When people seamlessly connect, communicate, and collaborate internally, with partners, and the customer—it increases efficiency, accelerates innovation, and boosts revenue. Digital Workspaces are a step in the right direction. But, are you just offering them as a privilege to the office workers, overlooking the field staff and partners who contribute towards revenue generation and customer retention equally if not more? How are you taking control of the critical path to organizational growth, and implementing fit for purpose yet unified workspaces to achieve the intended outcome?

Contributor

• • Zack Hicks, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Toyota Motor North America

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Welcome, listeners. This is Sanjog Aul, your host and the topic for our conversation today is Building Unified Digital Workspaces and I have with me Zack Hicks. Zack is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer with Toyota Motor North America. Hey, Zack, how are you?

Zack Hicks [00:00:16]:
I’m great, thank, how are you doing today?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:18]:
Very good, sir. Thank you for joining us. So businesses as we know, need to be agile and responsive to compete to grow today and they also need to be growing faster in the faster future ahead and it depends on how well everyone involved connects, communicates and collaborates. So the concept of digital workspaces which has been proposed is great, but it shouldn’t be a privilege only for the office workers who are overlooking field staff and partners. So how does an organization implement fit for purpose, yet unified workspaces to enable all involved? So that’s the topic we wanted to cover and to that end, Zack, my first question.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:01]:
While IT leaders are striving to offer ways to connect, communicate and collaborate internally and then also with partners and customers to enable efficiency, innovation and growth, what should be the benchmarks?

Zack Hicks [00:01:16]:
I would start off by saying, if you haven’t already begun transformation at your company, you’re probably a little bit already behind but the good news is there’s some great cloud and collaboration tools that are essential in the workplace to help enable this and remove those geographic barriers and provide more accessibility to customers and partners throughout the ecosystem. I can give you a great example. We at Toyota, we merged our manufacturing headquarters and our sales and marketing headquarters into a new location in Plano, Texas. So we moved from Southern California and Kentucky to Plano about three years ago and as part of that remit,  the CEO asked me to go out and check out, what’s the best in class. How can we begin to break down these barriers and allow people to work in new ways, and not just for the office worker, but for people across the enterprise and so that was a tremendous opportunity tech companies are doing, and also new companies, what they were, how they were investing in collaboration tools

Zack Hicks [00:02:08]:
and also simultaneously, I think consumer expectations are really driving what you expect to have happen in the workplace. Frankly, you can’t hire a new worker today and give them a desk phone that him or her desk phone that, keeping them tethered to the office. They’re expecting to be able to use new mobility tools and be able to walk into a conference room and not be hindered by technology because frankly, a lot of these collaboration tools, while the promise was great, the actual delivery was not so great. So you’d walk into a conference room, you’d have to figure out okay, is the Polycom system or is this a Skype system? How are we going to connect and how do we get people? Technology doesn’t need to be difficult and that I think where we are today the problems technology was to remove a lot of these barriers but the newer technologies are allowing us to actually do that. So a good example is what Microsoft is doing within their next generation of office products. So when you book a meeting and you walk into the meeting room, those attachments that were part of the meeting, they’re already available or the PowerPoint presentation is already available up on the screen. Don’t have to do a lot of fumbling around until we get to it that where we’re at today.

Zack Hicks [00:03:08]:
Maybe to be more direct to your question about what should people that are even outside of the workplace do, we have a tremendous focus on that. So on our manufacturing plant floor is a great example. We’re taking data that emitting out of our plant floor systems and giving that access to the data to the factory workers. They can understand when a machine is about to break before it breaks and impacts the quality of our vehicles, they can take action and we’re not doing that through, we’re doing it through large boards if their hands are full but we also give those tools through mobile devices that they can pull out and if they’re looking at the car that needs to be inspected, where is that car located? Giving them access to the vehicle and then telling them no what the reasons why we’re having to look at that vehicle.

Zack Hicks [00:03:47]:
So these are just some small examples but across our whole enterprise, you’ve got people throughout our field organization that are visiting dealership or visiting plant and we don’t really care. I don’t want to limit how they work. I want to give them access to the tools that they need when they need it ahead of time and we should explore the lines of technology. Technology is really a tool that quickly enable them to do the job that they’re trying to do.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:10]:
A great response here. So the digital workspaces concept, which is what we believe we need is where the users could engage with other people. The knowledge and even the environment where they are in with the sole purpose of getting the job done. That’s what would be an ideal way to go about serving at all different levels and no one is getting ignored and you’re not overlooking any field staff or partners. The underlying complexity that we find typically which pulls us down is the way we are trying to integrate with partner technology or the security or even when we are trying to provision any capability is what I’d like to use here, the word capability like to provision it across multiple devices and it should be such a way that it’s hidden where we are allowing the location based, the context based and environmental sensitivity of how that tool or that ecosystem works so that you’re able to get the job done.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:07]:
Is this tool futuristic? If not, then if the technology tools are there, then what holds us back?

