long time, it was the mindset, especially here at UNC that if you’re not on campus  you must not be working and so we were able to see that was not necessarily the case that people could do amazing work from home and from remote places. So, we, are actively putting those practices into our organization, as we speak, we found, we’re finding that we’re able to retain a better employee because they have this flexible work schedule. But it also opens us up to recruit great employees from different places because we have this remote opportunity now and I think it’s so the misnomer I think is that technology replaces people, I think that’s a huge misnomer. You still need people; I think the part that we’re helping our employees to see is that it requires a different skillset. So, you mentioned St. John about the retooling of skillset and making sure that people are repositioning people to handle this new work environment that has been a main focus of ours. So we’re doing tech Tuesdays, we’re doing lunch hours or open hours with the IT department to learn about these technologies and how you can best apply them in different ways, not necessarily to replace you, but to give you even a better understanding of how you can do your work, because what this is requiring now is again, to be spread so far across.  This is allowing us to go deeper in a different in a particular segment of our discipline, which then gives us a better product for our students, our faculty, and all of those who rely on the school of government to provide a service to this state. So, technology is not replacing anyone, it is definitely helping us to be better at what we do and this notion that you have to be in the office to get the work done, there are some tasks that you have to be in the building for, so I don’t want to minimize that, but there are other tasks that does not necessarily require a person to be in the building to get (a coffee 45:19 Accomplished).

Sanjog: So, with all the technology related capabilities, we definitely can get most of these things sorted where the business could go on, but touching the same point of people, so Bhavana, imagine you are an HR leader and, or consultant, but you are to an extent, even though you’re in IT, think about point of entry and point of exit from an organization, think about career ladder, or career lattice that where do you start? What are capabilities you need to build for you to go from one level to another and how work will get done, how roles and org structure will be created, what would you do in that realm today? So that that new org structure reflects where you want to go because HR has not come to you yet, I’m not sure, to fundamentally rethink it and maybe they will not be in a position to do so. It’s not that they cannot, but they would need a collaboration with you, but they  should be starting off a vision to say, these are the things I want to get done, this is how the people will move, this is the minim skill set, but above this, we do not need them around, let that be an outsource capacity, what have you thought in that  regard?

Bhawana: Yeah, I think that the people aspect of this is huge, right? And I think onboard and in a lot of ways, we had to be so much more deliberate in the last year, because I’ll say that like before you learn by osmosis, right, you sat there and you were surrounded by people who thought and talked and did things that you just picked up on by being next to them and we had to be a lot more deliberate. So, you think about people who start new jobs or new careers in the past year and the structure that we had to put around that, right? Around how do we think about everybody they should meet? How do we do not just the initial onboarding, but what other touch points should we have? So, I think a lot of that from that continues forward, I think where work gets done, I think that the shift is really the, you know, what’s the work and what’s the best way to get it done and that, you know, there’s we’ve learned that we can do certain things well, we’ve also found that people miss that connection to people, right? And so how do you blend the best of both worlds?  How do you get people to think about the impact of their work versus some of the logistics and I think that’s been a focus for a long time is here’s the rule of here’s the policy and I think that this has given us new data points around, like what of those truly hold true and what were just the norm and you know, I think we have to take those into account and I think some of the things we did to be more deliberate, not just about the onboarding or the off-boarding, but also that, those touch points that we did in our teams and conversations around careers, I actually think in some ways, because we had to do that, so, yeah, we had to schedule them and we had to get on a video call and we had to, you know, so we put more thought and more prep into them and how we carry some of that forward, I think is going to be really important too and the career move men, I think well, yeah, to me, people moving around from function to function, even either within my department are in and out of other departments, I think is huge and we’re seeing that across a lot of organizations, right? That cross functional knowledge, those lateral moves, I think are huge in terms of long-term growth and so how we do more to encourage that I think is going to be really valuable to individuals and to the organization, but I think we’re also going to see a lot more movement across companies and a lot of what Maurice talked about around recruiting and people opening up there, you know, their scope of where, you know, where they’re recruiting from or how work is done or how teams are formed, I think it is going to just change the dynamic of how we think about teams.

Sanjog: One last question for both of you, take 30 seconds each, just tell one thing that you would fix in yourself, which would make you the best you can be in dealing with the agenda here, right? The agenda of have you been able to help your business to become elastic, people centric, relevant and focused on now? What’s that one thing, which is top on your list, which you would focus on, which you would fix in yourself to be more competent in that area, or get better in that area. So, start with you, Maurice.

Maurice: Joy, yeah so I think Bhavana I hit on it earlier and I think it’s one of the things that I got to work on is making sure that I invite all of the parties to the table and really looking at that holistically and making sure that we have students, faculty, IT professionals, Deans, all the people that could be impacted. So, I think we learned that, yes.

Sanjog: Inclusiveness, so, you want to improve the inclusiveness in your ideas and pitches, all right great; Bhavana?

Bhavana: I want to piggyback off something that Maurice said earlier, which is, we can’t be all things to all people and do everything all at once and sometimes being more, yeah direct and honest about that and figuring out how to help people get where they want but being true to what the strengths are and where the organization is right now is important.

Sanjog:  Once again, thank you so much, Bhavana and Maurice, for sharing your insights about how people who are in leadership position, working alongside with the people who are following them and work together to build an elastic people centric business, which is focused on now. Thank you so much.

Bhawana: Thank you.

Maurice: Thank you

Sanjog: And listeners, please connect with us on social media, subscribe to our podcast and once again, thank you for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul signing off until next week, take care and god bless.

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