Zack Hicks [00:05:15]:
I think that the technology is catching up. I think we have the opportunity now to deliver a much more seamless experience but at the same time at the corporate enterprise IT level we have an obligation to make sure that the document are secure in safe. They’re also discoverable for e-discovery. There’s a lot of regulations that require corporations to understand where their data is and who’s using it. So you want to allow people to act as freely as they do in their home environment by able to use tools like Box or Dropbox or other collaboration tools like Slack but you also need to have. You have to be able to balance that with the security risk and e-discovery obligations and other regulatory requirements that are driving how we operate at the larger enterprise

Zack Hicks [00:06:00]:
but there are ways to do that. So you can lean into some of these new capabilities like Box and have a corporate enterprise agreement where consumers can or the field users can easily upload or download documents or video files but then when you have to provide those that information to legal teams or so on, you have easy access to it or somebody leaves the company, you’re making sure that those assets aren’t going with them, that the company still has control of those assets, that they’re created on behalf of the company. There is an opportunity to not go so far that you’re losing control but there is opportunities to be more open in these ecosystems. It wasn’t long ago that in corporate enterprises we provisioned devices, but now we also have the opportunity to enable bring your own device. So somebody prefers using own Android device, that’s great

Zack Hicks [00:06:44]:
but what we may need to do is to provision a small portion of that device where we have full access. You can pull for type of work and then keeping the personal and the corporate but another challenge that we have too in this new environment is knowledge sharing. As people come into the workplace, they want to be able to say Google and answer. A good example of that is a new employee at Toyota might be working on a braking solution and they want to know who knows anything about 1989 Camry brake that may be hard to find if you don’t know anybody, you’re new to the company but building a tool that we did, which is where all documents can be scanned and shared, you can search to say who knows anything about 1989 Camry. They will know, here’s who’s at work today

Zack Hicks [00:07:29]:
and using some other technology to say they’re actually at their desk bay, you can click on a button and interact with them and then have a question and answer. So you’re giving people access to a data if they want to search it, or maybe a knowledge repository of other humans that may be able to help you with the problem that you’re working on and really, that’s the goal of your communication tool, to begin to break down those barriers between the worker and information that they need.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:52]:
And you so rightly point that this information is so critical for them to be able to do what they’re supposed to do. So now, at the same time, what we have noticed, at least as media, we know that the inclusive approach that we would otherwise like to see when we are building these digital workspaces are few and far between because you take an example, like a machine technician on the factory floor, or a hotel housekeeper or a utility worker fixing the power lines, they’re also serving the customer. They’re also contributing towards customer satisfaction and retention and they’re no less in terms of how someone gets the satisfaction for the customer or even uncover the new revenue opportunities with all of that value already getting added, how come their device, the ones which they’re using, or the applications or the software, whatever that we put on make available to them, is not tethered to the main digital workspace ecosystem as effectively as someone who’s in the office.

Zack Hicks [00:08:54]:
I think at Toyota, that’s what we’ve done. So whether you’re working on the plant floor or you’re working in our dealerships, or going in our field or interacting with our suppliers, you have full access to all the data and the tools that you need wherever you go and that was a goal of what we’ve done here at Toyota but I’ll tell you for your example, if a maid in a hotel room doesn’t have access to the data, wouldn’t it be better instead of having the hotel maid knocking on your door and disturbing you to actually know, doing open the digital key, if somebody left the room to be able to have access to the maid, to have access, I won’t disturb this customer until they leave and then I’ll go in and clean their room so I’ll know when they’ve exited the room. It’s just leveraging the data to make it work and so if hotels or hospitals or other industries are not using it, others are going to step into this space and solve that problem at their expense. So there’s an opportunity, and that’s our job as IT leaders, is to not be waiting to take the order from the customer, but to understand the capabilities that technologies bring, understand your business and then be able to triangulate ahead of time where it intersects and can provide value for the customer and the employee.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:59]:
That’s a great example and I’m assuming you had to shift the mindset of all people involved for them to see the value of what it takes to get a field worker also to contribute equally effectively as the in office worker, so that’s great. Now coming to the environment that we are living in, which is a very externally focused, which means if you want to serve our customer, we have to work very closely with our partners and there has also been challenges noted where it says that they are bringing their own partners devices and systems and we are trying to integrate with them, but that’s where the problem is and because the customer doesn’t care how you are serving them, including the partners or not, that customer experience gets disrupted. So how can we address these integration challenges so that the digital workspaces we provide and use to serve the customer are in true sense unified?

Zack Hicks [00:11:02]:
One of the challenges that you’re talking about here, the underlying technology, is that we don’t have a homogenous environment. We’ve got lots of different endpoint devices. So in which they communicate, are we communicating through Skype or through voice or through a video conference thing? There’s an endless number of ways of doing that and that interoperability doesn’t always work well but home, if we use guy to talk to our family and maybe a different country or pretty happy to use a facetime and if it drops, we understand, and I didn’t really pay anything for it but in the corporate environment, when you go into a meeting room in the middle of the meeting and the call drops or the video dropped, nobody’s happy and so we do have a more contained and closed ecosystem when it comes into the corporate environments to be able to understand that, we also need to make sure there’s security. So if we’re talking about future designs of our next vehicle, we don’t want our competitors to be able to hack in and get that data.

Zack Hicks [00:11:55]:
So we want to know based on IP address due on the line. So it is situational and with our suppliers we have fantastic integration because at Toyota you may have heard of the just in time manufacturing methodology that we use. We need to know when we don’t want to overstock parts, but when we actually, we only want those parts when we actually need them and so we have tightly coupled relationships in those environments but it’s always a challenge. If you’re working with suppliers, they bring in their own device and they connect your network and if their software is out of compliance, you as a company may burden some legal risks. There are some limitations on being completely open, particularly from a security perspective.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:35]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s discuss about the availability and the quality of technology solutions that are available today so that you can literally have the right tool set to build unified digital workspaces. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:43]:
Welcome back. So Zack, what would you say is the state of availability and quality of technology solutions that we require to build robust and unified digital workspaces and that to using best of breed components?

Zack Hicks [00:14:02]:
I can tell you there are some amazing technologies that are available today, but I think that accessibility depends on several factors such as what industry you’re working in, what your security requirements are, what your customer needs are, your employee capabilities, and ultimately what’s the business value? Toyota our goal is to make collaboration for our workforce so natural that they’re not even hindered by the technology, but rather, I guess you’d be enabled by it. One way of doing that is to make the technology consistent and easy to use, regardless of the medium that’s being used. So whether our users are using a mobile device in a parked car or a laptop in the field, or being in a conference room, you can connect with who you want in a consistent fashion, accept the data you need and not just participate in collaboration, but contribute and ultimately that’s where we want to go. As we’re designing cars, those CAD systems Maybe if you have a model and you want to show somebody in a different country what that looks like, being able to share those files real time in a free fashion and be able to blur the lines of distance is really what we’re after. You also that all of our offices are equipped with the state of art collaboration tools like Surface Hubs. So whether they’re in our headquarters location in Plano or they’re in Michigan or Kentucky or field office, you don’t have to be in those rooms to be effective. Our goal is to provide a similar experience no matter where you’re at

Zack Hicks [00:15:16]:
and even if you’re in your hotel room and want to be able to join from your iPad, you can do that. Is it perfect yet? No, we still, we’re still rolling it out to 180 plus locations and outfitting with all that, it takes some time, but I also don’t think we’re ever going to be there if this constant iteration and as technology improves, to be able to jump on that, but also to not make the technology a hurdle to get through. We launched a startup company that I’m also CEO of called Toyota connected, which is a goal is to unleash the power of data for our customers and our employees and our motto is we want to free people from the tyranny of technology because I think today we’ve got the appif experience. You’re using your mobile device different from your, your desktop different from your car computing and then you go into a meeting room and different. We can begin to blur those lines to make it much more seamless and so that’s why I talk about it.

Zack Hicks [00:16:08]:
You’re never done. We’re always on the journey and it’ll, we’ll continue to iterate on that.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:14]:
And given the current state, whatever you mentioned, in terms of the technology solutions that are available, do you think we are whosoever is producing these solutions or maybe you as the adopter, are you assuming that they’re being geared towards these digital workspaces, which is the end outcome of putting these tools together and integrating them to be equally accessible or maybe we’ll give it that, okay, it may be accessible to people, but is it done with a usefulness for both in and out of office workers or are we just taking the broad spectrum of users and just say, okay, as long as it works for them, we are good, but that’s where we will lose the true value that you can get by making it unified.

Zack Hicks [00:17:02]:
Absolutely. I think these tools are great and they can enable some amazing connections. Our parent company’s in Japan. I go to Japan every month but I also spend a lot of time on video conferences interacting with my colleagues in Japan. It’s a great way to keep the conversation going and also my colleagues around the world

Zack Hicks [00:17:18]:
but I’ll tell you what, if you still, if you got a bad meeting, a bad meeting in person is just as probably even worse than a bad meeting. That distributed environment. So the technology enables humans to connect in better way but if the humans aren’t connecting in a meaningful way, that’s not the problem with the technology. That’s probably the problem of planning that meeting. I think there’s two problems in there that you’re trying to solve for the technology is enabler and sometimes it’s cumbersome but for the most part, what we’re thinking, particularly on our new campuses, is it’s becoming, well, much more frictionless. You can walk into a room, I don’t have to dial 20 numbers to connect with Japan.

Zack Hicks [00:17:52]:
I can push a button and my colleagues are there and I can see them and it feels like a much more in person experience.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:58]:
So the scope that you just mentioned, just to follow on upon this, that was more an office worker with someone dialing from home but they are still in a way in office type workers. I’m talking about say a field staff want to chime in.

Zack Hicks [00:18:11]:
I’ll give you a great example. I’m sorry, I mean, I’ll talk to you, but I’ll tell you a great example that we do is so now when we launch a vehicle and let’s say the brand new vehicle, and if there’s a condition that happens on that vehicle, we, that we’ve never seen before. One of the great things that we can do is that we have a local field technician show up to that vehicle, use an iPad or an iPhone or whatever device they’ve got, and they can video stream in a secure way to our other engineers so they can see firsthand without having to be there themselves. So by no means do we have the hierarchical approach to collaboration tools, but only office workers get it and other people don’t. That’s not the case. If a company is doing that, you’re not engaging your workforce appropriately and we’re all walking around these devices today. Why not enable them?

Sanjog Aul [00:18:58]:
Now let’s talk about the readiness check that we should do upfront in terms of trying to build the unified digital workspaces and then also the fixes that we need to make in terms of the processes, the workflow and even the culture, so that the end outcome is achieved and this basically helps you build that foundation based on which any unified digital workspace would thrive.

Zack Hicks [00:19:24]:
I think probably the most important thing is to have a compelling vision and understanding what you’re aiming for. Buying the tools without a vision is going to be a waste of time and a waste of money. What we did here on a new campus, and we thought about it more holistically about all of the workers. So if a worker is on the road and they’re having to upload a port back home, how will they do that? Do they have to open up their laptop and wait for it to boot or can we do that on a mobile device like an iPad so they don’t have to do that? Can they just take a picture of the problem and have that be and use optical character recognition to begin filling out the problem for them but we’re the office worker. We make a booking for a reservation, having digital cues on for the meeting room. So we’ve got the little devices or LCD displays that show you who’s in the room and who’s booked it and if the meeting room isn’t being used for 15 minutes, we use the sensors to free up the room so somebody else can use it and then when you book the meeting, you got people around the world that need to join.

Zack Hicks [00:20:22]:
They need to click one button to join the meeting. They don’t have to dial a series of buttons. We knew what we were willing to invest in and how we want to be experienced, to flow. So having that vision of what the experience should be like and then backing into what technologies can enable it is a much better plan than just jumping right into the technology and then you’ve got to have the leaders buy it and work at all levels. The people that really facilitate most of the communication in the company, or a lot of it, oftentimes are the admin assistants who have booked the senior executives meetings, have to make sure the calendars are available and so on. So having them be part of the solution and pulling in people at all levels to define what that communication strategy or the tool should look like and then I also think about having it pushing it more onto the cloud so it’s not location specific, so you can enable more workers in any environment to join in and then join a larger concentric circle to think about how do your partner want to engage and can they help participate in designing that solution

Zack Hicks [00:21:23]:
but also oftentimes it’s our partners that are troubleshooting these solutions for us too. If A network is outsourced, so including them in that design so that they can help troubleshoot when things do go. I would think stepping back, looking at the macro view and then building a plan to cost getting leaders buy in, but not the leaders of buy in at every level of the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:46]:
Let’s talk about the adoption challenges one will face because there is diversity of mindset and there is an issue with digital readiness and especially when you bring in out of office workers, which again doesn’t mean someone working remotely from home, but actually someone from your field staff or partners. They may not have come across those devices or the new technologies or new way of communicating and before your overall organization can enjoy the unified digital workspaces and that related experience, these people have to be brought on board and they have to adopt it for you to say, yes, I got something done and in its entirety.

Zack Hicks [00:22:32]:
That’s a great question. When we planned our new corporate headquarters, we had a long, a lot of conversations around were you going to put deaf phones on the desk anymore and we opted to not to because with Skype on the desktop and Skype for business, we simply didn’t need it any. The digital native had no problems adapting to that but maybe people that were more experienced in the career were more concerned with I don’t have a phone and what am I going to do and we had to explain that you’re actually going to have a phone no matter where you take your laptop or normal device, you’ll be able to answer it wherever you’re at. So you’re going to have actually better access than having a desk phone but that took some time and so what we did was we also created, we created a brand around the new compute and communication suite that we called Wordplay for the Future and W0F or Wordplay for the Future short and called it WOF and we had WOF Champion in every group and we had them participate in the solution building.

Zack Hicks [00:23:24]:
We gave them things like shirts, T shirts that are easily identifiable, but then they helped train all the people around them or it could be a resource if somebody was struggling. So we didn’t want it to be it’s problem to solve. We wanted it to be collectively Toyota’s problem to solve and engage many more people and the people that raised their hand and wanted to join in and help be the solution provider really were tremendous. It was a great way of engaging the organization in new way and not just relying on the IT staff to do that and I’ll tell you the other key thing that we had to do which was monitoring checkpoint, understanding of how it was working and iterating and being able to make changes along the way. Just like in any agile project, you’re getting that customer feedback and quickly responding and incorporating that’s been crucial.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:11]:
Let’s talk about the business demands and the people expectations and the technology. All of these are going to continue to change. How do you think we can keep these digital workspaces unified and healthy?

Zack Hicks [00:24:28]:
Well, it’s going to take a constant investment and that’s why don’t what we try to do is to continue to iterate and not just go all in, but allow some space for flexibility and keep more of an open mind on standards because what a standard works today, there’s a very good chance that tomorrow new technology will blow off that standard and that standard will be out of date. If you’re not flexible, you’re missing out on opportunities. There’s also opportunities to really drive out costs. So there is an investment side of the equation, but there was also places where we were able to take out cost. Understanding the new ecosystem and just frankly understanding that the world is changing faster than the corporate enterprise typically are willing to handle it. You’ve got to become much more agile in our approach and a little bit less rigid and knowing where to lock things down. So if it’s access to secure documents or data that always can be locked down and but if it’s data that could be helped workers do their jobs in new ways or consumers understand more about our products or services, then we need to be more flexibility, more flexible in opening that

Zack Hicks [00:25:32]:
but saying in a for a holistic communications environment that’s probably not going to happen because new entrants will always enter in the market and there’ll be new opportunities but how do we enable that? Interoperability is the opportunity in keeping that mindset open is for example like we use at Toyota today we use box but we also use Microsoft SharePoint and other share collaboration tools. I don’t want to have to dictate just one. I’d like to give a couple of solutions but all of those solutions allow me to do data privacy management, document management and those types of governance processes that I need to run a regulated environment. So it’s about that flexibility with an eye toward the future and also understanding that your customer base is going to evolve and our job as IT leaders to enable that evolution.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:24]:
Once again, thank you Zack for sharing your thoughts and insights about how organizations can implement a fit for purpose yet unified workspaces as a critical step towards increasing efficiency, accelerating innovation, and boosting revenue.

Zack Hicks [00:26:40]:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:42]:
Thanks so much again, Zack and listeners, I invite you to find related conversations on our website at ciotalknetwork.com.

Download Podcast
Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and Stitcher. Find other syndication channels here or search CIO Talk Network podcast on any other app.
Explore More

• • Building Resilience against Digital Disruptions during Heightened Uncertainty
  • Building Future Leaders for Hybrid Work Environment
  • Building a Disruption-Proof Bottom-Up IT Culture
  • Building your Relationship Capital as a CISO
  • Building Blocks for a Future-Ready Security Shop
  • Building a winning digital culture
  • Building Your Digital Business Technology Platform
  • Building Non-Positional Leaders